Karen Wilkin

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) was an acclaimed Abstract Expressionist and one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century. While his paintings have been the subject of many exhibitions and publications, his works on paper are comparatively little known, despite how central they were to his artistic practice and to the evolution of his style and technique. This is the first full-length book devoted to Hofmann’s works on paper, presenting a valuable new perspective from which to appreciate the achievements of this giant of postwar art. More than fifty examples from across his long career and from many genres—including self-portraits, figural studies, interiors, landscapes, and abstractions—are all attractively illustrated in color. In addition, works in different stages of finish, from rough sketches to polished pieces, offer an intimate glimpse into Hofmann’s methods and creative process. Distributed for MOCA JacksonvilleExhibition Schedule:Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL (01/28/17–05/14/17)Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (06/16/17–09/10/17)

The highly anticipated, definitive reference on Stuart Davis’s paintings, watercolors, drawings, and published illustrations Stuart Davis (1892–1964) made a mark on the art world early in his career, first with his Ashcan works and then with his highly personal version of Cubism, which firmly established American modernism as a force that could rival its European counterpart. Over the course of six decades, Davis produced artworks that drew inspiration from the European modernists but were deeply rooted in the popular culture of the United States. Jazz music and hipster talk, vaudeville stages, city streetscapes, New England fishing villages, gasoline stations, store fronts, and commercial packaging and advertising images were among the sources that infused his art with energy, bringing crisp edges, radiant color, and syncopated rhythms to a vast body of paintings, watercolors, and drawings.Documenting the life’s work of this prolific and highly influential artist—who affected almost every development in American art from second-generation Ashcan realism around 1912 to color field and geometric painting in the 1960s—is a monumental achievement. In these three volumes, the editors have catalogued 1,749 artworks by the artist—including more than 600 works never previously illustrated—providing extensive documentation and information about each one. A detailed chronology of Davis’s life, as well as an enlightening discussion of the compositional relationship between certain works spanning his oeuvre, rounds out this study. Exquisitely designed and produced, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné will be the definitive reference on the artist’s work for many years to come.Published in association with the Yale University Art Gallery

Giorgio Morandi’s lifelong pursuit of his poetic vision in still-life and landscape paintings as well as engravings and etchings has given him a deeply revered position in the history of modern art. This volume presents the work of this private and enigmatic 20th century Bolognese artist. Influenced by the work of Giotto, as well as Cézanne, the metaphysical painters, and the cubists, Morandi’s work denies any label. His still-lifes and landscapes are serene groupings of muted objects, yet Morandi provokes a tension between them which speaks of special relationships, negative space, and nuances of light and colour. His paintings seem to exist in a world outside of time, luminous and full of mysterious life.

This is the sixth volume in Lund Humphries’ series of monographs on British sculptor Anthony Caro and the first publication to focus on his use of stainless steel as a distinct body of work.Caro employed stainless steel extensively, from intimately scaled Table Sculptures to extremely large works, over many decades, and in his mature works, Caro's exploration and interrogation of this material became increasingly important. Karen Wilkin analyses Caro’s use of stainless steel in the context of the development of modernist constructed sculpture, pioneered in the UK by Caro and in the US by David Smith, a friend and admired predecessor, from whom Caro inherited most of the stainless steel he first employed, following Smith's untimely death in 1965. Karen Wilkin's text represents a much-needed overview of Caro's late career and a vital expansion of our understanding of 20th-century and early 21st-century modernist sculpture.

A figurative realist in the heyday of abstract expres- sionism, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) painted himself, his family, and friends in New York City, in Southampton, Long Island, and on an island off the Maine coast, all depicting a relaxed and comfortable world that seemed to mirror his own affluent, well- connected existence. With virtually all of the artist's previous publications now out of print, this much- anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great American master. Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928 and then studied at the Art Students League in New York with Thomas Hart Benton. Along with months in Maine, Porter lived in New York and from 1948 on, in Southampton where he purchased a large, late Federal-style house for his own expanding family. Porter painted several artist friends, including Elaine de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher. He was also close to the modern poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. With a carefully curated selection of the artist's best works, John Wilmerding, a specialist in American art, gives full consideration to Porter's expressive compositions and a color palette influenced by his coastal surroundings. Karen Wilkin discusses Porter's influences and pictorial creativity. Distinguished poet J. D. McClatchy writes a reflection on one of Porter's paintings.

The first comprehensive survey of Cornelia Foss’s landscapes, still lifes, and portraits, an artist in the style and tradition of Fairfield Porter. ?The American artist Cornelia Foss is part of a loosely knit group of artists commonly described as “painterly realists,” many of whom are associated with Long Island’s scenic Hamptons region, including Eric Fischl and Fairfield Porter. This is the first such survey of this artist’s work to be published. Long considered a quintessential Long Island artist, Foss has painted Wainscott Pond for over half a century.Foss’s work mirrors her protected environment—pastel drawings of her own garden and nearby ponds; oil portraits of her granddaughters and pets; landscapes featuring beach scenes and still-life paintings showing flowers on a windowsill. Thus, the art conveys a nurturing perspective that also acknowledges the outside world. Beautifully designed, this volume provides deep insight into the breadth and range of the artist’s practice over the past fifty years.

After the death of Martin Luther King Jr., Alabama produced an impressive number of African American self-taught artists whose work particularly focused on the Civil Rights Movement and on aspects of history that led to it. This happened, in part, because the action was right on their doorsteps: Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Selma March, the murder of four little girls in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. It was a spontaneous response to an emerging opportunity, and it occurred all over the South. History Refused to Die documents this phenomenon by highlighting the men and women whose artistic accomplishments deserve to be recognized by American art history, identifying six various themes that run through the works of almost all of these Alabama artists: Slavery, Agricultural and Industrial Alabama, The African-American Woman, The Civil Rights Era, Surviving Modern Times, and Autobiography and Commemoration. Featuring the work of fourteen African American artists from Alabama, including Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter, Ronald Lockett, Mose Tolliver, and several quilters from Gee's Bend, Alabama, this volume provides insight into black Alabama and African American visual expression through the presentation and analysis of more than 100 works of art.

This is a boxed set of Anthony Caro: Drawing in Space, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior, Anthony Caro: Figurative and Narrative Sculpture, Anthony Caro: Small Sculptures and Anthony Caro: Presence. The box has been specially designed by Anthony Caro.Anthony Caro restlessly explored an unpredictable range of sculptural possibilities, testing limits and positing new ideas about the nature of eloquent three-dimensional objects. Through his expansion and transformation of the legacy of construction in metal pioneered by Julio González and Pablo Picasso, and further developed by David Smith in the USA, Caro created a new, multivalent language of three-dimensional abstraction.The Caro pendulum swung between extremes of linearity and robustness, abstractness and allusion. He countered his mastery of line and transparency with investigations of our responses to mass and perceptions of interior and exterior, even experimenting with literally enterable sculptures. He made rigorously abstract constructions that resemble nothing but themselves, intimate table-based pieces, monumental constructions like metaphorical architecture, and complex multi-part cycles of narrative works that pulse in and out of explicit illusionism. And more. The range and variety of Caro's sculpture notwithstanding, there are also common threads that run through all of his work.The five volumes in this set, each by a different critic, examine the various aspects of Caro's evolution individually, tracing the permutations of different themes – narrative, volume and mass, line and openness – throughout his work, over time. Each volume is independent and explores different territory, but cumulatively, by tracing these dominant themes, they provide new insight into the achievement of one of the undisputed giants of Modernist art.

Having realized quite early that he had to be an artist, Smith made his way to New York and the Art Students League. There he experimented with variations on the revealing styles of Cubism and Surrealism, and slowly discovered his own technique, particularly the use of industrial methods such as welding to construct his sculptures. The results -- though responsive to such varied influences as Picasso and pin-up girls -- were imaginative, and often strikingly beautiful. Smith's art has inspired generations of followers, but his position as one of the masters of 20th-century sculpture remains unchallenged. About the Modern Masters series: With informative, enjoyable texts and over 100 illustrations -- approximately 48 in full color -- this innovative series offers a fresh look at the most creative and influential artists of the postwar era. The authors are highly respected art historians and critics chosen for their ability to think clearly and write well. Each handsomely designed volume presents a thorough survey of the artist's life and work, as well as statements by the artist, an illustrated chapter on technique, a chronology, lists of exhibitions and public collections, an annotated bibliography, and an index. Every art lover, from the casual museumgoer to the serious student, teacher, critic, or curator, will be eager to collect these Modern Masters. And with such a low price, they can afford to collect them all.