University of Chicago Press: New Titles from 'Hirmer Publishers'

Dan Flavin

Isabelle Dervaux; Friedrich Meschede — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Minimalist artist Dan Flavin (1933–96) is best known for his brightly colored fluorescent light installations, which have captivated art lovers for decades. But he was also an accomplished draftsman, and this is the first book to fully explore the central role that drawing played in Flavin’s art.

Not only did Flavin produce numerous sketches for each of his light installations, he also regularly drew outdoors, primarily riverscapes and beach scenes. A number of those drawings are included in this volume, as are a group of remarkable pastels of sails, a subject he turned to when he was in his fifties. This book also draws on Flavin’s journals, in which he wrote about his passion for drawing, which he called “an intensely concentrated personal form of artistic relief.” Yet despite the importance of drawing in Flavin’s life, his drawings are little known, in part because he almost never sold—or even gave away—his drawings. Most of the works reproduced here were never shown publicly and are being published here for the first time.

Offering a surprising new angle on a major artist, Dan Flavin: Drawing will surprise—and delight—his many fans.

Modernism London Style

Christoph Rauhut; Niels Lehmann — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the 1920s, London was a city on the cusp of change. Just as dance halls and jazz-age decadence displaced wartime austerity, a new generation of artists and designers sought to enliven the city’s architecture, erecting dazzling buildings in the emerging art deco style. In contrast with the aging Victorian structures that dotted the city, these bright and colorful buildings—from the Hoover factory to the Ideal House by Raymond Hood, who later designed New York’s Rockefeller Center—communicated the city’s aspirations as a thriving, modern metropolis.

In the decades since, London’s art deco buildings have lost none of their appeal. Millions of visitors gaze up at the headquarters of the Daily Telegraph and the nearby Daily Express, take in the elegance of Eltham Palace, or sip a martini at the Savoy. The city’s most popular art deco attraction, however, is the London Underground, which boasts a series of art deco and modernist stations, designed throughout the 1920s and ’30s by noted architect Charles Holden. In Modernism London Style, architectural historian Christoph Rauhut, with the help of three hundred photographs by Niels Lehmann, captures the architectural art deco heritage of London in a thrilling photographic tour. A portrait of the city during the interwar years, it chronicles the creativity of the artists and designers of the period—and the currents in the city’s culture that helped shape their work.

Insightful essays and an introduction by architecture scholar Adam Caruso shed light on some of the key features that characterize art deco, from floral and animal motifs to Egyptian themes. For readers planning a trip to London and hoping to place these striking buildings, the book also includes a detailed register and maps.

Korean Lacquer Art

Patricia Frick; Soon-Chim Jung — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A traditional art form with a history spanning several thousand years, Korean lacquer art is prized for its inimitable artistic and technical perfection. Drawing on a display at the Museum of Lacquer Art in Münster, this beautifully illustrated book introduces readers to outstanding—and often extremely rare—examples of lacquer art, which involves adorning objects with tree sap and intricately inlaying them with shell, gold leaf, or pearl. Among the objects photographed for this book are works from the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties, particularly valued periods in the history of lacquer art known for vivid pieces inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Each object in Korean Lacquer Art is described in considerable detail and extensively illustrated. Together with essays by renowned experts on the techniques used to create them, they present a picture of the multifaceted development of Korean lacquer art from its beginnings through the early twentieth century.

From Silverpoint to Silver Screen

James Hofmaier; Sydney Picasso; Daniel Blau — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Hear the name Andy Warhol and what comes most immediately to mind are iconic images of Campbell’s soup cans, the Velvet Underground’s ubiquitous banana cover art, and quirky color-adjusted panels of pop icons, including Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, and Marilyn Monroe. But Warhol was also a skilled draftsman, who filled numerous sketchbooks with freehand drawings of still-life objects and friends.

From Silver Point to Silver Screen collects more than one hundred of these early drawings. Dating from the 1950s, the sketchbook drawings exhibit a profound technical ability and are completed in Warhol’s characteristic blotted-line technique, a rudimentary form of printmaking that involved tracing projected photographic images onto paper and then blotting the inked figures to create variations on a theme. Many of the drawings in the sketchbooks were produced during Warhol’s first years in New York and include award-winning commercial illustrations and assignments from his time spent studying at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, as well as a number of images depicting his take on the dark side of society, including gun-wielding stick-up men and adolescents shooting up. Accompanying the images are insightful essays on the young Andy Warhol and the contemporary art scene in which he worked and lived.

Together, the drawings in From Silver Point to Silver Screen reveal a lesser-known Warhol, while offering a thrilling glimpse into a moment of great uncertainty and excitement in his life and artistic career.

IntroSpection

Beate Reifenscheid — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Abstract art is poised for widespread popularity in China, its appeal in recent years increased by the artists like Xiao Hui Wang and Wang Xiaosong, whose work created a sensation as part of the Collateral Events of the 2012 Venice Biennale. The two-volume Introspection looks at both of these important Chinese artists. Photo artist Xiao Hui Wang creates digitally enhanced and seemingly abstract photographic works that are closely linked to the pictorial tradition of Chinese culture. Her most recent work explores the nanocosmos. Wang Xiaosong is an installation artist whose practice includes painting and video and whose most recent exhibition sees him addressing social issues, such as the collision between East and West and the crisis of faith in contemporary culture.

With one hundred full-color illustrations, Introspection analyzes the latest works by these two renowned artists.

Stephan Maria Lang

Harry Dirrigl; Petra Dirrigl — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

A proponent of the slow architecture movement, Stephan Maria Lang designs homes that are mirrors of their inhabitants’ souls. Through this highly individualized approach, his work takes on a remarkable diversity. With one hundred full-color illustrations, this volume presents select projects by Lang from 2004 to 2011.

From the California Residence, which conveys the leisureliness of a holiday home on the American West Coast, to the lakefront Alpine Highway, for which Lang restored the surrounding land to its natural state, the homes in this book reveal thoughtful new facets at each turn, with charming hidden details, surprising vistas, interesting interplays of shadow and light, and the clever integration of landscape, garden, and interior decoration. Of course, the homes also change over time as they are inhabited—and that, argues Lang, is what allows them to radiate life.

An impressive pictorial introduction to Lang’s vintage-inspired state-of-the-art architectural work, Stephan Maria Lang will be of interest to scholars of design, architecture, and planning.

Raphael

Joachim Jacoby; Martin Sonnabend — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Raphael is among the defining artists of history. From magnificent portraits of the Virgin Mary to the enormous frescoes that dazzle visitors to the Vatican, Raphael’s prominence is undeniable, and his works, together with those of Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, and Leonardo da Vinci, epitomize the formal harmony and balance that characterized the High Renaissance ideal.

Drawing on the remarkable collection of Raphael’s works in the collection of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, as well as a number of important works on loan, Raphael: Drawings provides insight into this Italian master and his impressive technical versatility. Among the most able draftsmen of his time, Raphael made extensive use of drawings in preparation for his many large-scale works, and over four hundred such studies and sketches survive today. For their painstaking precision and attention to detail, these drawings often stand as works of art in their own right. Highlighting the clarity and careful composition of the drawings, the book sheds light on how Raphael developed and refined some of his best-known works. Sketches of the papal portraits and the Vatican’s Raphael Rooms, for instance, are shown alongside illustrations and close-ups of the completed work.

Through a focus on his drawings and how they informed some of the world’s most identifiable works, this book offers a fascinating new look at this enormously productive master of Renaissance art.

Nordic Art

David Jackson — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked a defining moment in Nordic art. From the cozy domestic landscapes of Carl Larsson to Edvard Munch’s darkly beautiful The Scream, the diverse artwork of the period mirrored shifting literary and intellectual pursuits in their attempts to broaden the cultural conversation to incorporate the identities and traditions of the region.

Through more than two hundred paintings, Nordic Art tells the story of this important period. In conversation with both Scandinavian culture and the contemporary art of the time, turn-of-the-century artists developed distinctly Nordic interpretations of realism, impressionism, and symbolism. The book focuses on the transitions between these forms of expression, as well as the impact of Nordic art on mainstream European art. Featuring works by well-known artists, including Carl Larsson, Edvard Munch, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and Vilhelm Hammershøi, the book also introduces artists from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland whose contributions, though crucial, may be less familiar to international audiences.

With Nordic Art, David Jackson offers the first comprehensive look at this critical period of cultural development in the Nordic countries and the extraordinary art that arose during this time.

Gustave Caillebotte

Karin Sagner; Max Hollein — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The paintings of Gustave Caillebotte depict striking Parisian street scenes, from Boulevard Haussmann and The Bridge of Europe looking out onto the Gare Saint-Lazare to Caillebotte’s best-known work, Paris Street, Rainy Day, which hangs in Chicago’s Art Institute today. Caillebotte has long been acknowledged as an important painter—and munificent patron—of the French impressionist movement. Yet his paintings, in their near-photographic precision, stand apart from the works of Renoir and Monet in important ways.

Gustave Caillebotte: An Impressionist and Photography sets out to explore the development of the artist’s distinctive style. Though there is no evidence that Caillebotte practiced photography, he took an early interest in the art form, influenced perhaps by his brother, the photographer Martial Caillebotte. As a result, Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings show an emphasis on realism and often take on the composition and perspective of a photograph as well, with figures toward the center in sharp focus, while those in the foreground or background remain indistinct. Karin Sagner and Max Hollein have carefully chosen from among Caillebotte’s works a selection of paintings that exemplify this characteristic of the artist’s style. They are presented here alongside critical essays and works by photographers who were Caillebotte’s contemporaries and shared an affinity for documenting the nineteenth-century French capital, including André Kertész, Wols and László Moholy-Nagy, Édouard Baldus, Charles Marville, and Eugène Atget.

While there have been many studies of Caillebotte’s work, this is the first book to publish his paintings side-by-side with a selection of early photographs taken between 1850 and 1930. Together, they establish Caillebotte as the pioneer of a radically modern photographic form that added a new dimension to French impressionism and exerted an important influence on later photography.

Fashion Monkey

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

On the occasion of the three-hundredth anniversary of Frederick the Great’s birth, the Foundation of Prussian Castles and Gardens, Berlin-Brandenburg, restaged his one-act play, Le Singe de la Mode, or The Fashion Monkey. Written in 1742, The Fashion Monkey recounts the story of the fashion-obsessed Marquis de la Faridondière and his uncle’s attempt to put a stop to his free-spending ways by proposing that he marry the particularly thrifty maiden Adélaïde. In his quest for the latest fashions, the marquis must also address matters of philosophy.

For the festivities, Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave created and installed throughout Potsdam’s Neues Palais figurines whose papier-mâché frocks are near-perfect simulations of lavish lace, rich velvet, and rustling silk. With photographs by Andreas von Einsiedel, the book collects this ambitious work and supplements it with the play in its original French and an essay by the foundation’s director, Samuel Wittwer, on the intellectual environment of Frederick the Great, the cultural history of The Fashion Monkey, and the creation of de Borchgrave’s 2012 works.

Frederick and Potsdam

Jutta Götzmann — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

When Frederick the Great (1712–86) ascended to the Prussian throne, Potsdam was a small provincial town. But, by the end of his reign, it had risen both in population and prominence thanks to the construction of beautiful royal residences, foremost of which was the rococo Sanssouci Palace, whose grounds boast a UNESCO World Heritage–listed garden.

Published on the occasion of the three-hundredth anniversary of Frederick the Great’s birth, this book chronicles the city’s rapid rise at the hands of the king. An ardent supporter of architecture and the arts, Frederick the Great dedicated himself to the beautification of Potsdam, commissioning artists and artisans from both home and abroad and seeking inspiration in the buildings he encountered in Italy, England, and France. This book brings together fifty full-color illustrations of the works he commissioned or purchased.

Few European cities can be said to have been built so fundamentally to suit the ideas of a single ruler. Frederick and Potsdam: A City is Born thoroughly examines this “invention of a city.”

Passage 2011

Christian Schoen — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In May 2011, Munich-based artists Thomas Huber and Wolfgang Aichner set off with a seventeen-foot boat on a journey of a few hundred miles that would nonetheless take several weeks—because the route would take them across Italy’s Zillertal Alps. Destined for the 2011 Venice Biennale, Huber and Aichner conceived of this seemingly Sisyphean task, Passage 2011, as a metaphor for human hubris and the pursuit of success. As neither expected to complete the pass, Passage 2011 would also serve as a study of failure.

Passage 2011: An Actionistic Transalpine Drama draws on the artists’ photographs and detailed journal entries to reconstruct this epic journey, its moments of heartwarming success and its physically and mentally testing travails, including one instance in which they had to rappel the cheery red boat down a steep rock face that dropped more than two hundred feet. As a finale, Huber and Aichner launched the boat in the Venice Lagoon for a triumphant cruise along the Grand Canal, where, as expected, it rapidly sank and had to be retrieved in order to be installed in its place at the Biennale.

Stephan von Huene

Petra Kipphoff von Huene; Marvin Altner — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Stephan von Huene (1932–2000) was a pioneer in the sound art movement. Beginning in the 1960s, he produced sculptures that incorporated sound in novel ways—from Text Tones, a sleek series of works that record and recompose chance conversations within the exhibition space, to a pair of legs that perform a lively tap dance. But von Huene was also an accomplished draftsman, whose works on paper—collages, sketches, and prints—have been the subject of extensive solo exhibitions.

Combining interviews with von Huene and an essay by his partner, Petra Kipphoff von Huene, this book provides unparalleled insight into the artist’s processes and the mechanical complications involved in the creation of some of his works. The book also brings together for the first time all of von Huene’s Mind Maps, a series of meticulous compositions of images and words. In addition to illustrating how von Huene conceived of his sculptures, the Mind Maps series also reveals the artist’s keen interest in contemporary communications theory and the technical side of sound, both of which were central to the social function of his work.

A richly illustrated survey of von Huene’s remarkable four-decade career, this book explores both sculptural and graphic works and examines the artist’s continuing influence in his native America and adopted Germany.

Bridget Riley

Eva Schmidt — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Bridget Riley is one of the foremost figures of the op-art movement. With Richard Anuszkiewicz and Victor Vasarely, she pioneered the patterned black-and-white style of painting that enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the 1960s. In the years since, Riley’s reputation has continued to grow, with major retrospectives and works in the collections of museums worldwide, from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to the Tate Modern. In 2012, she was awarded the prestigious Rubens Prize for her lifelong contribution to European art.

Bridget Riley: Painting 1980–2011 surveys the artist’s recent dynamic and productive career. Since the early 1980s, Riley has increasingly experimented with color in her art. With works like Echo and Red With Red, she explores the spatial effects of color, creating geometric patterns throughout her compositions that convey movement and three-dimensionality that change according to the viewer’s position. Riley also began to incorporate curves into her work in the form of radiant, rhythmic lines and arches that seem to make the surface of these painting vibrate. This book collects nearly fifty of Riley’s best-known works from the past three decades, including paintings, gouaches, and a series of studies. Renowned experts Michael Bracewell, Eric de Chassey, Lucius Grisebach, and Robert Kudielka provide critical commentary to these works, which are also accompanied by an interview with the artist by Michael Harrison.

Beautifully illustrated and broadly accessible, this book will renew interest in this remarkable twentieth-century artist.

Orient and Occident

Sabine Grabner; Agnes Husslein-Arco — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Throughout the nineteenth century, Austrian painters traveled to far-off lands, taking their inspiration from bustling street markets, serene temples, and landscapes saturated in light—or drenched by tropical downpour.

Drawing on works currently on display at the Belvedere Gallery in Vienna, Sabine Grabner and Agnes Husslein-Arco offer an extraordinary selection of Austrian depictions of the Orient, including portraits, landscapes, and richly hued market scenes. Among the most prolific of the painters collected here was Leopold Carl Müller, who produced over the course of ten winters in Egypt numerous paintings, many of which are reproduced in the book. Orient and Occident also follows in the footsteps of artists like August von Pettenkofen, Otto von Thoren, and Johann Gualbert Raffalt in Hungary; Rudolf Swoboda and Hermann von Königsbrunn in India and Sri Lanka; and many others, including Alois Schönn, Alphons Mielich, and Bernhard Fiedler.

Together, the artworks in Orient and Occident offer an awe-inspiring glimpse of these lands through the eyes of a group of prolific Austrian painters, shedding light as well on how attempts to capture unusual motifs and unfamiliar patterns of light in these exotic surroundings impelled these artists to introduce new approaches within Austrian art.

Nude Men

Elisabeth Leopold; Tobias G. Natter — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Rodin’s Thinker. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Pigalle’s controversial portrayal of the philosopher Voltaire. From its earliest days, art history has been rife with representations of nude men. But while there are many studies of art celebrating the female form, the male nude has suffered from relative neglect. This book seeks to correct that imbalance with a collection of paintings, sculptures, and photographs that challenge conceptions of the body and masculinity, many of which continue to have considerable cultural resonance today.

Nude Men takes readers on a fascinating tour of the male nude in art history, turning the focus on works from the Enlightenment to the present. Beginning with a look at art completed in the life-drawing classes once popular across European academies, the book moves on to representations of masculinity throughout the French Revolution, including works by Johann Heinrich Füssli and Antonio Canova; provocative Sturm und Drang paintings by Edvard Munch and his contemporaries; and late impressionist works. The unsettling self-portraits of Austrian artists Egon Schiele and Richard Gerstl exemplify an extreme candor that characterized the early twentieth century. Other twentieth-century artists whose work is included in this book are Jean Cocteau, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, and Louise Bourgeois.

With nearly three hundred full-color illustrations, the book also includes insightful essays examining topics like male identity, depictions of desire in modern art, and the use of nude men in advertising.