This in-depth study of the paintings of Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) from the 1940s through the 1970s breaks new ground in its analysis of the artist's working methods and yields new information about previously unreported materials. De Kooning's idiosyncratic working methods have long engendered intense speculation and debate among conservators and art historians, primarily on the basis of visual inspection and anecdotal accounts rather than rigorous technical analysis. This is the first systematic study of de Kooning's creative process to use comprehensive scientific examinations of the artist's pigments, binders, and supports to inform art historical interpretations, thereby presenting a key to the complicated evolution of the artist's work. Written for conservation scientists, conservators, specialists in modern art history, museum curators, and practicing artists, this book offers insights into the way an artist can achieve radical changes in style. The technical discussions will have practical applications for conservators, curators, collections managers, and collectors who care for twentieth-century art.
"Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms are filled with a multiplicity of lights that reflect endlessly, projecting the illusion of infinite space. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors traces these installations over five decades, revealing the ways in which they developed from a strategy of "self-obliteration" and political liberation during the Vietnam War to a means of social harmony in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent ethereal atmospheres, this volume aims to historicize her pioneering work amidst today's renewed interest in experiential practices"--
This fully illustrated artist book, published in conjunction with Doug Aitken: song 1, includes essays by Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator and the organizing curator; Barney Hoskyns, author of such books as Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, and Weird Scenes & the Sound of Los Angeles, and Dean Kuipers, an editor at the Los Angeles Times and a longtime writer on music.
Timely and wide-ranging, this volume explores in-depth the theme of destruction in international contemporary art. While destruction as a theme can be traced throughout art history, from the early atomic age it has remained a pervasive and compelling element of contemporary visual culture. Damage Control features the work of more than 40 international artists working in a range of media--painting, sculpture, photography, film, installation, and performance--who have used destruction as a means of responding to their historical moment and as a strategy for inciting spectacle and catharsis, as a form of rebellion and protest, or as an essential part of re-creation and restoration. Including works by such diverse artists as Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, Yoko Ono, Gordon Matta-Clark, Pipilotti Rist, Yoshitomo Nara, and Laurel Nakadate, the book reaches beyond art to enable a broader understanding of culture and society in the aftermath of World War II, under the looming fear of annihilation in the atomic age, and in the age of terrorism and other disasters, real and imagined.
This foundational anthology maps the emergence of a dynamic new global phenomenon: contemporary Asian art. In 2008, Asia stormed the citadel of the New York art world when two major museums presented retrospectives of Asian contemporary artists: Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim Museum and Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, a painting by Zeng Fanzhi sold for $9.5 million, setting a new world auction record for Chinese contemporary art. The Western art world is still coming to grips with the challenge: it is all about Asia now. This book is the first anthology of critical writings to map the shift in both the nature and the reception of Asian art over the past twenty years. Offering texts by leading figures in the field (mostly Asian), and including more than fifty illustrations in color and black and white, it covers developments in East Asia (including China, Korea, and Japan), South Asia (including India and Pakistan), and Southeast Asia (including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand). Together, the twenty-three texts posit an historical and pan-Asian response to the question, "What is Asian contemporary art?" Considering such topics as Asian modernism ("productive mistranslation" of the European original), Asian cubism, and the curating, collecting, and criticism of Asian contemporary art, this book promises to be a foundational reference for many years to come.
Anne Truitt, an artist based in Washington, D.C. for most of her career, remains an under-recognized force in art post-1960, which has been dominated by artists like Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly who have strongly influenced the movement now known as Minimalism. Part of this lack of recognition stems from the fact that Truitt pursued a staunchly independent course in her art: not only did she take a different path from the Color Field artists often associated with Washington, D.C., but she created reduced geometric abstraction that deviated from the approaches of Minimalist artists in some significant ways. For example, her highly nuanced use of colour veered dramatically from primary hues, and the titles of many of her works evoked places and events that were important to her, suggesting a complex network of references beyond and yet somehow contained by the sculpture. This volume, and the accompanying exhibition, will form an important part of the re-evaluation of Truitt's art, due to the scope of work which it presents. A wide range of three-dimensional works will be presented to showcase Truitt's exploration of colour, scale and proportion. Examples of two-dimensional series on canvas in which the artist investigated the cusp of visibility as well as the relationships between painting and sculpture, join 24 works on paper some of which date to the year that Truitt first arrived at her radical reduction of form, and others that represent a three-year period during the 1960's from which there are almost no extant sculptures. At the heart of this volume are colour plates of the columnar sculptures that became the hallmark of Truitt's profoundly focused practice, and that made her so significant to the development of minimal abstraction. Whilst Truitt's work has featured as part of larger surveys of Minimalism, as well as in Truitt's own artist's journals - Daybook (1984), Turn (1987), and Prospect (1996) - it has never before been the subject of a complete monographic survey. For this reason alone publication of Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection in 2009 will be a major event in itself, and one that will significantly increase our understanding of post-1960's art. AUTHOR: Kristen Hileman the organizing curator of the exhibition, is associate curator, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she recently curated The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, Part II: Realisms (2008), and has worked with such artists as John Baldessari, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Wolfgang Tillmans; James Meyer is Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and the author of Minimalism: Art & Polemics in the Sixties (Yale, 2001) and Themes & Movements: Minimalism (Phaidon, 2000). He organised the Anne Truitt exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University in 2004. He also co-authored Howard Hodgkin with Nicholas Serota (Tate Britain, 2006) 150 colour & 12 b/w illustrations *
The beautiful companion volume to Lee Ufan's largest site-specific outdoor sculpture project in the U.S. In fall 2019, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden debuted 10 new specially commissioned outdoor sculptures from celebrated Korean artist Lee Ufan. This book accompanies the expansive installation, which features sculptures from the artist's signature and continuing "Relatum" series and marks the first exhibition of Lee's work in the nation's capital. For the first time in the Hirshhorn Museum's 44-year history, its 4.3-acre outdoor plaza will be devoted entirely to the work of a single artist, and this book is a beautiful commemoration or keepsake of that event. Lee is a founder of the late 1960s artistic movement Mono-ha, or "School of Things," so his artwork represents an encounter between the viewer, the materials, and the site. The sculptures in this installation and book reflect this: all of the sculptures respond to the museum's unique architecture and continue Lee's iconic practice of placing contrasting materials, such as stainless steel plates and boulders, in dialogue with one another to heighten awareness of the world. The book features more than 100 color illustrations, including preliminary sketches, photographs of the artist selecting materials for the work, images of the installation process, shots of installed sculptures, details of installed sculptures, and more. Accompanying these powerful images are a foreword, essays, artist interview, and short captions that highlight how the works are rooted in contemplation and sensation rather than static representation. Lee Ufan: Open Dimension offers readers an intimate look at the work, artistic process, and impact of one of the pioneering figures of postwar art.
Valerie Fletcher records the little-known history of the Hirshhorn Museum's garden and plaza, and provides a succinct overview of one hundred years of subjects and styles as represented in the Hirshhorn's sculpture collection. Her essay is followed by sumptuous photographs of the sculptures, which show the garden's changes through the seasons.
The buildings of the Smithsonian Institution not only contain impressive collections; they are themselves icons of great cultural significance, many of them part of the historic National Mall. The Smithsonian's unique buildings illustrate the changing styles and sensibilities of America as an evolving nation. Representing the work of major architects, each building evokes a specific time in history: the mid-19th-century turreted Castle, the sky-reflecting mid-century modern Air and Space Museum, and the golden, undulating, 21st-century American Indian Museum.
