\n<\/p>\n
Have art books, will travel. And this year\u2019s prime selections clock up a lot of visual, historical and personal mileage. We get an up-close tour through the Vermeer extravaganza that became the focus of international pilgrimage in 2023. The contemporary American artist Wade Guyton leads us, with a volume of his own drawings, through a lifetime fascination with the work of \u00c9douard Manet. And at last we have the much-anticipated autobiographical account \u2014 actually an anti-memoir \u2014 of the long, continuing and indispensable career of one of our most influential and personable art writers. \u2014 HOLLAND COTTER<\/em><\/p>\n \u2018Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction\u2019 <\/strong>Edited by Lynne Cooke <\/em>(University of Chicago Press<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This major looker of an exhibition catalog loosens up the warp and weft of conventional views of modern art \u2014 all those tight-knotted hierarchical categories (high versus low, art versus craft) on which our institutions and markets still rest \u2014 and demonstrates the universe of formal and conceptual brilliance that has always traveled on a parallel track. The sheer variety of work produced by more than 50 artists chosen by the book\u2019s editor, Lynne Cooke, will knock your socks off. (Just wait till you see what\u2019s happening in the field of basketry alone.) So will the visual imaginations of individual geniuses we already know like Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks, and the others we\u2019re introduced to here.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u2018Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island\u2019<\/strong> Edited by Olga Viso <\/em>(Thames & Hudson)<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Outstanding in the pandemic-haunted 2022 Whitney Biennial was a video by the Cuban American artist Coco Fusco, in which she was filmed steadily rowing a small boat around Hart Island, New York City\u2019s historical public graveyard, as if keeping a vigil for the poor, unnamed and outcast dead buried there. For more than 30 years, Fusco has been a just-below-the-surface art presence, both here and in Cuba, best known for her rigorous, interruptive performances addressing the hard realities of cultural difference and the complacency \u2014 \u201cthe genteel appreciation of diversity,\u201d she coolly notes \u2014 with which the art world smooths and markets them. This visually captivating book documents the politics and the poetry, both sharp, of an important career very much in progress.<\/p>\n \u2018Darrel Ellis: Regeneration\u2019 <\/strong>Edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Leslie Cozzi. (<\/em>Skira<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n When the New York artist Darrel Ellis died of AIDS in 1992 at 33, he was all-too-well aware that the chances of the work of a young, gay, Black experimental photographer surviving, much less gaining critical and institutional notice, were less than slim. Fortunately, through the vigilance of curators, artist-friends and family, his work is very much with us and permanently visible in this lovingly conceived book, the catalog for a traveling survey.<\/p>\n \u2018Stuff: Instead of a Memoir\u2019 <\/strong>By Lucy R. Lippard <\/em>(New Village Press)<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Admirers of the art writer and activist Lucy R. Lippard have long hoped that she would produce an autobiography, and at last, and with wry reluctance, she has. Characteristically, it\u2019s a maverick project: a super-succinct account that packs a lifetime, from her childhood to her octogenarian present, into illustrated outline form. There\u2019s so much to tell: She was a starter-spark in what came to be called feminist art, Conceptualism, Multiculturalism, and environmentally conscious art. She briefly touches on her role in each of these and makes mention of people she knew \u2014 what a lineup \u2014 all of it in what basically amounts to an annotated photo album of barely 140 small pages. Sure, you\u2019d love to have more, but you still get a lot, about her and about the more than 60 years of art history she\u2019s helped shape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another quite different memoir also appeared in 2023, this one by the art historian and artist Catherine Lord. It\u2019s lengthy, ruminative, non-chronological, and as much about the writer\u2019s place of origin as about herself. That place was the Caribbean island of Dominica, once a British colony, where Lord was born and which she left for the United States at 16. She has since returned for exploratory visits, and on a recent one came upon an antique \u201ccommonplace book\u201d of clippings, quotes and personal commentaries assembled by an early British plantation owner. Taking its scrapbook form as a model, she has kaleidoscoped a view of her own past through anecdotal memory, post-colonial history, and contemporary queer and gender politics. The result is a wry, sharp-eyed and ultimately moving mix, a late-in-life grappling with where she came from, and where she is now.<\/p>\n \u2018Botticelli Drawings\u2019 <\/strong>By Furio Rinaldi (<\/em>Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco\/Yale<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His strawberry-blond Venus on a wind-propelled scallop shell still pulls Florence\u2019s tourists<\/a> from the gelateria to the Uffizi \u2014 but a rarer Botticelli feast is currently on offer in San Francisco, where the Legion of Honor is presenting the first exhibition ever of this Renaissance master\u2019s fragile drawings (through Feb. 11). In this authoritative catalog, Rinaldi makes several new attributions, including two exquisite head studies of a man gazing upward and a woman with modestly lowered eyes. For a Florentine in the later 15th century, the core of painting was disegno<\/em> (\u201cdesign,\u201d but also \u201cdrawing\u201d), and Botticelli put drawing first. Delicate highlights of white and yellow show the light on tensed muscles or bowed heads. Effortless squiggles cohere into Simonetta Vespucci\u2019s curled hair or John the Baptist\u2019s camel cloak. His line feels spring-loaded; his saints and angels seem ready for the dance floor; his paintings\u2019 grace and vigor started with a pen.<\/p>\n \u2018Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts\u2019 <\/strong>By Jordan Stein (<\/em>Pre-Echo Press<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n A major book for a \u201cminor\u201d (by which I mean major) painter, this striking and sizable volume at last assembles all of Ito\u2019s quiet, adroit abstractions, whose genius is no longer a Midwestern secret. Born in Berkeley, Calif., forcibly moved during the war to Tanforan internment camp, Ito (1918-83) would settle in Chicago and paint soft, subtly erotic tessellations of bulging rectangles and gradient stripes. Freshly photographed for this volume, they showcase a truly idiosyncratic palette that requires all your floral vocabulary: saffron, goldenrod, periwinkle, amaranth, gamboge. More than a refoundation of a critically important American artist, this book is a labor of love from Stein and the painter Matt Connors, who\u2019s published it through his own imprint.<\/p>\n \u2018Wade Guyton: Galerie Matthiesen, Ausstellung, \u00c9douard Manet, 1928, 6. Februar bis 18 M\u00e4rz, Vol II\u2019 <\/strong>(<\/em>Galerie Chantal Crousel<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The show of the year was \u201cManet\/Degas<\/a>,\u201d but a second great Paris-New York hookup, and maybe the exhibition I think about more, was Wade Guyton\u2019s immensely intelligent rereading of Manet\u2019s full oeuvre in over 100 drawings in France this fall. Forgoing his trusty inkjet printer for a lithography stone, Guyton overlaid 10 catalogs of a century-old Manet exhibition with a pattern of hazy-edged camouflage; this book is one of them, and indeed exhibition and publication are largely coterminous. Over the hands of \u00c9mile Zola, over the mouth of Laure in \u201cOlympia,\u201d Guyton\u2019s striated blots and bends stage an infinite regress of media reproduction and artistic retransmission, and enact a thrilling renewal of Manet\u2019s commitment to an art worthy of its time. Some still misunderstand Guyton\u2019s all-surface paintings as mere acts of style (an insult that Manet also frequently faced); in this volume and the nine others like it, he proves again that he is nothing less than the painter of modern life.<\/p>\n \u2018Shadows of Reality: A Catalog of W.G. Sebald\u2019s Photographic Materials\u2019 <\/strong>Edited by Clive Scott and Nick Warr (<\/em>MIT Press<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In Britain at the end of the last century, the author pushing fiction furthest was writing in German. W.G. Sebald<\/a>\u2019s erudite, elegiac books bore witness to history and atrocity through slow, steady accretions of seemingly trivial details, but also through an arresting integration of photographs \u2014 taken by Sebald himself, more often than we realized, in his adopted East Anglia and around Europe \u2014 into the body of his texts. This rigorously edited volume assembles, for the first time, the author\u2019s film negatives, slides and clippings: the hedge maze and rainy stone beaches of \u201cRings of Saturn<\/a>,\u201d the hybrid tea kettle\/alarm clock that baffles the narrator of \u201cThe Emigrants<\/a>,\u201d the young boy in a white nobleman\u2019s costume who would become the orphan Austerlitz<\/a>. \u201cWhat the image always does is arrest the text,\u201d Sebald said in 2001, just a few weeks before his fatal car crash. \u201cThe visual arts have the capacity to lift you out of time, and since all disasters happen in time, they offer some consolation in lifting you out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Vermeer\u2019 <\/strong>Edited by Gregor J.M. Weber, Pieter Roelofs and Taco Dibbits<\/em> (<\/a>Thames & Hudson<\/em><\/a>).<\/a><\/p>\n Do you get FOMO? I do. Maybe you missed the most hyped show of 2023, the once-in-a-lifetime majority of Vermeer paintings in Amsterdam<\/a>. So did I. But there was compensation. With its many pages of hyper-zoomed close-ups, this dense and snoopy catalog gets you obscenely close to the real thing. Although there are trenchant essays about the artist\u2019s household and his innovations in perspective, I came for the goods. A double-page spread of nothing but the nail holes in the wall of his \u201cMilkmaid?\u201d Yes, please. They\u2019re so beveled with shadow you feel you could spackle them flat. That lemon peel in \u201cGirl With a Wineglass?\u201d Stippled like a Seurat<\/a>. The choice of matte rather than standard glossy pages (a matter of some controversy) respects the painter\u2019s soft lighting. This is armchair museum-going at its finest.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Like Vermeer, the Mexican portraitist Abraham \u00c1ngel, who died at age 19 in 1924, left little behind. His 20 extant works (on view in Dallas<\/a> through next January) reproduce beautifully in a slim but convincing catalog that doesn\u2019t overstate the case. \u00c1ngel\u2019s preferred substrate was cardboard, and the bumpy nap of it really shows in these pages. So do the Fauve-like colors he used to outline his sitters. (Instead of black he preferred blues and browns, as Alice Neel would.) Playfully primitive, these knowing likenesses (among them \u00c1ngel\u2019s tutor and lover, Manuel Rodr\u00edguez Lozano) combined Mexico\u2019s burgeoning populist aesthetic with a private romanticism that seems nonetheless to have sought clarity on the promise of his country\u2019s Revolution.<\/p>\n \u2018Mad About Painting\u2019 <\/strong>By Katsushika Hokusai<\/em>, translated by Ryoko Matsuba <\/em>(David Zwirner Books<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Even the most technical corners of art history can awe. From the reliably excellent \u201cekphrasis\u201d series at David Zwirner, this pocket paperback humanizes a forbiddingly mythical figure, the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai. Newly collected and translated here, the painting manuals he dictated near his death in 1849 (dictated, as Hokusai was not literate) contain, despite their strict instructional nature, surprising delights: his precocious awareness of abstraction (\u201cDidn\u2019t shapes develop first and their meanings accrue later?\u201d), his almost culinary relationship to pigment (\u201cWrap the white lead in a piece of paper and insert it into a quarter block of tofu\u201d), a readiness to talk trash (in Dutch painting, lions \u201clook like dogs and do not appear ferocious in the least\u201d) and a terrific, grumpy ego (\u201cThe brush never lies, so please do not do what you should not\u201d). For scholars and straphangers alike, and affordable to both.<\/p>\n \u2018Whitfield Lovell: Deep River\u2019<\/strong> By Whitfield Lovell, Kellie Jones and Julie L. McGee <\/em>(<\/a>Eakins Press Foundation<\/em><\/a>)<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n During the Civil War, escaped slaves formed a settlement on the banks of the Tennessee River near Chattanooga, Tenn. Camp Contraband has long been a muse of the artist Whitfield Lovell. On repurposed foundry molds, Lovell draws tightly modeled cont\u00e9 portraits of Black Americans from antique tintypes and cabinet cards in his collection. These cameo portraits practice imaginative archaeology on a vanished corner of history. Changing the tune a bit, a new book pulls these big wooden discs from the context of their original installations<\/a> (Lovell\u2019s room-size earthworks nodding to Camp Contraband) and devotes individual spreads to each one, cropping them tight like an album of pennies mudlarked from the riverbank. And for all its technical and photographic appeal, \u201cDeep River\u201d asks a curatorial question: How much exhibition can a book mount on its own? Quite a bit, it seems.<\/p>\n \u2018Trad, Gras och Stenar: A Collective History\u2019 <\/strong>By Hakan Agnsater, Mats Eriksson Duner, Jakob Sjoholm and Jonas Stal <\/em>(Anthology Editions)<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cTrees, grass and stones\u201d is how the name translates. Operating under this and other monikers since 1967, the Swedish rock band that set the gold standard for counterculture in Scandinavia<\/a> gets the kitchen-sink treatment in a sumptuously illustrated archival book. While \u201cTrad Gras och Stenar\u201d is best known for cult<\/a> classic<\/a> LPs<\/a> that combine the groupthink of the Grateful Dead with the menace of La Monte Young<\/a>, shown here for the first time are the paintings, posters, prints, zines, light projections, homemade instruments and ephemera that embodied their uncompromising art ethic. Anticommerce is the theme. The aesthetic is punk and pastoral at once, rigorous, not your typical groovy psychedelia. Interviews with members document the emotional labor that held it all together: all the homesteading, performance art, child-rearing, mediation, budgeting and activism. The total communalism that eluded so many of the Woodstock generation. The real deal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nHolland Cotter<\/h2>\n
Jason Farago<\/h2>\n
Walker Mimms<\/h2>\n