Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Individual Artists - Essays

"People tell me I'm not Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Puvis de Channes--but I already know that Why tell me?" --Paul Gauguin

"Criticism is our censorship...." So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) wrote "Racontars de Rapin" only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his contemporaries and predecessors, Gauguin unpacks what he viewed as the mistakes and misjudgments behind much of art criticism, revealing not only...

When Mary Kelly's best-known work, Post-Partum Document (1973--1979), was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, it caused a sensation--an unexpected response to an intellectually demanding and aesthetically restrained installation of conceptual art. The reception signaled resistance to the work's interrogation of feminine identity and the cultural mythologizing of motherhood. This volume of essays and interviews begins with this foundational work, offering an early statement by the artist, a subsequent interview, and an essay situating the work within a...

Director-dramatist Howard Barker is a restlessly prolific, compulsively controversial, provocative multi-media artist.

Beyond his internationally acclaimed theatrical productions for his award-winning theatre company The Wrestling School, Barker is also a poet, a painter whose work has been exhibited internationally, and a philosophical essayist on the power of art to provoke moral speculation, and on the theatricality of the human being in crisis. In France, his drama was the subject of a major retrospective season, 2009-10, comprising no less than seven theatrical...

Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken's oeuvre: embodied...

"Monsieur Degas, you just said some things that would make an old soldier blush "

There are many myths about Edgar Degas--from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire than Degas and His Model, a short memoir by Alice Michel, who purportedly modeled for Degas. Never before translated into English, the text's original publication in Mercure de France in 1919, shortly after the artist's death, has been treated as an important account of the master sculptor at work. We...

"Not just anyone makes a good pisser."--Jean-Claude Lebensztejn

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn's history of the urinating figure in art, Pissing Figures 1280-2014, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and limits in works of art in general. Lebensztejn is one of France's best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of...

International voices from across the globe come together in Art Therapy and the Creative Process to share their perspectives on art, the artist's process, and how art has been therapeutic for them.
In the first section, the three primary contributors--Alfredo Zotti, Samuel Mann, and Cynthia Pearson--create a triple commentary on a piece of art. Zotti paints a picture, Mann analyzes it, and Pearson writes a poem to complement it. In later sections, various artists share why they write, paint, play music, or take photographs, including what their individual mediums mean to...

"How are they doing it?" is the key questions Wenders asks as he looks at the dance work of Pina Bausch, the paintings of Cezanne, Edward Hopper of Andrew Wyeth, or the films of Ingmar Bergman, Michelanelo Antonioni, Ozu, Anthony Mann, Douglas Sirk and Sam Fuller.

He finds the answer by writing about them, trying to...