Books on Art & Culture

distributed art publishers, inc. SPRING/SUMMER 2007 BOOKS ON ART & CULTURE From the World’s Finest International, Independent & Museum Publishers Sharon Helgason Gallagher Executive Director [email protected] Avery Lozada Vice President, Trade Sales Director [email protected] Dear Reader, Yvonne Puffer Vice President, Comptroller [email protected] We who handle books are people of the copy.We inhabit a world of reproductions, of pictures of Kenny Cummings pictures, which, as we stride into the age of digital reproduction, we cannot help but imagine as ever Director of Operations [email protected] more “true” or “faithful” to the originals. We are in the thrall of a technological fantasy that we are Jane Brown always moving closer to perfect replication. But, however deep down in our psyches we long for the National Accounts Director picture to capture the “real” original, the perfect moment, angle or frame must inevitably splinter [email protected] kaleidoscopically into multiple, deviating, even conflicting pictures. Our age of reproduction is a Todd Bradway Key Accounts Sales Director paradox worthy of a Greek myth: a cautionary tale of increasingly precise copies that, in their infinite [email protected] divergence from each other, belie the dream of fidelity. As German artist Gerhard Richter said in a Elisa Leshowitz 2001 interview with Robert Storr,“Today there are more facts that are changing.”* Director of Publisher Services [email protected] Alexander Galán Richter is, as veteran readers of the D.A.P. catalogue will have guessed, the artist of the picture on Director of Communications the front of the current issue. While to call someone “the painter of the picture” sounds more correct, [email protected] the phrase “the artist of the picture” has a strange, unusual ring. This very strangeness is, to my mind, Cory Reynolds Marketing Director Richter’s identifying aesthetic signature across the diversity of his materials and styles: by painting [email protected] pictures from, or, one might say, of photographs (and even of paintings), he creates pictures that, Carson Hall certainly in reproduction but also often in person, have the appearance of being photographs. It is Customer Service Director [email protected] thus that Richter very precisely pictures how reality appears to us. His works can be read as portraits Adrian Crabbs of perception at a particular historical, technological and cultural moment . Ours. Marketing Associate [email protected] You may think the Spring 2007 cover image is a reproduction of “Roses,” a 1994 oil on canvas. In fact Alexa Forosty Publisher Services Assistant it is not. Rather, it is a different entity altogether,“Roses, 1994” an offset poster edition published by [email protected] Walther König in 2007. While it, like the other Richter Poster Editions listed on page 14 of the catalogue, Jenna Adams is an offset print made directly from a transparency of the original painting, it is not a “technically Publisher Services & Special Acquisitions perfect” reproduction, but a subtly altered reproduction that constitutes a new and autonomous work [email protected] of art. If the “original” painting was, in fact, an altered “copy” of a photograph, now the painting has Dan Vesper again been copied—and again altered—in still another medium.“We can never see for the first time,” Accounts Receivable [email protected] Richter seems to be saying,“beware of what claims to be an absolute original demanding our fidelity.” Amy Willis Sales & Customer Service Manager In a world where facts are changing with vertiginous speed, it behooves us all, as citizens, to look [email protected] carefully at what at first appears too familiar. Molly Cain Publicity Associate [email protected] We hope the selection of extraordinary new books included in this Spring 2007 D.A.P. catalogue gives Joshua Craig you cause to pause—and look again. Inventory Manager [email protected] Michelle Casciolo With kind regards, Office Manager & Accounts Payable [email protected] Sharon Helgason Gallagher Skúta Helgason Executive Director,D.A.P. Creative Consultant [email protected] Thomas Evans artbook @ PS1 Bookstore Manager [email protected] Jennie C. Jones Ariann Costa Clifford Borress Office Assistants * Robert Storr,“Interview with Gerhard Richter,” Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: The Museum of Grace Attlee Modern Art, 2003): page 183. Piper Marshall Sean Simpson Nicoleta Coman Interns Contents Spring Highlights 2 Fashion 42 Art History 48 Decorative Arts 56 Fiction & Poetry 58 Contemporary Art Highlights 60 Design 74 Criticism, Theory & Group Exhibitions 80 Journals 88 Architecture 90 Eye on Politics: Photojournalism and Art 100 Photography 104 Contemporary Art, Monographs & Catalogues 128 Annuals & Fair Guides 168 Index 169 Ordering Information 172 www.artbook.com • Voice: 800.338.2665 • Fax: 800.478.3128 2 MFA Publications Edward Hopper Text by Carol Troyen, Judith Barter, Elliot Davis. One of the most enduringly popular painters of the twentieth century, Edward Hopper produced many works now considered icons of Modern art. Canvases such as Drugstore, New York Movie, and the universally recognized (and often parodied) Nighthawks not only reshaped what painting looked like in America, but created a visual lan- guage for middle-class life and its discontents. This extensive new assessment of Hopper, which accompanies a major traveling exhibition, examines the dynamics of the artist’s creative process and discusses his work within the cultural currents of his day—examining the influence not only of other painters, but also of such media as literature and film. And while most studies have tended to see Hopper as the great painter of alienation, this one takes a much broader, more nuanced, and ultimately more representative view. Spanning the entirety of Hopper’s career, but with particular emphasis on his heyday in the 30s and 40s, Edward Hopper highlights the artist’s greatest achievements while discussing such topics as his absorption of European influences, critical reactions to his work, the relation of Realism to Modernism, the artist’s fascination with architecture, his depiction of women, and the struggle in his last years to produce original works. Illustrated with over 150 oils, water- colors and prints, and including essays by several noted scholars in the field and an extensive chronology and bibliography, this is the most comprehen- sive volume on Hopper produced in the last decade. Edward Hopper 0-87846-712-2 / 978-0-87846-712-9 Clthbnd, 10.5 x 11 in. / 288 pgs / illust. throughout. U.S. $65.00 CDN $78.00 June/Art Exhibition Schedule Boston: MFA Boston, 05/06/07–08/19/07 Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 09/07–01/08 Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 02/08–05/08 distributed art publishers, inc. D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 3 Rembrandt’s Nose Of Flesh and Spirit in the Master’s Portraits SPR By Michael Taylor. I The year 2006 marked the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest portrait painters NG H that ever lived, the Dutch seventeenth-century master,Rembrandt.(The exhibition Strokes of Genius: Rembrandt’s Prints and Drawings alone, which opened in November, 2005 at The National Gallery of IGH Art in Washington, D.C., is one of the most popular of the decade and has drawn hundreds of thou- sands of visitors.) Although Rembrandt is among the most important artists in western history, and LIGH perhaps our greatest draftsman, no one has ever, until now, been able to pinpoint exactly how it was that he so precisely and effortlessly captured the spiritual essence of his subjects. This thrilling, TS insightful, sophisticated and yet accessible illustrated reading-format study, written by the preemi- nent scholar and translator Michael Taylor, will be as enlightening and delightful to Rembrandt scholars as to lay readers. Taylor looks at Rembrandt’s self-portraits, his society portraits, historical paintings and biblical scenes, and identifies how it was that the artist rendered his subjects so alive, so full of earthy, flesh-and-blood vitality—which all boils down to his treatment of the nose. Rembrandt’s Nose is a gem of a book, an intimate, candid and extremely entertaining engagement with the works of art themselves, interwoven with racy historical snippets that contextualize the artist’s breakthroughs and techniques. It includes some 49 reproductions, as well as a complete chronology of Rembrandt’s life. Michael Taylor was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in France. He attended Dartmouth College and did his graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley. After receiving a PhD in Comparative Literature he settled in France, where he has been working in publishing and as a writer and translator. Taylor is the author of two previous books, published in French, one of them a biogra- phy of turn-of-the-century French poet Victor Segalen, plus an ongoing verse translation of the Odes of Horace, the first volume of which was issued by Greenwood Press in San Francisco. He is the translator or joint translator of some 20 art books, including Pierre Schneider’s Matisse, Florian Rodari’s Collage, Pasted, Cut and Torn Papers, the Matisse archives concerning the building of The Vence Chapel and, most recently, the Wildenstein Institute’s catalogues raisonnées of the paintings of Edouard Vuillard and Camille Pissarro. Taylor teaches at Parsons School of Design in Paris and lives in a restored farmhouse in the Dordogne. Rembrandt’s Nose 1-933045-44-2 / 978-1-933045-44-3 Hardcover, 5.5 x 7.5 in. / 186 pgs / 49 color/ 49 b&w. U.S. $27.50 CDN $33.00 July/Nonfiction & Criticism If the sitter is the lead actor of a performance, which is what a portrait is, in essence, then the nose is his understudy on the stage of the face.

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