Best of
Visual-Art

1996

Monet: Or the Triumph of Impressionism


Daniel Wildenstein - 1996
    A visual representation of an extraordinary artistic career, that simultaenously brings to life the spirit of a whole era.The author: Daniel Wildenstein (1917-2001) was an art historian and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris). From 1939 onwards, he was Director of the Wildenstein Galleries of New York, London, and Tokyo. He edited several international journals, e.g. the magazine Arts from 1956-1962 and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts after 1963. He co-founded the Fondation Wildenstein in 1970 (it was renamed the Wildenstein Institute in 1984), and was a prime mover in many exhibitions of international repute. Daniel Wildenstein also edited the catalogues raisonnés of various 18th, 19th, and 20th century artists. He was a world authority on Impressionism, and published catalogues of the works of Gauguin, Manet, and Monet.

Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings


Robert Smithson - 1996
    In addition to a new introduction by Jack Flam, The Collected Writings includes previously unpublished essays by Smithson and gathers hard-to-find articles, interviews, and photographs. Together these provide a full picture of his wide-ranging views on art and culture.

Nan Goldin: I'll Be Your Mirror


Elisabeth Sussman - 1996
    Goldin turns her camera outward to record transvestites carousing in downtown clubs and the social impact of AIDS and drugs; and inward to look with unblinking intimacy at her friends, her lovers of both sexes, and herself. She records her boyfriend masturbating. She shows him on the toilet. She shows her own battered face in a mirror after he beats her up. She traces the decline and death of her friend Cookie Mueller. Goldin has created a stark record of her urban demi-monde.

Louise Bourgeois: Drawings and Observations


Louise Bourgeois - 1996
    Depicts drawings by an artist better known for her sculpture, and features interviews and comments by the artist.

Bouguereau


Fronia E. Wissman - 1996
    Wissman offers astute and illuminating insights into the art, career, and family life of this great artist--whose beautiful paintings of a better, purer time an place continue to find favor with contemporary viewers. Over fifty full-color reproductions and several black-and-white illustrations exemplify Bouguereau's precision in creating timeless works of sensual, emotional, and intellectual appeal.

Techniques of the Great Masters of Art


Waldemar Januszczak - 1996
    Over 400 color illustrations show how each developed their own style and techniques.

Jasper Johns: A Retrospective


Kirk Varnedoe - 1996
    His methodical working process combines intense deliberation and experimentation, obsessive craft, cycles of revision and repetition, and decisive shifts of direction. Johns also frequently borrows images from other artists, which, ironically, only underscores the originality of his own vision. His work occupies a key position in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective is the most complete and authoritative resource on it available, containing 264 color plates illustrating his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Accompanying essays review his essential themes, analyze his references to other artists, and explore how his contemporaries have, in turn, seen and absorbed his own work. The plates are arranged to follow the stages of his career, allowing comparison of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from each period, as his style developed and changed. That comprehensive selection of reproductions is interwoven with an illustrated chronology tracing Johns' life and work with unprecedented accuracy and thoroughness. With its scholarly essays and extensive bibliography, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective is the indispensable reference work on this crucial artist. This volume was originally published to accompany the major exhibition of Johns' work held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1996 and 1997, his first full retrospective in 20 years. It has been out of print since 2002.

Lucian Freud


Lucian Freud - 1996
    Now in his early seventies, his output is prolific. He chose the late Leigh Bowery as his model as his model in the early nineties and produced some of his largest and most ambitious nudes to date. He is a superb draughtsman, as his drawings of his mother reveal, and he is a virtuous painter whose work flies in the face of any ephemeral avant-garde. This is the great definitive book.