Book Description
Seventy-five of Peter Schjeldahl's engaging pieces on art from The New Yorker, published together for the first time.

Distinguished critic at The New Yorker since 1998, Peter Schjeldahl has been described as America's most influential writer on art. Blessed with an unerring eye, he tackles a myriad of subjects with wit, poetry, and perspicacity, examining and questioning the art before him while reveling in the power and beauty of language. His writing springs from a desire to be understood by all readers, and a determination to help them engage with art of every kind.

Covering subjects drawn from a broad canvas of the history of art—from ancient Greece, Mexico, and Byzantium, through Raphael, Rubens, and Rembrandt, to Bruce Nauman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and John Currin—the writings collected here seek out with precision and economy the essence of the individual artist or work under discussion, but they never lose sight of the bigger picture: What is beauty? What does it mean to be an American artist? What can the art we produce and admire tell us about ourselves?

With an imaginative introduction—twenty questions, each one posed to Schjeldahl by a different artist or writer—this collection will appeal to anyone who considers the experience of art, and of writing on art, an invitation to a voyage.

Coverage includes:
• large-scale exhibitions at leading institutions around the world
• shows at private galleries
• profiles of prominent members of the art world
• personal accounts of time spent with artists
• the influences of museum spaces on our experience of art ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Writing At Full Tilt Boogie
In his introduction, Rob. Storr describes Schjeldahl as fashion's 'watchful scribe'. It's a fine tribute and sets out what distinguishes Schjeldahl as a particular type of poet/ critic in the romantic tradition of Baudelaire and Whitman. So don't pick him up anticipating reams of jargon and esoteric art analysis, or structuralst theorizing. He speaks smart, 'for the fan in the stands'. I never knew Schjeldahl until he came to visit and travel to Uluru with me in 1986. It was a totally engaging 3 or 4 days and I became a fan of his enthusiasms as they then appeared, mostly in Art in America. I scrambled in our library for back issues to catch up on this infectious and radiating intelligence. At the time, he was very big on Kiefer, and in fact, suggested I fly south to Adelaide and catch the German show with its crop of current maestros, then current atthe gellery of S. Australia, curated by the indefatigable, Ron Radford. Fortunately, most of his best writing til 1990 is packed between these covers, and his piece on Kiefer is among them. It's his gift and passion that even people I neither know much about, or do not care for, can be resurrected under Peter's gaze. I don't share his enthusiasms for Schnabel, Warhol, Nauman, Salle, Polke or Koons for instance. But Schjeldahl is generous with his praise and perspicacious with his more cautiousnotes, never dismissive or superior. This last quality is demonstrated in his defence of Rothko from the bullying Bobby Hughes. His caning of Wyeth's 'Helga' series pops the balloon on Helga hype and delivers uncharacteristically cool truths about his art being completed by reproduction and of Wyeth's place as'mass reassurer and avatar of the Art myth'. To read Schjeldahl is to be refreshed. He's still at it and enjoying writing for the New York Times. A recent review of Hillary Spurling's great volumes on Matisse will surely make it into his next collection.

Buy this book
This is a collection of reviews and essays written by the Oscar Wilde of art critics.Known for his witty and engaging column at the Village Voice, and his more recent post at the New Yorker, Schjeldahl has also contributedpieces to the New York Times, and most of the major art magazines. Fromthe abstract expressionists to the simulationists, this book focuses mainlyon the artists and movements of the last half of the 20th century.

Iloved this book.It was informative, intelligently written, and highlyentertaining. I found Schjeldahl to be a rare critic who is genuinelyexcited by the work he sees and admiring of the many artists he writesabout.He may not always like the work, but he always gives it a fair andhonest review. In turn, he opened up my mind to the possibilities of whatart is and can be. ... Read more

Book Description
"Taking its title and cue from the Wordsworth poem ""I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,"" The Inward Eye assembles together a visceral and enigmatic array of contemporary work that involves looking and seeing on different, and often quite meaningful and personal, levels. From James Lee Byars' perfect ""Slit Moon"" and Vija Clemins engraving of the ocean surface, to Katharina Fritsch's vanitas and Howard Hodgkins' painterly memory of a dinner in Italy, the paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, and installations included herein provide the viewer the opportunity to take pleasure in their beauty and meaning from their profundity." ... Read more

Product Description
This publication accompanied the exhibition William Wegman, October 1993 to January 1994 at the Museo de Monterrey, Mexico. ... Read more

Book Description
Described by one critic as "embarrassingly intimate," Cindy Sherman's Centerfolds, a series of twelve 2 x 4 foot images shot in 1981 for an Artforum commission, take the horizontal centerfold as their physical and conceptual framework. Though the images were never run in the magazine--the editor was concerned that they would be misunderstood--they remain some of the most affecting of Sherman's constructed pictures. In them, Sherman's vaguely adolescent female characters fill up the frame with an ambiguous, uncomfortably close presence, their plaid kilts, wet t-shirts, matted hair, disheveled nightgowns, and pretty gingham dresses keeping them in your face but unavailable, emotionally suggestive but ambivalently distanced. This handsome, compact volume, the first to include all twelve of the Centerfold images, is run through with an informative, involved text by Lisa Phillips, Head Curator of the New Museum and a long-time supporter of Sherman's work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Later Regular Edition More Informative & Better Suited To Photos Than Earlier Limited Edition
Caveat emptor: Two books dated 2003 have the title "Cindy Sherman Centerfolds." Both contain 12 landscape-orientation self-portraits of the photographer made up and dressed up as adolescent girls that were originally shot in 1981.But the books' designs and contents are different.

The first one was produced as a limited edition of 1850 which was apparently recalled. It has an incorrect ISBN of 0970909039*, is 29.5cm wide and 15cm high, has a light blue cloth cover, is 44 pages in length, was designed by "Honest, NYC," and was printed in Iceland.The photos are presented full-bleed on the right-hand pages, with blank pages facing them. An essay by Lisa Phillips in a rather large font is interspersed among the photographs.The captions (untitled #92, #87, #85, #88, #86, #89, #95, #93, #94, #90, #96, and #91a) are at the end.The dust jacket features orangish Untitled #93 with Sherman as a "blond with red rimmed eyes and matted hair tucked under rumpled black sheets" (per the essay).

The later regular edition (ISBN 0970909020) is 22cm wide by 25cm high, has a black cloth cover, is 50 pages in length, was designed by "Stella Bugbee, Giampietro + Smith," and was printed in Germany.In this book the Phillips essay is found in normal-size font on pages 5-7.The twelve photographs (untitled #92, #87, #91, #85, #88, #95, #89, #86, #93, #94, #90, and #96) follow on two-page spreads with white around them.Pages 32-47 have 1981-1982 essays by Peter Schjeldahl, Roberta Smith, and Andy Grundberg. The dust jacket has a detail of bluish Untitled #92 with Sherman in a tartan skirt and white blouse.

Which is better? If you are a book collector, you'll want the wide-format limited edition due to its rarity and "artistic" presentation. But those interested in Sherman's art are better served by the regular edition for several reasons.For one, it has more text than the limited edition.For another, the presence of the book's gutter in each photo in the regular edition gives a more "centerfold-like" feeling (although I suppose fold-out photos would have been even more effective).Finally, when I compared the photos in the two editions, the ones in the limited edition were slightly cropped, the worst example being Untitled #86 on page 17 in which you cannot see Sherman's eyes at the far right.

If you're unsure which edition a bookseller has for sale, use the "Contact This Seller" feature in the "Used & New" section of Amazon.com!

* That ISBN belongs to "Laurie Simmons Photographs 1978/79."

A Long Wait, But Well Worth It
Although the "Centerfolds" were shot back in the 1980's it took until now for them to be all collected in a book collection. They are some of Cindy Sherman's best work and they are presented beautifully in this very wide shaped book. The book was hard to get a hold of as it was specially produced by an art gallery, but as a fan it is a great addition to the "Complete Film Stills" book. Highly recommended.

An Early Look at Cindy Sherman's Art
Cindy Sherman is now an established household art figure, a photographer who spends her life costuming herself and arranging her settings to recreate or reinterpret other people both famous in art history and in other arenas.These works are no longer shocking or startling, but the twelve 'Centerfolds' in this fine little book show her at an early stage in a career that has since burgeoned.

As far as the Centerfolds themselves, each is a self portrait in different but drab dress and moods. While the concept of viewing the standard plain woman in the guise of what is usually associated as a Playboy etc venture of sizzling sensuality is a solid idea, the photographs themselves tend toward a sameness that makes them less interesting than her current work.

Still, this was a pioneering commission by Artforum magazine that never made it to print and we are fortunate to see the images that found no home until the museums sought them out due to her growing fame.It is another moment in history that bears observing.Grady Harp, May 05 ... Read more

Amazon.com
The artwork in The Symbolist Prints of Edvard Munch is sobeautifully reproduced that one might be tempted to tear out pages, frame them and hangthem on the wall. Munch's work, which constitutes some of the 20th century's greatestprintmaking, is presented through the lens of an extraordinary private collection thatincludes almost every one of his prints along with alternate versions and early sketches.Elizabeth Prelinger's essays provide background on Munch's life, printmakingtechniques, and the development of his symbolist aesthetic. An exciting element of thebook is an evocative essay by renowned critic, Peter Schjeldahl, who, in inimitable style,likens Munch's effect on the viewer to that of listening to the early work of a favoriterock-star. Published on the occasion of an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario in early1997, this book provides excellent documentation of an artist whose work remains vitalmore than fifty years after his death. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

La douleur, la couleur et le criard
Il montrait sa soeur Sophie qui mourait jeune, entouree de toute la famille. Mais il montrait chacun a l'age qu'il avait a l'epoque de la peinture, et non pas a la mort de la jeune fille. Car la douleur durait a jamais et unifiait toute la famille pour toujours. Puis avec des tetes d'une femme et d'un homme, gravees et multicolorees, il cessait de suivre le style repandu des japonais de faire une seule couleur d'un seul troncon de bois. Son prefere de tout son oeuvre etait Sick Child II, en tant que sa premiere lithographie en couleur. Mais son Scream est le plus reconnu, en tant que l'image la plus frappante du 20eme siecle.

The Print and the Darkness
He was bound determined not to paint people reading and women knitting, but instead to show people who breathed emotions into his darkly suggestive prints. "Death in the sickroom" showed family members at the ages when they were painted, not when his sister Sophie died; it expressed unity in grief as one of death's longlasting effects by seemingly overlapping planes flowing together across bleakly empty areas, starkly B&W contrasts, and stiffly posed mourners frozen in misery. "The mirror" heads of a disembodied man and woman was his first woodcut to give up the Japanese method of printing each color with a separate woodblock; instead, he jigsawed blocks into pieces according to compositional design, linked each piece with a different color, and put everything back together into a multicolored print. He considered his "Sick child II" his most important print: his first color lithograph, it focused on the diseased upper chest and the head in profile facing right against a large pillow in order to gaze with tragically meditative resignation into the flatly patterned looming void on the far right. However, his "Scream" became the most compelling image for the late twentieth century: it expressed terror before the universe by powerfully decorative lines reverberating through the starkly opposed black lines and bleakly white voids of pulsing land and sky. Elizabeth Prelinger and Michael Parke-Taylor have applied reader-friendly illustrations and text to their catalog of the Vivian and David Campbell exhibition. Their SYMBOLIST PRINTS OF EDVARD MUNCH goes down good with PROGRESSIVE PRINTMAKERS by Warrington Colescott and Arthur Hove, PRINTS AND PRINTMAKING by Antony Griffiths, EDVARD MUNCH by Josef Paul Hodin, and THE PRINT IN THE WESTERN WORLD by Linda C Hults. ... Read more

Book Description
Breaking the ceramic arts up into incisive, historic, award-winning essays, Shards is an anthology of writings by Garth Clark, one of the most noted proponents of the medium. The writings in this volume span 25 years of Clark's important career as a critic, historian and dealer in ceramics. The compilation is divided into two parts and features over 150 duotones of seminal ceramic works. Part one deals with artists and contains catalogue and exhibition essays that focus on individual artists--contemporary and historic, domestic and foreign. Part two is dedicated to issues, including American ceramic history and general history; criticism, theory, scholarship and semantics; function and design; and finally, the marketplace. This volume also contains, among many of Clark's seminal works, six previously unpublished articles, several on artists and others confronting some of the field's more controversial topical issues. Sure to raise hackles among ceramists, not least of all among ceramics' many teachers, is the chapter "Ceramic Education and the Culture of Amateurism." Artists and students alike will be compelled and delighted by some of Clark's best and most recent musings on maverick artists like British potter Grayson Perry, widely collected and celebrated by the likes of Charles Saatchi and Damien Hirst. Shards is the most comprehensive grouping of Clark's writings to date. ... Read more

Book Description
Description: Painter Among Poets: The Collaborative Art of George Schneeman is the first full presentation of the wide range of projects that Schneeman has co-created over the past 35 years. Painter Among Poets not only investigates Schneeman's signature enthusiasm for free-wheeling artistic collaboration, it also considers his work as part of the remarkable tradition of poet/painter collaboration that grew out of 19th- and 20th-century modernism. Always open to spontaneity and engagement, Schneeman encouraged poets to cross over into his dominion and contribute visual elements to the projects in order to create a surprising work of art that neither artist nor poet could have done alone. Painter Among Poets offers the reader a behind-the-scenes look at the high-wire process of collaboration as an outgrowth of Schneeman's friendships with poets Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Michael Brownstein, Tom Clark, Edwin Denby, Larry Fagin, Dick Gallup, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Greenwald, Steve Katz, Lewis MacAdams, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Harris Schiff, Peter Schjeldahl, Tom Veitch, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, and many others. Twelve of Schneeman's collaborators contribute essays and remembrances to this volume, which also features an essay by Carter Ratcliff, an extensive conversation between Schneeman and Padgett, a detailed checklist of the artist's collaborations, and a bibliography. ... Read more

Book Description
Willem de Kooning: Drawings and Sculpture Essay by Peter Schjeldahl 1998. Co-published by Matthew Marks Gallery and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Dust jacket. 18 color plates. 120 duotones. 152 pages ... Read more