ARTBOOK BLOGEventsStore NewsMuseum Stores of the MonthNew Title ReleasesStaff PicksImage GalleryBooks in the MediaExcerpts & EssaysArtbook InterviewsEx LibrisAt First SightThe Artbook 2024 Gift GuidesArtbook Featured Image ArchiveArtbook D.A.P. Events ArchiveDATE 12/7/2024 Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman on 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s'DATE 12/5/2024 The Primary Essentials x Artbook Pop UpDATE 11/28/2024 Blue collar pilgrims in 'Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944'DATE 11/28/2024 Happy Thanksgiving from Artbook | D.A.P.DATE 11/24/2024 Photorealism lives!DATE 11/22/2024 2024 Staff Pick Holiday Gifts!DATE 11/21/2024 NYPL Jefferson Market presents Neal Slavin with Kevin Moore on 'When Two or More Are Gathered Together'DATE 11/18/2024 “All is beauty, all is measure, richness, serenity and pleasure” in ‘Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage’DATE 11/16/2024 Kaleidoscopic and dynamic, Orphism comes to the GuggenheimDATE 11/13/2024 From Belly Dancers to Bingo EnthusiastsDATE 11/11/2024 Know your propaganda!DATE 11/9/2024 Yumna Al-Arashi pays poetic tribute to her great-grandmother and an ancient tattooing practiceDATE 11/7/2024 Long before social media, Sophie Calle fearlessly overshared | RECENT POSTSLACY SOTO | DATE 12/7/2024Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman on 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s'Saturday, December 7 at 3 PM, Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents a book signing event celebrating 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s' with photographer Chloe Sherman in conversation with writer and activist Michelle Tea. Book signing to follow.
CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/5/2024The Primary Essentials x Artbook Pop UpThursday, December 5, from 6–8 PM, please join us to celebrate the opening of our December pop-up with Brooklyn home goods store of great intelligence and beauty, The Primary Essentials! Throughout the month, TPE will present a curated selection of more than 50 titles, with a focus on the study. Customers can receive complimentary book plates and in-person calligraphy for extra special holiday gifting. PLUS: on Sunday, December 8, painter JJ Manford will sign his new monograph from Derek Eller / Harper’s. CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/28/2024Happy Thanksgiving from Artbook | D.A.P.On this quintessentially American holiday, both beloved and fraught, we honor the importance and beauty of gathering. At a time when our culture may seem more divided than ever, and more focused on consumption than connection, we take joy in this family photograph from Reel Art Press’s new book on FSA-era denim—the quintessentially American fabric. The image is captioned: “Feggen Jones lived with 14 children on an 86-acre farm purchased through the FSA. He had two cows, three mules, four hogs, 200 chickens, two dogs and a cat. He owned a Ford truck and an Oldsmobile sedan. His cash crop was seven acres of tobacco and he also grew five acres of cotton, seven acres of wheat, 12 acres of corn and two acres of vegetable garden. Jones was formerly a sharecropper in this area and was obviously a very busy fellow but I am sure he got a lot of help from his many kids. His OshKosh overalls look in pretty good condition considering.” Zebulon, North Carolina, March 1942.CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/28/2024Blue collar pilgrims in 'Denim: The Fabric That Built America, 1935–1944'For many Americans, Thanksgiving is the most festive of holidays. For others, it’s fraught. This year, we found a little brightness in this photograph from Reel Art Press’s new book on FSA-era denim, “the fabric that built America.” Graham Marsh writes, “Known as the color of the working class, blue was the cheapest color to produce. Even today, the term ‘blue-collar’ refers to someone who does manual labor. This wasn’t the designer denim look, brothers and sisters, but clothing for real back-breaking hard work. When this clothing wore out, they patched it, sometimes patching a patch until they were wearing the patch itself. It was a tough life, but these were the pilgrims that built America with determination and grace.” Pictured here, “Daughter of a farmer resettled on Kearney Farmsteads in Nebraska,” May 1936.CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/24/2024Photorealism lives!Amy Sherald’s 2017 oil painting, The lesson of falling leaves, is reproduced from new release Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, published to accompany the major survey opening this week at MOCA LA. Spanning from the 1960s to today, and including everyone from Robert Bechtle and Richard Estes to Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter, this book proves that the genre is not just alive and well, but sometimes challenging, weird and confrontational. In her catalog essay, MOCA curator Anna Katz discusses Sherald. “The dichotomy between painting and photography, drawn along lines of racial exclusion and inclusion, is stark in the work of self-described ‘American Realist’ Amy Sherald, who was catapulted to national fame at the unveiling of her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018. The lesson of falling leaves exemplifies her selection of Black sitters, often strangers, whom she chooses for their ‘quality of existing in the past, present, and future simultaneously.’ … Sherald’s signature is the depiction of the bodies (skin, hair, nails, eyes) of her portrait subjects in grayscale. She uses grayscale to invoke the nineteenth-century daguerreotype, which comprised some of the earliest portraits of African Americans. In the history of European and North American art, Black people rarely figured in painted portraits and enjoyed their first opportunities to be portrait subjects upon the dissemination of the relatively accessible means of photography. The photographic is thus doing heavy lifting here: whereas in [works by artists like Jesse Treviño and Robert Bechtle], the nonhierarchical distribution of details anchors the images to a specific time and place, in Sherald’s painting the photographic locates a historical origin of representation for Black subjects, while also pointing out a history of absence and pointing toward a future inclusion. The photographic is a corruption, an acknowledgment and an abrogation of painting’s racist foundations.”CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/22/20242024 Staff Pick Holiday Gifts!Check out our hand-picked list of staff favorites for everyone you love to gift—from the hardcore art lover to the photo aficionado, from the sophisticated traveler to the obsessive collector . . . and more!CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/21/2024NYPL Jefferson Market presents Neal Slavin with Kevin Moore on 'When Two or More Are Gathered Together'Thursday, November 21, from 6–7:30 PM, the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library presents photographer Neal Slavin in conversation with editor Kevin Moore for the launch of the new, expanded edition of 'When Two or More: Are Gathered Together,' published by Damiani Books. The event will take place in the Willa Cather Room, on the first floor of the library, and will be followed by a signing.CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/18/2024“All is beauty, all is measure, richness, serenity and pleasure” in ‘Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage’There is so much to see in new release Matisse: Invitation to the Voyage. Published to accompany the major retrospective at Fondation Beyeler, on view through January 2025, it features the artist’s work across all movements, from early Fauvist landscapes and interiors to the radical, monochromatic nude cutouts of the 1950s. The book’s design is also notably pleasing and unique, with two heavy gatefolded covers bound in to the one beautifully produced paperback volume. Pictured here: Grand nu couché/Nu rose (1935). Excerpted in the headline: an excerpt from Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poem “Invitation to the Voyage,” which inspired Matisse throughout his life.CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/16/2024Kaleidoscopic and dynamic, Orphism comes to the GuggenheimScience, technology, artistic freedom! Ah, the optimism and unfettered exploration of the Belle Époque. Then: the First World War, followed by the devastation of the 1918 influenza epidemic. In November 2024, the Guggenheim Museum opens Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930, the first in-depth examination of this avant-garde movement whose name, borrowed from the Greek poet-hero Orpheus, was coined in 1912 by French literary giant Guillaume Apollinaire. “‘Orphism’ referred to the kaleidoscopic and dynamic paintings produced by a constellation of transnational artists exploring the boundaries of representation to convey their experiences of modern life,” Guggenheim senior curator Tracey Bashkoff writes. “Artists connected to Orphism engaged with ideas of simultaneity—which they equated with modernity—creating compositions that often capture motion, encompass disks of vibrant color, and evoke multisensory responses. Situated among vanguard movements of the period such as Cubism and Futurism, Orphism pushed further into modes of abstract expression, whereas these other idioms remained invested in figurative content. … To invoke [František] Kupka, Orphism is an amorphous concept. Apollinaire invented the term to describe an abstracted pictorial idiom, but he did so by specifically conjuring the ultimate bard, the mythological Orpheus. In doing so, he productively allied painting, poetry and music with one another—and with modernity itself.” Featured spreads show work by František Kupka, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Gino Severini and Mainie Jellett.CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/13/2024From Belly Dancers to Bingo EnthusiastsOut now from Damiani, the new, expanded edition of Neal Slavin’s classic 1976 photobook, When Two or More Are Gathered Together, collecting more than 100 photos of groups big and small, scientific, artistic, gastronomic, athletic, etc, etc, etc. … from the 1970s to the present. Pictured here, “Yogis, Los Angeles, California” (1974). Kevin Moore writes, “Certainly, over the last fifty years, the nature of groups has changed—how they organize, how they meet, where they meet, and what they meet for. Much of this activity now happens online, on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. But in many cases, the online realm is a parallel space, a portal of introduction and information that interfaces with in-person assembly. No matter how they form, the reasons for groups have not changed much over time. Groups exist to express common identity, to provide companionship, offer support, and a sense of belonging. Groups also form to preserve, share, agitate, entertain, or simply to escape. In the fractured and often divisive times in which we live, exacerbated by politics, technology, and propaganda, groups have come to provide the social sustenance often missing from traditional outlets, such as jobs and families. Groups, with their processes of arguing, consensus building, and voting, are our common experience of working democracy.” |