There’s never a shortage of art books, but it is often hard to find the best in a field flooded with vanity projects, sales tools, and books that promise so much more than they deliver.
Books
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Photographing the Crossroads of Life and Death in South Africa
Beginning in the 1940s, South African photographer David Goldblatt documented the people and landscapes of his country in striking black and white. It was only after apartheid that he felt comfortable with color in his work.
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Fables from Artlandia: The Miraculous by Raphael Rubinstein
In a 1946 letter to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, poet Charles Olson articulated what has become a quietly influential conception of historiography in poetry circles. “There has been, is too much of everything, including knowledge,” he contended, quite presciently, “because it has not been winnowed.”
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A History of Art on the Final Frontier
The first instance of a space discovery affecting art was likely 1608’s Somnium, a novel by astronomer Johannes Kepler about a trip to the moon following a pathway revealed by a demon. Ron Miller includes the curious story in The Art of Space, published this October by Zenith Press, which chronicles the history of artists interpreting the frontier beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
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Making Muses: Dorothy Iannone’s Erotic Art Was Inspired by Dieter Roth
Dorothy Iannone describes her trip to Reykjavík in 1967 as the “journey which seems to have made all other journeys possible.” It was there she met the artist Dieter Roth, with whom she swiftly fell in love and for whom she left her husband and a comfortable life in the United States.
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A Portrait of the 21st-Century Alps, Where Glaciers Retreat and Concrete Advances
The Alps today are different mountains from when the first 19th-century photographers hoisted heavy plate cameras up their craggy sides. Glaciers are in retreat, ski resorts are firmly lodged into slopes, and human infrastructure crawls back and forth steadily up their inclines.
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The Original Renaissance Man and His Brain
LOS ANGELES — As he raced against cancer to finish his fourth and final book, Leonardo’s Brain, author/inventor/surgeon Leonard Shlain was motivated by the possibility that his manuscript-in-progress might help answer a very vital question: How can mankind achieve a more creative and peaceful future?
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Photographers Expose Their Processes
Some photographers take relentless notes in pocket journals, others share their discoveries in real time on Instagram. The two methods are different approaches to the contemporary photographic process, which is the subject of a new book, Photographers’ Sketchbooks, by Stephen McLaren and Bryan Formhals.
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Inflatable Corsets, Ventilated Top Hats, and Other Failed Victorian Inventions
Many great inventions came out of the Victorian era, from the photograph to the electric lightbulb. The elastic opera hat and the anti-cholera belt, however, are not among their illustrious numbers.
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Grappling with a Family Ghost in an Interactive Photography Project
Photographer McNair Evans’s faith in his father was rattled when the patriarch died and the secret of the family agricultural business being near insolvency was revealed.
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Does It Suck? Another Look at ‘Showgirls’
Long brushed off as a horrendous excuse for a film, Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas’s epic flop Showgirls may have more than meets the eye. Or, at least, its vulgar superficiality may be worth critical re-evaluation
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Relentless Complexities: Trevor Winkfield’s Art Writing
While visiting Philadelphia a number of years ago, the poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum asked me “Is Trevor Winkfield a real person?”