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The Writings of a Passionate Painter
Pick up a survey of modern art, start scanning the 1930s, and you may come across a paragraph or two on the French painter Jean Hélion (1904–1987).
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An Out-of-Focus Look at Post-Photography
Tacking "post" onto a word is one of those art world tricks that's routinely wielded to great rhetorical effect, but has little denotative meaning. In much the same way, Robert Shore’s book featuring the term, Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera, jumps off the shelves with its punchy title bu
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Catching Subway Riders in the Act of Reading
For bibliophiles and generally nosy people, one of the worst things about the rise of e-books and e-readers is that they don't have distinct covers.
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Anselm Berrigan’s Ambivalence about Words
I am going to start with a “Note for poems” that Anselm Berrigan wrote about his most recent book, Pregrets.
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Language Lessons: The Poetry of Bob Brown
In his 1974 anthology Revolution of the World: A New Gathering of American Avant Garde Poetry 1914–1945, Jerome Rothenberg introduced American poet Bob Brown to those of us of a certain generation, hinting at the wealth of visual poems the man had created and describing his writing, based mostly on
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Best of 2014: Our Top 10 Art Books
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.
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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 winno
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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
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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