Kirk Varnedoe

Accompanying the major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1996-97, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective contains 264 color plates illustrating Johns's work in all its facets - paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. An introductory essay by Kirk Varnedoe, the exhibition's curator, looks back through the layers of memory in Johns's recent work to review the essential themes that have engaged the artist since his epoch-making Flag and Target paintings of the mid-1950s. In the book's second essay, Roberta Bernstein analyzes a crucial tactic in Johns's art: his many methods of referring to predecessor artists ranging from Leonardo and Grunewald to Cezanne, Duchamp, and Picasso. The illustrations for Bernstein's essay include a fourteen-page section reproducing the images she discusses - a striking visual demonstration of the variety of the art that Johns's work gathers together and transforms. Varnedoe then takes the opposite approach to Bernstein's, exploring how Johns's art has been interpreted by the artists of his and our own time: from the Pop, Minimal and Conceptual movements of the 1960s through to the new art of today, his work has proved rich enough to have a fundamentally influential impact on an extraordinarily diverse array of artists. The plates in Jasper Johns: A Retrospective are arranged in sections according to the stages of Johns's career, allowing comparison of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from each period of his art as it has developed and changed. This comprehensive selection of reproductions is interwoven with an illustrated chronology tracing Johns's life and work with unprecedented accuracy and thoroughness.

In this volume, an extended essay by Kirk Varnedoe, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, examines the artist's background and early education in Lexington, Virginia, and charts his study at the Boston Museum School, the Art Students League of New York, and the renowned, progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Twombly's early contacts with both the modern European tradition and New York School painting are examined, and the emergence of his own distinct style in the mid-1950s is presented with a new clarity. More than fifty of the artist's most important paintings from all phases of his career are reproduced in color, including recent works never seen outside the studio and several important earlier works not previously published. A dozen sculptures, stretching from the artist's early assemblages of the 1940s through work of recent years, are also reproduced, as well as more than forty works on paper.

Donated: The Margaret A. Bailey Art Collection.

Provides an authoritative overview of the artist's work, including his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs.

Portraiture has managed to flourish in modern painting in spite of the popularization of photography, the decline of traditional patronage, and modernism's increasing emphasis on abstraction. However problematic modern styles have been for representational art, painters have continued to discover new possibilities in the imaging of the human face. This book explores the challenge of the modernist portrait through the multiple solutions proposed by its foremost protagonist and, in so doing, becomes the first volume ever published on the subject of Picasso and portraiture. The hundreds of works reproduced here - most of them unfamiliar, some virtually unknown - demonstrate the remarkable range of Picasso's experimentation in all its stylistic and psychological diversity. . The book opens with an authoritative, broad-ranging essay by William Rubin; the nine essays that follow - all by major contemporary scholars and critics - examine different periods and aspects of Picasso's career and clarify personal relationships between the artist and his subjects. It closes with an essay by Mr. Rubin on the late portraits. Numerous photographs, some never before published and many by outstanding photographers, present the portrait subjects as seen through the eye of the camera. This book, published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opening in April 1996, no doubt will long remain the definitive work on its subject.

Briefly examines the life and work of the renowned twentieth-century artist, describing and giving examples from his various periods or styles.

"More than fifty of Gustave Caillebotte's (1848-1894) strongest paintings illustrate the fertile period from 1875 to 1885 when he was most closely allied with the impressionists. Accompanying the National Gallery of Art's major new exhibition, coorganized with the Kimbell Art Museum, this volume explores the inquisitive, experimental, almost fearless vision that inspired his masterworks"--

Study of Rodin and his place in traditional and modern art.

"Proceedings of a symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 10-15, 1989, in conjunction with the exhibition 'Picasso and Braque: pioneering Cubism, ' shown September 24, 1989--January 16, 1990"--T.p. verso./ Includes bibliographical references.

Poems about man and nature, the future, memories and old friends.