Rosalind E. Krauss

Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss convincingly introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production.

Having realized quite early that he had to be an artist, Smith made his way to New York and the Art Students League. There he experimented with variations on the revealing styles of Cubism and Surrealism, and slowly discovered his own technique, particularly the use of industrial methods such as welding to construct his sculptures. The results — though responsive to such varied influences as Picasso and pin-up girls — were imaginative, and often strikingly beautiful. Smith's art has inspired generations of followers, but his position as one of the masters of 20th-century sculpture remains unchallenged.

"The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today." -- From the publisher's description.

Was Picasso a modern Midas who not only turned the trash of everyday life into the gold of Cubist collage but also gave new value to the work of the Old Masters? Or was he a monster counterfeiter who mercilessly raided the styles of others? In The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss, one of the foremost theorists of modern art, suggests that the reason we still ask these questions is that modernism itself is a hall of mirrors in which "counterfeit" and "genuine" are two sides of the same condition. Revealing Picasso's collage as a vertiginous play of voices, The Picasso Papers shows that no single voice is "authentic," no single voice sanctioned by its author. Picasso's pastiche of other artists is brilliantly brought into focus as the "sublimated" underbelly of Cubism itself, refashioned in the bright, clean style of the master's neo-classicism, a defense that is its own form of practicing the forbidden.

"This catalogue presents fourteen early sculptures by the late artist, many of which had never before been shown in the United States. Documented in vivid color photographs, these exuberant sculptures depict Anthony Caro's decision to bypass representational imagery, and to use bright colors to synthesize the bolted and welded metal parts that replaced it. Along with installation shots and historical photographs, this vibrant book includes a brand-new essay from Tim Marlow that tracks Caro's development as a sculptor, as well as Rosalind Krauss's 1967 Art International article on the artist and the nature of sculpture."--Amazon.com.

"In this first presentation of the artist's complete work, leading contemporary art historian Rosalind Krauss reviews Cindy Sherman's remarkable series of photographic works - in which the artist has notoriously assumed various roles, from B-movie starlet to Old Master model - and the enormous influence these works have had on feminist thinking and on current dialogues about the strategies of contemporary art in general. Almost perversely, Krauss argues, Sherman's unsettling attempts to dissect the formation and perception of images have turned her artworks - and herself - into icons for feminists' and others' agendas. Krauss explores in depth the various approaches to Sherman's work taken by philosophers and art historians and asks if they have not often lost sight of the imagery itself - or, more specifically, the way the images are constructed." "In a further essay, Norman Bryson, internationally known for his pioneering theories on the semiotics of looking, explores Sherman's most recent, horror-show images of mannequins (known as the Sex Pictures) and identifies their place in her continued out-of-body investigations. Along with a bibliography and chronology, more than 200 illustrations (140 in color), including numerous unpublished works, represent Sherman's complete career to date."--BOOK JACKET.

This book studies major works by important sculptors since Rodin in the light of different approaches to general sculptural issues to reveal the logical progressions from nineteenth-century figurative works to the conceptual work of the present.

This volume contains a collection of essays -- spanning three decades -- of the writings of American art critic and theorist Rosalind E. Krauss (b. 1941). Krauss is a leading voice among modern art historians, prominent in the field of deconstructionist, feminist, and psychoanalytical art criticism. Krauss examines what she has come to call the "post-medium condition"--The abandonment by contemporary art of the modernist emphasis on the medium as the source of artistic significance. Krauss maintains that master narrative of contemporary art ended when conceptual art and other contemporary practices jettisoned the specific medium in order to juxtapose image and written text in the same work.

"In the early 1950s, Willem de Koonings Woman I and subsequent paintings established him as a leading member of the abstract expressionist movement. His wildly impacted brushstrokes and heavily encrusted surfaces baffled most critics, who saw de Koonings monstrous female image as violent, aggressive, and ultimately the product of a misogynistic mind. In the image-rich Willem de Kooning Nonstop, Rosalind E. Krauss counters this view with a radical rethinking of de Koonings bold canvases and reveals his true artistic practices. Krauss demonstrates that contrary to popular conceptions of de Kooning as an artist who painted chaotically only to finish abruptly, he was in fact constantly reworking the same subject based on a compositional template. This template informed all of his art and included a three-part vertical structure; the projection of his male point of view into the painting or sculpture; and the near-universal inclusion of the female form, which was paired with her redoubled projection onto his work. Krauss identifies these elements throughout de Koonings oeuvre, even in his paintings of highways, boats, and landscapes: Woman is always there. A thought-provoking study by one of Americas greatest art critics, Willem de Kooning Nonstop revolutionizes our understanding of de Kooning and shows us what has always been hiding in plain sight in his work"--Publisher's website.

This unique and beautifully presented book includes almost one hundred prints in all media, from 1991 to the present, with a stress on experimental, collaborative and serial works. William Kentridge's distinctive use of light and shadow and silhouettes, his concern with memory and perspective, and his absorption in literary texts, are all strongly in evidence throughout this book, which provides new insights into the working methods of this prolific artist. Kentridge is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films and theatre and opera productions. He is also an innovative and prolific printmaker; he started his career studying etching at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, and printmaking has remained central to his work ever since. Over the past 25 years, he has produced more than three hundred prints - etchings, engravings, aquatints, silkscreens, linocuts and lithographs - often experimenting with challenging formats and combinations of printing techniques to create highly-worked, intensely atmospheric imagery. Kentridge is producing 40 new prints for the accompanying exhibition some of which will be illustrated in this book. His prints range in scale from intimate etchings and drypoints to linocuts on rice paper and canvas measuring 2.5 metres high. Also featured is Portage (2000), an accordion-folded multi-panelled book, 4 metres long, with torn paper silhouetted figures dancing across unbound pages of the French encyclopedia Le Nouveau Larousse Illustre. The procession is one of Kentridge's great themes, ultimately a symbol of humanity's journey through life.