The Metropolitan Museum of Art
By Luke Syson, Sheena Wagstaff, Emerson Bowyer, and Brinda Kumar
320 pages
Since the dawn of history, humans have created three-dimensional renderings of the body, and for centuries artists strove for realism, often creating works of stunning verisimilitude and using color to enhance religious, cultural, or personal meaning. This volume examines key sculptural works from 14th century Europe to the global present, revealing new insights into the strategies artists deploy to blur the distinction between art and life.
Featuring works created in traditional media such as wood and marble as well as the unexpected such as human hair, rope, and blood, Like Life presents objects both familiar and shocking, including effigies, dolls, mannequins, automata, waxworks, and anatomical models. Insightful essays by both art historians and contemporary artists consider works by artists ranging from Donatello and Degas to Picasso, Kiki Smith, and Jeff Koons, culminating in a vivid and provocative exploration of three-dimensional representations of the human body.
Exhibition review in The New Yorker.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
By Iria Candela
208 pages
Lygia Pape (1927–2004) was one of the most acclaimed and influential Brazilian artists of the twentieth century. A prominent member of a generation of artists who embraced the optimistic spirit of postwar Brazil, she is particularly known for her participation in the experimental art movement Neoconcretism. Beyond that, Pape engaged with a wide range of media, constantly experimenting in a quest to confront the canonical and discover unexplored territories in modern art.
The John Yeon Center for Architecture, University of Oregon
By Randy Gragg
240 pages
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Quest for Beauty: John Yeon's Eye for Art, Architecture, and the Oregon Landscape at the Portland Art Museum. John Yeon (1910-1994) is a pioneering figure in the Northwest Regional style of modernism. Known for a series of exceptionally beautiful houses, Yeon's architecture was celebrated for its subtle relationship to site and place, and its sensitive deployment of local materials. His far-reaching innovations in construction and early sustainable design, and his stylistic freedom, anticipated several later movements, ranging from ecological modernism to postmodern eclecticism. Yeon's was also a planner, conservationist, art collector, historic preservationist, urban activist, and perhaps most of all, a connoisseur.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
By Bernice Scharlach
368 pages
Born with an unshakeable belief that she was destined for greatness, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (1881–1968) rose from poverty to become one of San Francisco’s most powerful women. Alma’s humble beginnings and scandalous lifestyle would alienate her from the cream of San Francisco society: she became an artists’ model, befriended European royalty, married sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels, lived in the grandest mansion in San Francisco. Big Alma celebrates the woman who brought a magnificent collection of Rodin’s works to America and built the California Palace of the Legion of Honor to hold them.
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
234 pages
Referencing the moment when Lewis and Clark "turned back" and returned to the east coast, Turning Back retraces a modern day path from the Oregon beaches through the now-ravaged forests to the plains of eastern Oregon.
Catherine Mills is a rarity among
designers—she sees her job as primarily collaborative (rather than directorial).
This allows her a flexibility that seems
to me to be, when it is combined with her abundant creative imagination and unfailing courtesy and years of professional experience, the key to her success.
ROBERT ADAMS, Photographer
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
Essay by David Anfam, statement by Brice Marden
88 pages
Brice Marden: Ru Ware, Marbles, Polke features three suites of recent paintings on linen and marble. The book's title attests to the breadth of Marden's inspirations: ancient Chinese pottery, coarse Greek marble, and the late German artist Sigmar Polke. Includes a 2012 statement written by the artist — an extended meditation on geometry, color, and proportion.
Merlin Press, Santa Fe
144 pages
From visits to this Himalayan kingdom totaling seven months from 1999 to 2005, Mary Peck's fifty-six black-and-white photographs command attention and allow the reader to look at the landscapes, people, ceremonies, and architecture as if witnessed firsthand.
Merlin Press, Santa Fe
64 pages
The Everglades is singular and sublime. Nothing remotely matches it. Once a continuous sheet of water covering the southern half of the Florida peninsula, less than half the original Everglades survived development. Now diminished and relatively desiccated, the Everglades persists, in the vivid words of author William deBuys, as a kind of inundated Kansas of water, grass, and muck, ending in the dense mangrove forests that edge the sea. Peck’s photographs combine with deBuys’s account of the natural and political history of the Everglades to underline the tension between awe at the power of our experience in wild places today and the knowledge that those very places are being lost.
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
126 pages, 106 pages respectively
Over the past decade the renowned photographer Robert Adams has turned his attention to the woods and shores near his home on the Oregon coast. Sea Stories is a sequence of three visual narratives that follow Adams and his wife, Kerstin, as they walk among alder and maple trees, along the beach to observe the annual migration of shorebirds, and back eastward through meadows and what remains of the inland forest.
In This Day, Robert Adams observes two kinds of landscapes, those inside his home, and those outside his window and beyond. The windswept headlands, beach grasses, and felled trees seen by the photographer on his walks are animated by an atmospheric light. Together, these pictures reveal the undeniable presence of the sublime in everyday life.
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
222 pages
A comprehensive overview of the work of the most important American photographer of the nineteenth century, Carleton E. Watkins.
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
144 pages
Family comprises hundreds of pictures of Lee, his wife Maria, their children Anna and Erik, and their grandchildren. The subjects are unaffected by Friedlander's ubiquitous camera and the images show family life at its most essential.
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
232 pages
The Eye Club, unofficially founded around 1975, was the nickname given to the loose conglomeration of individuals who found themselves among the first new collectors of photography. These few dozen people shared a distaste for established pantheons and veered instead toward the lesser-known, the anonymous, the outré, or any photograph emanating sparks of electricity.
Assembled in a related spirit of adventure, the images in The Eye Club weave back and forth through the history of photography to reveal little-known images by some of the medium’s most influential artists.
Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
82 pages
Lee Friedlander has documented a lifetime in photographs, creating a vast and diverse body of work that has left an indelible imprint on the medium he helped to establish. Among his most important subjects—once at the beginning of his career, and now thirty years later—is himself. With the photographic cornerstone of a monograph, Self-Portrait—originally published in 1970—Friedlander created an archetype for self-imaging. Three decades later Friedlander re-acquaints himself with the far side of the camera.
Alec Soth, together with CommonBond Communities, produced this limited edition book about the importance of secure and affordable housing. Soth's sensitive photographs feature residents of CommonBond's housing initiatives. The edition featured wallpaper over boards in three color ways.
By Douglas R. Nickel
96 pages
When the Kodak #1 camera found its way into the hands of millions of amateur photographers, quotidian life became documented for the first time. Here we can see life through the eyes of our fellow photographers and note the similarities and differences in what we choose to record.
