Hi Everyone,
Thanks for your continued interest in Art & Artists.
This week I’m excited to recommend a few new books, part of a magazine, and a documentary. I’ll start with the books…
Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973
Annie Cohen-Solal (Translated by Sam Taylor)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 21, 2023)
This new book focuses on Picasso’s extremely conflicted relationship with France, the country that eventually adopted him as its own. From 1901 onwards, French security services labeled Picasso an anarchist and tracked his activities, and even over the next forty years—as he became the leader of a new cubist avant-garde, and was recognized internationally—Picasso’s works were largely excluded from public collections in France. The French police and the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts saw Picasso as having a “triple stigma”—“as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist,” which had significant repercussions for his career that have been largely ignored by French-dominated art history. Read more here.
Internet Art
Omar Kholeif
Phaidon (April 26, 2023)
I wrote about Kholeif in A Year in the Art World and am happy to promote any of his new projects as Kholeif is one of the few peripatetic curators recognized not just for his exhibitions but for his accessible, engaging writing. (In case you’re not familiar with him, Kholeif is known for his expertise in the art of the Middle East and South Asia and “artists of the post-digital condition” and he is currently Director of Collections and Senior Curator of the Sharjah Art Foundation.
While it’s extremely hard to write about art and the Internet, since whatever you write will seem almost instantly outdated (even more than writing about traditional mediums), this survey does an impressive job of both telling the story of this new “mass medium and how it has fostered new possibilities for artists” but also showcasing key artists and innovators in mediums from browser-based projects to NFTs. Read more here.
The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity
Joan Kee
University of California Press (April 18, 2023)
I also have to acknowledge a similar bias with Joan Kee; I will read anything she writes. Kee studied at the Institute of Fine Arts when I was there and was one of the most talented students I knew. (In case you’re not familiar with her, Kee is a Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan. Her 2013 book, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), has been often credited for bringing international attention to Korean abstraction and to postwar Korean art generally.)
I was very excited to learn about Kee’s new book, which promises “a framework for understanding the rich and surprisingly understudied relationship between Black and Asian artists and the worlds they initiate through their work.” Using the model of geometry, The Geometries of Afro Asia uses points, angles, and trajectories to explore “the relationships that formed between Black and Asian artists at critical historical junctures.” It spans the “civil rights struggles in the United States and the development of South Korea amid US military occupation in the 1960s and 1970s to debates over multiculturalism and critiques of globalization in the 1990s and 2010s.” Read more here.
Capturing Nature: 150 Years of Nature Printing
Matthew Zucker and Pia Östlund
Princeton Architectural Press (April 25, 2023)
A bit more in the realm of eye candy than my above picks, Capturing Nature is a “landmark visual exploration of nature printing, featuring 45 different techniques and hundreds of astonishing rare images.” Sourced from Matthew Zucker’s 13,000+ collection of nature prints—impressions taken from the surface of natural objects like leaves, flowers, etc.—spanning from the 18th century to the present, it’s not hard to envision this as a great reference book or inspiration for art-making.
The Brooklyn Rail May 2023 Critic’s Page
Edited by Charlotte Kent
For this month’s Brooklyn Rail, critic Charlotte Kent invited curators and scholars from around the world to contribute their perspectives on the language used for art and technology, for Kent explains:
“When art encounters technology, the language gets brackish as disciplines and histories converge. Just as some people sneer at art’s lingo, misunderstanding its unfamiliarity as obscurantism instead of observing an effort at specificity (let’s presume), so do many art audiences shrink from the terminologies associated with digital art.”
Towards remedying this, Kent used the Rail’s Critic’s Page to create a “symposium on the language of art and technology,” and prompted others in the field to “select a word they would like to never hear again or one they think important for this moment.” For example, Margaret Wertheim discusses “the metaverse”; Magda Sawon writes about neutrality; lawyers Yayoi Shionoiri (my very talented former Artsy colleague), Sarah Conley Odenkirk, and Megan Noh write about touch; and Tina Rivers Ryan considers aesthetics. Read more here.Directed by Suzanne Raes. Distributed by Kino Lorber.
Release Date: May 26, 2023. (1 h 18 min.)
If you’re not able to see the once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum—which, unfortunately, probably includes a lot of us, this great new documentary might make you feel a little better.
Filled with exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage of expert art historians and conservators handling iconic Vermeer works out of their frames—and this I think could just be the whole movie—the film discusses what makes a Vermeer a Vermeer, highlights some important new discoveries in the study of the artist (brought to the fore in the Rijksmuseum show), and explores some of the major issues and debates around some of Vermeer’s most well-known pieces. Close to Vermeer opens May 26 at the Quad Cinema in New York City, and subsequently will be shown nationally.
That’s it for this week. As always, I hope you benefit from these recommendations and see you again soon.
Best,
Matthew
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