Not for nothing: booksellers also are called bookhandlers. All books are objects, intimate ones in fact, made to be held and loved. Exhibition catalogs and art books can really bring on the love. They have more room for the imagination and more images (hugely important) and they also invite greater expectations. They rise or fall on cover design and material; proportions and heft; paper stock and fonts; the way images and text combine on the pages — all of which we start to comprehend the moment we take hold of an art book. We expect whole worlds; many deliver. Below, in no particular order, are some art books that I love as objects, and as worlds. – Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 12/14/17
As Roberta Smith so eloquently introduced her favorite new art books, please read on for a curated selection of the new art and design books that inspire us lately.
Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005-2016. By Annie Leibovitz, Introduction by Alexandra Fuller. Released October 25, 2017
Image courtesy of Amazon.com
First, Annie Leibovitz’s new book by Phaidon features iconic portraits presented in tandem with never-before published photographs. Each of the photographs documents contemporary culture with her uncanny ability to personalize even the most recognizable and distinguished figures. One of the great observers of contemporary life, the personalities captured in her work help to shape our memory of this time: from Cate Blanchett to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Gloria Steinem, Meryl Streep, Zaha Hadid, Anna Wintour, Leonard Cohen, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Barack Obama, and Queen Elizabeth II.
Suzanne Lovell Inc. is honored to support the Education and Public Programs at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) through participation in the museum’s premiere Visionary luncheon to be held at the Standard Club on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. Annie Leibovitz will be the featured keynote speaker. For more information on this fantastic event, visit the MCA’s website.
Candida Höfer in Mexico by Uta Uta Grosenick and Herbert Burkert, Release date: December 19, 2016.
Images courtesy of Alemania-Mexico
“I wanted to capture the way people behave in public spaces, and I started photographing theaters, palaces, opera houses, libraries and similar spaces. After a while I realized that what people do in these places – and what spaces do to them- is more evident when no one is present, just as an absent guest is often the topic of conversation.”
“I am not a photographer of architecture; I see my work as portraits of spaces.”—Candida Höfer
In October 2015, in a project developed by Galeria OMR, acclaimed artist and photographer Candida Höfer orchestrated a 3-week shoot across Mexico in which she recorded emblematic spaces of the country: Teatro Degollado, Juarez Theater of Guanajuato, the Church of Santo Domingo, Oaxaca, amongst others, marked by the Dual Year of Mexico and Germany. The result was a travelling exhibition at Mexico City’s Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (April – July 2017), Monterrey’s Centro de las Artes (October through February 2018), Puebla’s Museo Amparo (February through July 2018) and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (October 2018 – January 2019). Certainly the book marks a significant project for the artist that is so poignant in today’s Trumpian era.
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait by Deborah Wye. Release date: September 29, 2017.
Image courtesy of Amazon.com
Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait explores the prints, books, and creative process of the celebrated sculptor Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010). Bourgeois’s printed oeuvre, a little-known aspect of her work, is vast in scope and comprises some 1,200 printed compositions, created primarily in the last two decades of her life but also at the beginning of her career, in the 1940s. The Museum of Modern Art has a prized archive of this material, and the exhibition will highlight works from the collection along with rarely seen loans. A special installation filled the Museum’s Marron Atrium September 2017 through January 28, 2018.
Enjoy here the complete Louise Bourgeois print archive, which will ultimately contain some 5,000 images documenting the complete prints and illustrated books of Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010). Cataloguing is ongoing and works are continually added to the site.
Louise Bourgeois, No 1 of 14 from the installation set “À L’Infini (To Infinity)” (2008), soft ground etching, with selective wiping, watercolor, gouache, and pencil additions. Sheet: 40×60″. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchased with funds provided by Agnes Gund, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, and Katherine Farley and Jerry Speyer, and Richard S. Zeisler Bequest (by exchange) (© 2017 The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, NY)
Image courtesy of Hyperallergic
Most of Bourgeois’s prints were made when she was in her eighties and nineties. “These have been interpreted as evoking spirituality and transcendence. Bourgeois created this particular project when she was 96 and it felt to me like it fit into this general discussion of late artistic styles. Here, she seems to be going back to a primordial state; some see the series as representing the life cycle, from birth to death.” [Deborah Wye, 11/4/2017]
Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of The Art Market in the 21st Century by Georgina Adam, Release date: March 15, 2018.
Image courtesy of Lund Humphries
This book scrutinizes the excesses and extravagances that the 21st-century explosion of the contemporary art market brought in its wake. The buying of art as an investment, temptations to forgery and fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and pressure to produce more and more art all form part of this story, as do the upheavals in auction houses and the impact of the enhanced use of financial instruments on art transactions. Drawing on a series of tenaciously wrought interviews with artists, collectors, lawyers, bankers and convicted artist forgers, the author charts the voracious commodification of artists and art objects, and art’s position in the clandestine puzzle of the highest echelons of global capital. [amazon.com]
Georgina Adam is a journalist and author who has covered the global art market for the last 30 years. She is a contributor to The Financial Times and The Art Newspaper, where she was Art Market Editor from 2000 to 2008. This is the author’s follow-up to her book Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century (Lund Humphries, 2014).
Excerpt from Inside Utopia, published by Gestalten, published May, 2017, featuring Les Lelanne.
Gestalten, a Berlin-based publishing house known for their exquisitely curated books on art and design, both articulates and connects seemingly disparate design trends across time and geography.
Inside Utopia shows the future of living that architects and designers have envisioned. Spectacular and reflective, unpretentious and efficient: the breathtaking Elrod House by John Lautner; the Lagerfeld Apartment near Cannes that seems like a set from a science fiction film; Palais Bulles in France with its organic and unique architecture. These interiors welcome habitation and spark curiosity while embodying the foundations of minimalism and bygone visions of the future. Inside Utopia delves into the rhyme and reason behind past designs that we still interact with today. The architects, the owners, and the craftsmen like Gio Ponti or Bruce Goff who work behind the scenes created amorphous interiors that invite the mind to wander. At the time they were futuristic, confident, utopian, idealistic― we may not realize it, but they have shaped our current living concepts, and even now, they inspire us anew. [amazon]
