David Anfam - Böcker

Larry Poons (b. 1937) shot to fame while still in his twenties, on the strength of his “dot paintings,” in which dots or ellipses were meticulously arranged on brightly coloured fields, creating a rhythmic, pulsating effect. But within a few years, Poons first loosened the hard-edged precision of the dot paintings and then abandoned them entirely for an organic mode of abstraction based on vertical drips of flung paint. This marked the beginning of an uncompromising five-decade evolution that has finally led the artist back to a more intimate mode of painting with brushes — and his own hands. At every stage, Poons's career has compelled the attention of critics and, in particular, other artists.This handsome volume, the first full-length biocritical monograph on Poons, reproduces more than 140 of his most important works in full colour, some as spectacular gatefolds. The incisive text — a collaboration between four leading critics and historians — traces the development of the artist’s extraordinary career. Larry Poons is a necessary addition to the library of anyone with an interest in American art.

Clyfford Still (1904-1980) is a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. This revelatory book, accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition, investigates Clyfford Still s late work, both in painting and in drawing, made after his move to rural Maryland in 1961. This marks a particularly fertile period for Still; he made over 375 works on canvas and a staggering 1,100 works on paper in Maryland before his death in 1980 at the age of 75. Given Still s especially reclusive posture later in life and the fact that none of the artworks in Still s estate were exhibited or made available to anyone before the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum in 2011, a full-scale presentation of these forty paintings and thirty works on paper is especially meaningful. In addition to essays by Dean Sobel and David Anfam, the artists Alex Katz and Dorothea Rockburne contribute texts on the notion of late work.

During the early 1950s, Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) created one of the most anomalous bodies of work of his career: graphite drawings on undercoats of blue or ocher painted over a titanium white ground. For an artist known for his love of color and impasto, these predominantly white paintings constituted quite a departure. Twenty-five works were shown at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1955, in an exhibition titled Predominantly White; the artist returned to mine this vein in later paintings in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

The German-born American artist Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) relocated to the United States in 1932 right before the outbreak of World War II. In the midst of wartime insecurity, he opened schools in both New York and Provincetown, immersing himself in America's growing avantgarde art scene. The works Hofmann created at the end of WWII and immediately afterward show angular abstractions and personify the uncertainties of the period. At the same time, this was also the moment that he moved toward the soft, ambiguous forms and gestures that would become the hallmark of the Abstract Expressionist movement—a movement that Hofmann presaged.  Hans Hofmann: FURY presents Hofmann's work from 1942 to 1946. While demonstrating Hofmann's development towards abstraction, the paintings featured here still reveal a representational quality that nods to his figurative beginnings. Linear paintings particularly emphasize this artistic trajectory. Primarily known for his expressive use of bold, often primary colors, Hoffmann here uses a palette of vivid, bright colors, and contrasting dark tones, epitomizing the conflicted postwar feeling. Hans Hofmann: FURY gives particular insight into an essential moment in Hofmann's career—his first solo exhibition in New York in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, which Clement Greenberg considered "a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism."

This book offers a thorough visual biography of the life of Peggy Guggenheim (1898 1979) as collector, through a selection of works from the world-renowned collection she established primarily between 1938 and 1946, and to which she would continue to add for the rest of her life.The selections from her collection, emphasizing lesser-known works, are accompanied by a series of previously unpublished photographs from her life during periods spent living in London, Paris and her native New York, as well as Venice, where she settled with her collection in 1949 and spent her remaining 30 years.Each period of Guggenheim's life is examined through contributions from 13 international scholars and researchers, which, along with the photographs, provide new insights into her colorful and impressive career building one of the world's most significant and widely visited personal art collections.