Edouard Kopp – författare

A celebration of the stunning collection of artworks donated in honor of the creation of The Menil Drawing InstituteFeaturing outstanding 20th-century drawings promised or bequeathed to the Menil Collection for the opening of the Menil Drawing Institute, this elegant volume is a testament to the growing significance of drawings as stand-alone artworks over the past century. The drawings come from the private collections of well-known connoisseurs Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney, and include works by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Eva Hesse, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. Its chief curator Edouard Kopp profiles the Drawing Institute’s nature and scope, and noted scholars John Elderfield and Richard Shiff discuss historical aspects of drawing, while Terry Winters muses from an artist’s viewpoint.Distributed for the Menil Collection

The extraordinary life of a captivating American artist, beautifully illustrated with his dreamlike drawingsMuch of Joseph Elmer Yoakum’s story comes from the artist himself—and is almost too fantastic to believe. At a young age, Yoakum (1891–1972) traveled the globe with numerous circuses; he later served in a segregated noncombat regiment during World War I before settling in Chicago. There, inspired by a dream, he began his artistic career at age seventy-one, producing some two thousand drawings over a decade. How did Yoakum gain representation in major museum collections in Chicago and New York? What fueled his process, which he described as a “spiritual unfoldment”? This volume delves into the friendships Yoakum forged with the Chicago Imagists that secured his place in art history, explores the religious outlook that may have helped him cope with a racially fractured city, and examines his complicated relationship to African American and Native American identities. With hundreds of beautiful color reproductions of his dreamlike drawings, it offers the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work, illuminating his vivid and imaginative creativity and giving definition and dimension to his remarkable biography.Distributed for the Art Institute of ChicagoExhibition Schedule:The Art Institute of Chicago(June 12–October 18, 2021)Museum of Modern Art, New York(November 28, 2021–March 18, 2022)Menil Collection, Houston(April 22–August 7, 2022)

A New York Times best art book of 2022An A to Z exploration of the Enlightenment’s quest for understanding and change, as revealed in the era’s prints and drawingsAre volcanoes punishment from God? What do a fly and a mulberry have in common? What utopias await in unexplored corners of the earth and beyond? During the Enlightenment, questions like these were brought to life through an astonishing array of prints and drawings, helping shape public opinion and stir political change. Dare to Know overturns common assumptions about the age, using the era’s proliferation of works on paper to tell a more nuanced story. Echoing the structure and sweep of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the book contains 26 thematic essays, organized A to Z, providing an unprecedented perspective on more than 50 artists, including Henry Fuseli, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco Goya, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, William Hogarth, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Giambattista Tiepolo. With a multidisciplinary approach, the book probes developments in the natural sciences, technology, economics, and more—all through the lens of the graphic arts. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums  Exhibition Schedule:Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA(September 16, 2022–January 15, 2023)

A groundbreaking examination of how the act of drawing was a vital component of Ruth Asawa’s multifaceted art “A revelatory exhibition. . . . [A] fine exhibition catalog.”—Nancy Princenthal, New York Times, “Critic’s Pick”  Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), widely known for her looped-wire sculptures, was an inveterate drawer. She filled sketchbook after sketchbook and even stated that drawing was central to her sculpture. This volume is the first to consider the significance of drawing in Asawa’s oeuvre throughout her career, featuring essays that examine the range of Asawa’s aesthetic maneuvers across materials and techniques; how Asawa’s drawing intertwined with the Bay Area arts community and her contributions to public education as a teacher and organizer; and the influence of Josef Albers’s pedagogy and Asawa’s lifelong adoption of his type of paper folding. Tracing Asawa’s artistic journey from her first formal art lessons in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II through her time at Black Mountain College and beyond, this comprehensive overview of the artist’s drawings includes reproductions of more than one hundred works—many of which have never been published—organized into eight thematic sections that cut through time, reflecting an art-making practice that was more circular or cyclical than linear.  Distributed for the Menil Collection and the Whitney Museum of American Art  Exhibition Schedule:  Whitney Museum of American Art, New York(September 16, 2023–January 15, 2024)  The Menil Collection, Houston(March 22–July 21, 2024)

This insightful publication reveals the artistic process and theoretical underpinnings of Beuys’s practiceFor German sculpture and performance artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), drawing was a practiced form of thought with an experimental character on par with verbal and written modes of communication. I Am a Transmitter: The Drawing of Joseph Beuys explores the centrality of drawing to Beuys’s artistic practice and stands as a testament to the growing influence of the preeminent postwar artist’s legacy.Featuring 110 drawings from a collection assembled by the art historian, poet, and Beuys’s confidant Heiner Bastian, this book offers a synoptic cross-section of the artist’s oeuvre through an intimate study of the origins of his practice. Thematic sections elucidating Beuys’s philosophical beliefs and holistic process reveal the broader dimensions and formative quality of his drawings. By illustrating Beuys’s motivating concern—activating forces of nature to set in motion a process of transformation that would break new artistic and social ground—this collection powerfully delineates the wholeness of Beuys’s thinking and design.Distributed for the Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule:Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlung Museum, Dresden(October 23, 2026–January 17, 2027)The Menil Collection, Houston(March 26–July 11, 2027)

The odore Rousseau (1812-1867), arguably the most important French landscape artist of the mid-nineteenth century and a leader of the so-called Barbizon School, occupies a crucial moment of transition from the idealizing effects of academic painting to the radically modern vision of the Impressionists. He was an experimental artist who rejected the traditional historical, biblical, or literary subject matter in favor of "unruly nature," a Romantic naturalism that confounded his contemporaries with its "bizarre" compositional and coloristic innovations. Lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented, this volume includes five essays by experts in the field. Scott Allan and Edouard Kopp alternately examine Rousseau's diverse techniques and working procedures as a painter and as a draftsman, as well as his art's mixed economic and critical fortunes on the art market and at the Salon. Line Clausen Pedersen's essay focuses on Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, an early touchstone for the artist and a spectacular example of the Romantic sublime in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek's collection. This catalogue accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J.Paul Getty Museum from June 21 to September 11, 2016, and at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek from October 13, 2016, to January 8, 2017.

One of the most imaginative and fascinating artists of eighteenth-century France,Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762) was instrumental in the transition from Rococo to Neoclassicism and in the artistic rediscovery of classical antiquity. Much celebrated in his time, Bouchardon created some of the most iconic images of the age of Louis XV. His oeuvre demonstrates a remarkable variety of themes (from copies after the antique to subjects of history and mythology, portraiture, anatomical studies, ornament, fountains and tombs), media (drawings, sculptures, medals, prints), and techniques (chalk, plaster, wax, terracotta, marble, bronze).With five essays by experts on Bouchardon's sculpture and graphic arts, more than 140 catalogue entries, and a detailed chronology, this book aims to demonstrate the originality of Bouchardon's art within the cultural and social context of the period, while suggesting the subtle relationship between, as well as the relative autonomy of, the artist's two careers as a sculptor and a draftsman.This lavishly illustrated publication represents anunprecedented and thorough survey on this major andunique artist from the Age of Enlightenment, offering in-depth scholarship based on unpublished material detailingthe subtle relationship between, as well as the relative autonomy of, the artist's two careers as a sculptor and a draftsman.