Elisabeth Sussman – författare

For more than 30 years, Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner have devoted themselves to contemporary art, and through their passion and acumen have assembled an extraordinary collection. This handsomely illustrated volume is the first to document the collection of Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, more than 850 artworks in all media that have been promised to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Artists represented include Lee Friedlander, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Ryan Gander, and Bernadette Corporation, among others, and the works span from the 1950s to 2014.  Over 300 highlights illustrate the collectors’ commitment to acquiring works that challenge, excite, confound, and amuse. Essays offer context for understanding the importance of the works as a group and illuminate the art world milieus in which the collectors immersed themselves. The book also includes an engaging interview with the collectors, providing a personal perspective on contemporary art acquisition. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art(11/20/15–03/06/16)Centre Pompidou, Paris06/16/16–01/2017

The first comprehensive overview of an influential American photographer and filmmaker whose work is known for its intimacy and social engagementComing of age in the 1960s, the photographer Danny Lyon (b. 1942) distinguished himself with work that emphasized intimate social engagement. In 1962 Lyon traveled to the segregated South to photograph the civil rights movement. Subsequent projects on biker culture, the demolition and redevelopment of lower Manhattan, and the Texas prison system, and more recently on the Occupy movement and the vanishing culture in China’s booming Shanxi Province, share Lyon’s signature immersive approach and his commitment to social and political issues that concern those on the margins of society. Lyon’s photography is paralleled by his work as a filmmaker and a writer.  Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is the first in-depth examination of this leading figure in American photography and film, and the first publication to present his influential bodies of work in all media in their full context. Lead essayists Julian Cox and Elisabeth Sussman provide an account of Lyon’s five-decade career. Alexander Nemerov writes about Lyon’s work in Knoxville, Tennessee; Ed Halter assesses the artist’s films; Danica Willard Sachs evaluates his photomontages; and Julian Cox interviews Alan Rinzler about his role in publishing Lyon’s earliest works. With extensive back matter and illustrations, this publication will be the most comprehensive account of this influential artist’s work.Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San FranciscoExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art(06/17/16–09/25/16)de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco(11/05/16–03/12/17)Fotomuseum Winterthur(05/20/17–08/27/17)C/O Berlin Foundation(09/15/17–12/10/17)

“The work of the sculptor Rachel Harrison is both the zeitgeist and the least digestible in contemporary art. It may also be the most important, owing to an originality that breaks a prevalent spell in an art world of recycled genres, styles, and ideas.”—Peter Schjeldahl, The New YorkerIn her sculptures, room-sized installations, drawings, photographs, and artist’s books, Rachel Harrison (b. 1966) delves into themes of celebrity culture, pop psychology, history, and politics. This publication, created in close collaboration with the artist, explores twenty-five years of her practice and is the first comprehensive monograph on Harrison in nearly a decade. Its centerpiece is an in-depth plate section, which doubles as a chronology of Harrison’s major works, series, and exhibitions. Objects are illustrated with multiple views and details, and accompanied by short texts. This thorough approach elucidates Harrison’s complicated, eclectic oeuvre—in which she integrates found materials with handmade sculptural elements, upends traditions of museum display, and injects quotidian objects with a sense of strangeness. Six accompanying essays cover Harrison’s earliest works to her most recent output. The book also includes a handful of photo-collages that the artist created specifically for this project. Published here for the first time, these pieces superimpose found images with reproductions of Harrison’s own past work.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York(October 25, 2019–January 12, 2020)

A reevaluation of American art of the 1960s that foregrounds the role of surrealism during a period of social and political upheavalChallenging what we think we know about art of the 1960s, this volume moves beyond the established movements of pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism to shine a light on how American artists created a unique type of surrealism, making works suffused with eroticism, dread, wonder, violence, and liberation. A series of essays reveals how this new surrealism enabled artists to reconnect art to an increasingly untethered reality following the period of rapid postwar transformation and to imagine new worlds and models for art rooted in political and social change.Presenting a new framework to understand the work of artists such as Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Jim Nutt, John Outterbridge, Ralph Arnold, H. C. Westermann, Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Christina Ramberg, and Robert Arneson, this study features an expansive chronology that highlights how a broad group of artists across the United States connected to each other through exhibitions, galleries, and collectives, offering a fresh perspective on how artists in the 1960s harnessed psychoanalysis, wordplay, and assemblage, among other strategies, to create new horizons for subject matter and form that continue to reverberate in American art today.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York(September 24, 2025–January 29, 2026)

The Seventh Dog is a new monograph/photobook by American photographer Danny Lyon. Organised chronologically, this artist's book tells the story of Danny Lyon's 50-year-career as one of America's most original and influential documentary photographers. Groundbreaking as a photobook in itself, Lyon tells this story starting in the present day and going back in time to the beginning of his career in the 1960s when he photographed the American civil rights movement and the Chicago bikeriders. Through text and image – colour and b&w photographs, original photo collages, letters and other ephemera (many published here for the first time), and Lyon's own writings – this is a story of Danny Lyon's personal journey as a photographer - a story about photojournalism, the move from film to digital photography, about Lyon's life and quest as a photographer, and of America.

The seminal work by photographer and artist Roger Ballen, re-released in an expanded edition with never-before-seen images from Ballen's archive.The culmination of nearly 20 years of work, Outland marked Ballen's move from documentary photography into the realms of fiction and propelled him into the international spotlight. Disturbing, exciting and impossible to forget, Ballen's images captured people living on the fringes of South African society. His powerful psychological studies influenced a generation of artists and still resonate today.First published in 2001, Outland is back in print and expanded to include 50 never-before-seen images from Ballen's archive with illuminating new commentary from the artist himself.

Diane Arbus: A Chronology is the closest thing possible to reading a contemporaneous diary by one of the most daring, influential, and controversial artists of the twentieth century. Drawn primarily from Arbus’s extensive correspondence with friends, family, and colleagues; personal notebooks; and other unpublished writings, this eautifully produced volume exposes the private thoughts and motivations of an artist whose astonishing vision derived from the courage to see things as they are and the grace to permit them simply to be. Further rounding out Arbus’s life and work are exhaustively researched footnotes that amplify the entire Chronology. A section at the end of the book provides biographies for fifty-five personalities, family members, friends, and colleagues, from Marvin Israel and Lisette Model to Weegee and August Sander.Describing the Chronology in Art in America, Leo Rubinfien noted that “Arbus … wrote as well as she photographed, and her letters, where she heard each nuance of her words, were gifts to the people who received them. Once one has been introduced to it, the beauty of her spirit permanently changes and deepens one’s understanding of her pictures … ”The texts in Diane Arbus: A Chronology originally appeared in Diane Arbus Revelations. This volume makes this invaluable text available in an accessible, paperback volume for the very first time.