James Crump – författare

Breuer's Bohemia explores a vibrant period of midcentury modern design and culture as seen through the influential New England houses designed by Marcel Breuer for his circle of clients and friendsThe iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which is often overshadowed by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his large-scale projects.Breuer’s Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in Connecticut and Massachusetts from the 1950s through the ’70s, many of which were commissioned by a few culturally progressive clients - chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin - who coalesced around him into a dynamic social circle. Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Philip Roth, and William Styron, and more, marking a unique intersection of postwar architecture, art, and letters.The publication of Breuer’s Bohemia coincides with the feature-length documentary of the same name by author and filmmaker James Crump, exploring Breuer’s explosive residential practice on the East Coast.Through original research and interviews, the voices of principal characters from Breuer’s circle and notable figures from the field of architecture help tell the story of Breuer’s collaborations with his friends and clients, breathing new life into the history of the rich cultural atmosphere of which they all played a vital part.Heavily illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs as well as rarely seen archival materials, Breuer’s Bohemia is a unique glimpse of a twentieth-century milieu that produced an aesthetic, intellectual, and sometimes sybaritic community during a fertile period of American design and culture.

Lauded by photographers, artists, and critics for his influence on the contemporary generation of art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for over thirty-five years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture, and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. James Welling: Monograph will provide the most thorough presentation of the artist’s work to date, as well as offer an indispensible resource for those interested in this artist’s remarkable, foundational practice. Since the mid-1970s, Welling’s work has fluidly explored a mercurial set of issues and ideas: the tenets of realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. To date, the artist has been the subject of numerous catalogs addressing his more than twenty-five different bodies of work—Welling’s “substantive investigation of the spectrum of abstract to figurative,” as one curator has described it. Yet no book has appeared with the ambition of linking these bodies of work together by examining the primary threads that run through them all. That is, until now. Sumptuously produced, James Welling: Monograph, presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, comingled with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades. Chief curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum, James Crump, working closely with the artist, contributes an extensive introductory essay, and the volume will also include text contributions by Mark Godfrey, Thomas Seelig, and an interview with Eva Respini, associate curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA.