Jonathan Fineberg – författare

Back in print in an expanded edition, this richly illustrated survey of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s entire career is timed to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their acclaimed Gates project  Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne‑Claude’s (1935–2009) landscape-scaled, outdoor projects were astounding temporary works of art in public settings that captured headlines across the globe. For sixteen days in February of 2005, their most celebrated installation, The Gates—7,500 saffron‑colored fabric panels suspended from the tops of vinyl gates—stood along 23 miles of walkways in New York City’s Central Park.  This book celebrates the twentieth anniversary of The Gates with photographs of their installation alongside reproductions of the preparatory drawings that Christo created as he planned the project. An essay by Jonathan Fineberg surveys the career of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their life journey through projects such as Surrounded Islands in Miami, The Umbrellas in Japan and California, Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, and many more. This expanded edition also includes an epilogue that considers the artists’ works after The Gates—including Floating Piers in Italy and L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped in Paris—and a 2017 interview Fineberg conducted with Christo, one of the artist’s last.  This new edition is published on the occasion of two documentation exhibitions, curated by the artists in their lifetimes and presented to the public as the artists wanted them to be seen.  Exhibition Schedule:  Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Gates and Unrealized Projects for New York CityThe Shed, New York(February 12–March 23, 2025)  Surrounded Islands Documentation ExhibitionNSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale(Opens February 23, 2025)

In his last and most overarching essay on the subject, Rudolf Arnheim encourages us to see the range of individuality in children's drawings and to recognize the child's creation of 'significant form' as a way of bringing coherence to his or her experience of the world. This groundbreaking book brings together distinguished critics and scholars, including Rudolf Arnheim, to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented history. The contributors address central questions of how children use art to make sense of their experience and what really constitutes visual 'giftedness' in children. They also cover such topics as visual thinking, the influence of popular culture on children's drawings, giftedness versus education in children's drawings, process, and social interaction in drawing. Created to accompany an exhibition on children's drawings, "When We Were Young" features a stunning full-color gallery of drawings both by famous artists such as Ingres, Van Gogh, Picasso, Miro, and Klee when they were children and by extraordinary 'ordinary' children.An annotated chronology, with synopses and more than a thousand scholarly notes, offers a comprehensive survey of the literature and history of child art from the thirteenth century to the present. It includes essays by Rudolf Arnheim, Jonathan Fineberg, Misty S. Houston, Olga Ivashkevich, Christine Marme Thompson, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner.

This book brings together thirteen distinguished critics and scholars to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented influence on the evolution of modern art. It shows that children's art and childhood have inspired major works of art, served as central metaphors for artistic spontaneity and honesty, and provided a window into the fundamental human qualities explored by modern artists. The volume complements editor Jonathan Fineberg's groundbreaking new book, The Innocent Eye (Princeton, 1997), in which he showed how many of the greatest masters of modern art collected and were directly influenced by children's drawings. Contributors here both expand on Fineberg's themes and take the study of children's art in new directions. They examine, for example, the influence of child art on such artists as Kandinsky, Klee, Larionov, and Miro; the diverse styles of children's art; the influence of Romantic ideas on perceptions of children's art; the conception of giftedness versus education in children's drawings; and the relationship between children's art and primitivism.The book offers unique glimpses into the working processes of great modern artists, presenting, for example, Dora Vallier's personal recollections of Miro and his creative process, and new documentation about the works of the Russian avant-garde. The essays draw on art theory, psychology, and the close study of individual works of art and written texts. Discovering Child Art will appeal to a wide range of readers, including art historians, psychologists, and art educators. Contributors to the book are Troels Andersen, Rudolf Arnheim, John Carlin, Marcel Franciscono, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Green, Josef Helfenstein, Werner Hofmann, Yuri Molok, G. G. Pospelov, Richard Shiff, Dora Vallier, and Barbara Wurwag.

The first major monograph on Zhang Xiaogang (b. 1958), a leading Chinese contemporary artist, world-renowned for his haunting, surrealist works. Both a retrospective of his paintings and a biography of his dramatic life, Zhang Xiaogang: Disquieting Memories is a key resource for academia and art enthusiasts alike.This book features all of the artist's iconic series - major works as well as lesser-known drawings - and never-before-published letters dating from the early 1980s between the artist and his friends. These offer an inside view of everyday life in China, historic and political events, as well as invaluable insight into Zhang's artistic practice. With a chronology illustrated with personal photographs from the artist's archive, this is the most comprehensive account of the artist's life and work.

Human beings have made images continuously for more than thirty thousand years. The oldest known cave paintings are between six and ten times older than the first forms of written language. Images help us organize our thoughts and represent them in our memory. We make images, Jonathan Fineberg argues, because we need them to aid not only in structuring our social and psychological self-conceptions but also in developing the circuitry of our brains.Modern Art at the Border of Mind and Brain is a broad investigation by one of the foremost scholars of modern art of the relationship between modern art and the structure of the mind and brain. Based on Fineberg's Presidential Lectures at the University of Nebraska, his book examines the relationship between artistic production, neuroscience, and the way we make meaning in form. Drawing on the art of Robert Motherwell, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Christo, Jean Dubuffet, and others, Fineberg helps us understand the visual unconscious, the limits of language, and the political impact of art. Throughout, he works from the conviction that looking is a form of thinking that has a profound impact on the structure of the mind.

Alice Aycock (b. 1946) emerged onto the New York art scene in the 1970s and is best known for her large-scale public sculptures that often combine an industrial appearance with references to weightlessness as well as to science and cosmology. Aycock also has embraced the practice of drawing throughout her enormously productive career. Alice Aycock: Drawings is the first exploration of her spectacular drawings, which include elements of mirage, fantasy, and science, and evoke both abstract thinking and bodily sensation. The works on paper featured in this handsome volume highlight the major themes that have governed her artistic practice: the role of architecture as a founding point of reference; the importance of mechanics and structure; and references to nature. As author Jonathan Fineberg demonstrates, Aycock is an artist who thinks on paper. Her works are often equal parts engineering plan and science fiction imagining. Visualizing such contradictions allows us to, in her words, transport ourselves “farther into another place.”Distributed for the Parrish Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Grey Art Gallery, New York University(04/21/13–07/13/13)Parrish Art Museum(04/21/13–07/14/13)Santa Barbara Museum of Art(01/25/14–04/19/14)University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara(01/25/14–04/19/14)