Joyce Henri Robinson - Böcker

A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) was one of the most prolific and important artists of nineteenth-century France. He played a leading role in shaping the new realism brought to the portrayal of everyday life, but he is now best known for the thousands of caricatures he published in magazines and newspapers such as Le Charivari, a daily with satirical articles and a wide circulation. Musical Notes by Honoré Daumier, which accompanied an exhibition of prints from the Collection of Egon and Belle Gartenberg, focuses on Daumier's vivid records of the musical life of Paris. Although not himself a musician, Daumier had a keen interest in the amateur practice of the art as well as in grand opera and the celebrated performers and composers of his day.Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Gioacchino Rossini, and Niccolò Paganini are among the "greats" lampooned in the lithographs in Musical Notes by Honoré Daumier. Other prints offer satirical glimpses into the music making of everyday Parisians—from squawking clarinets to flirtatious piano teachers and straining tenors. In these lithographs, as in most of the prints Daumier produced during his long career, he discloses the foibles and follies of a society facing rapid changes in its cultural norms.

In his book A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes attempted to theorize the language used by lovers to describe each other. It is arguably a text about loneliness, suggesting that even romantic language confesses the distance that always exists between people—if we could achieve perfect unity with others, language would not be necessary. This book is about how "couples" discourse—about the ways in which artists cope with the social connections and practicalities of being artists in a couple. It is about the commonalities as well as the differences, the intimacies as well as the public articulations—in other words, the negotiations that are required in any relationship.It might be a truism to say that the very notion of "the couple" is undergoing significant transformation at the moment. Legal changes now allow many same-sex marriages in the United States, even as increasing numbers of people both gay and straight choose to enjoy unions and family structures beyond such conventional forms. Now is, of course, the perfect time to investigate more carefully the ways in which artists construct and articulate their position as "couples."Co-curated by Joyce Henri Robinson, curator, and Micaela Amato, professor of art and women's studies, Penn State, Couples Discourse features work by twenty-one artist-couples including Eleanor and David Antin, Nene Humphrey and Benny Andrews, Patricia Cronin and Deborah Kass, Joyce and Max Kozloff, Helen and Brice Marden, Gladys Nilsson and Jim Nutt, Julie Burleigh and Catherine Opie, Roy Dowell and Lari Pittman, Sylvia Plimack Mangold and Robert Mangold, Lisa Sigal and Byron Kim, Nancy Spero (recently widowed), Deborah Willis (recently divorced), and Betty and George Woodman.

Patrons and collectors Barbara and James Palmer have long played a vital role in the museum that bears their name. A Gift from the Heart: American Art from the Collection of James and Barbara Palmer documents in its entirety what is arguably one of the finest private collections of American art in the country. Amassed over more than three decades, the collection features notable works by well-known nineteenth-century artists and boasts strengths in Ashcan realism and Stieglitz-circle modernism, as well as works by noted artists of the mid- to late twentieth century.Much of the book comprises thematic essays written by invited scholars—university professors, museum and gallery professionals, and independent curators—who consider the broader sociohistorical context of American art and culture as they delve into the particulars of the collection. Interspersed throughout the book are a series of short “In Focus” essays, highlighting a number of the most notable works in the collection. The remainder of the book is an extensive, fully illustrated catalogue of the 200+ paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and ceramics collected by the Palmers, including works that have already been donated to the museum and the remaining works, all of which will be gifted in the future. Aside from the editor, the contributors are Robert Cozzolino, John Driscol, Randall R. Griffey, Molly S. Hutton, Lauren Lessing, G. Daniel Massad, Leo G. Mazow, Patrick J. McGrady, Jan Keene Muhlert, Marshall N. Price, Sarah Rich, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner.

A Small Radius of Light maps the territory artist G. Daniel Massad has explored for almost four decades. After earning degrees in English at Princeton and the University of Chicago and working for a time as a psychotherapist, Massad made the decision to pursue graduate work in painting in 1979. Two years later, while working on his MFA at the University of Kansas, Massad made an unexpected shift from abstraction to still life, and from oil to pastel as a painting medium. His abandonment of painterly gesture for knife-edge precisionism led him in the late 1980s to the painstaking reenactment of minute detail in order to express, as he puts it, “the way I encounter the world.” Since 1990, still life’s traditional tabletop and its implied interior space have given way in his work to less easily definable architectural fragments of brick or stone; the darkness surrounding these broken walls and cairns is deep, immeasurable, and richly potent. Over the last two decades, Massad has moved past description and metaphor, layering into his images other kinds of data—maps, words, numbers, constellations, personal symbols—all of which suggest readings of his remarkable still lifes as aniconic portraiture, implied narrative, and visual autobiography. This book accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art and features a comprehensive essay by curator Joyce Henri Robinson and forty-three “backstories” by the artist. These memoir-like reflections invite us to peer into Massad’s artistic, emotional, and mental process as he moves from making the intangible tangible, revealing along the way sources and associations that precede the final reenactment of the world around him—a world brought into focus by a small radius of light.