Susan Dackerman – författare

The first comprehensive overview of Jasper Johns’s work in an innovative medium that the artist has singlehandedly redefined over the course of four decadesJasper Johns (b. 1930) is arguably the most important living American artist, and his work is central to any history of postwar art. With extensive new scholarship based on original research and interviews with the artist, Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Monotypes provides the definitive account of his groundbreaking work in an intrinsically subversive medium situated between painting, drawing, and printmaking.  Susan Dackerman and Jennifer L. Roberts examine Johns’s innovative use of the printing press to create alterity, overturning monotype’s long-standing reputation for subjectivity. Featured in this volume are all 143 monotypes Johns made between 1954 and June 2015, most of them published here for the first time. Each work is generously illustrated in color and accompanied by complete cataloguing information, including technical specifications, provenance, exhibition history, and bibliographic references.

An important new examination of Islamic themes in the art of Albrecht DürerAlbrecht Dürer’s depictions of Muslim figures and subjects are considered by many to be among his most perplexing images. This confusion arises from the assumption that the artist and his northern European contemporaries regarded the Muslim Levant as an exotic faraway land inhabited by hostile adversaries, not a region of neighboring empires affiliated through political and mercantile networks. Susan Dackerman casts Dürer’s art in an entirely new light, focusing on prints that portray cooperation between the Muslim and Christian worlds rather than conflict and war, enabling us to better understand early modern Europe through its visual culture.In this beautifully illustrated book, Dackerman provides new readings of three of the artist’s most enigmatic print projects—Sea Monster, Knots, and Landscape with Cannon—situating them within historical contexts that reflect productive collaborations between Christendom and Islam, from the artistic and commercial to the ideological and political. Dackerman notes how Gutenberg’s development of printing shares an inextricable relationship to the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople. While Gutenberg’s workshop produced a call to crusade and other publications antagonistic to the Muslim East, Dürer’s prints, she shows, instead emphasize instances of affiliation between Christendom and Islam.A breathtaking work of scholarship, Dürer’s Knots shows how the artist’s prints of Muslim subjects give expression to the interconnectedness of Christian Europe and the Islamic East.