Marquand Books – serie

Chicana painter Judithe Hernández’s subversive female archetypes offer her perspective on the historical and contemporary roles of womenPublished with Riverside Art Museum and The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture.As the fifth and only female member of the art collective Los Four, Judithe Hernández (born 1948) was a figurehead of Chicano/a art in California. She began her artistic career as a muralist in the 1970s, executing commissions for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers Union, and at the Ramona Gardens Housing Project in East Los Angeles. Her paintings and pastel drawings place women against vague, dreamlike backgrounds, clothed in traditional garb or surrounded by animals, gesturing beyond the picture plane while gazing solidly at the viewer. Art historian Margarita Nieto writes that Hernández "speaks of woman hidden in her masks of roles…enhanced by a subconscious precognition of a mythic past." Beyond Myself, Somewhere, I Wait for My Arrival represents the first comprehensive evaluation of Hernández’s 50-year career, and how it has informed Chicano/a artistic practices today.

Retranslating Celan's translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Rimbaud and more reveals new insights on the circularity of languageBorn in Romania into a German-speaking family and recognized as one of the most important postwar poets, Paul Celan (1920–70) is also celebrated for his meticulous German translations of a wide range of works by such luminaries as Dickinson, Mandelstam, Rimbaud, Shakespeare and Ungaretti. Inspired by the close relation between Celan’s work as Überträger, or "transmitter," and his own poetry, Holly Cundiff has retranslated some of these works into English to illuminate the interstices in which we catch a glimpse of Celan’s own perspective. Each selection in The Other Voice is presented in three versions: the poem in its original language, Celan’s translation into German and Cundiff’s translation into English directly from Celan’s translation. This circular process highlights the generative and transformative force of language, which Celan viewed as a means not only of sculpting the world but also of forming new worlds.

A career survey of the Los Angeles portrait artist known for his spontaneous, blunt portrayalsPublished with The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.Over the past seven decades, Santa Monica–based artist Don Bachardy (born 1934) has created thousands of visceral, compelling portraits from life. Many of these poignant renderings are of Bachardy's longtime partner, the writer Christopher Isherwood. Other subjects include such famous figures as Bette Davis, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin and David Hockney. This lavishly illustrated volume accompanies the Huntington’s landmark exhibition, which explores the range and depth of Bachardy’s practice. Essays by art critics, biographers and some of Bachardy’s subjects offer fresh perspectives on the work of this inventive artist, setting him in context within a vibrant community of Los Angeles artists, actors, writers and intellectuals. The career survey is filled with evocative portraits and photos from Bachardy’s personal collection, loans from private collections and objects from the Huntington’s extensive collection of Bachardy’s work and Isherwood’s papers.

A long-overdue retrospective dedicated to the 70-year career of Washington Color School pioneer Paul ReedPublished with Oklahoma City Museum of Art.One of the original six members of the Washington Color School, Paul Reed (1919–2015) has often been overlooked in favor of his colleagues Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. This retrospective shines a light on Reed's extraordinary seven-decade career spanning paintings, sculptures, photography and even computer-generated images.

Lasker's postmodern abstraction meets the Frye collection's turn-of-the-century representationPublished with Frye Art Museum.Since the late 1970s, American painter Jonathan Lasker (born 1948) has cultivated a distinct formal vocabulary of structural grids, graphic scribbled lines and thick impasto strokes of paint. Lasker employs the familiar tools of representational painting—figure and ground, space and perspective—to destabilize its dividing line with abstraction. In keeping with Lasker's line of formal inquiry, this compact volume presents an unlikely yet productive pairing: a selection of the artist's large canvases intermingled with the Frye Art Museum's collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century paintings. Embedded within the museum's salon, Lasker's compositions open unexpected conversations across time, style and painterly intent. The publication includes photographs of the exhibition, as well as a foreword by collector Judy Greenstein, an essay by director Jamilee Lacy that discusses the exhibition in the context of Lasker's overall practice, and an interview between the artist and Lacy.