Art Curatorship Books

Salon to Biennial: Volume 1

Bruce Altshuler

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SALON TO BIENNIAL explores the development of modern art as shown through a series of highly influential group exhibitions. It is the most important reference book available on the subject, and the only book available that charts these groundbreaking events in such detail and scope. Volume I opens with the revolutionary first Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863, and concludes with the multi-locational international exhibition 'The New American Painting,' organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1958-59. SALON TO BIENNIAL depicts a wealth of rare documentary material and ephemera, including installation photographs, publications, and reviews of the period surrounding each exhibition. It is an exceptional sourcebook for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century art, exhibition design, or curatorial practice.

Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space

Brian O'Doherty, Thomas McEvilley

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When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translatedthe three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others. O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar.

A Brief History of Curating

Lucy Lippard

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Part of JRP|Ringer's innovative Documents series, published with Les Presses du Reel and dedicated to critical writings, this publication comprises a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist mapping the development of the curatorial field--from early independent curators in the 1960s and 70s and the experimental institutional programs developed in Europe and the U.S. through the inception of Documenta and the various biennales and fairs--with pioneering curators Anne D'Harnoncourt, Werner Hoffman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten and Harald Szeemann. Speaking of Szeemann on the occasion of this legendary curator's death in 2005, critic Aaron Schuster summed up, "the image we have of the curator today: the curator-as-artist, a roaming, freelance designer of exhibitions, or in his own witty formulation, a 'spiritual guest worker'... If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice--itself defined by selection and arrangement--would come to be seen as an art that operates on the field of art itself?"

Henry F. du Pont and Winterthur: A Daughter`s Portrait

Ruth Lord

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Henry F. du Pont, or Harry, as he was commonly known, was something of a pack rat. Luckily, he had exacting taste and meticulously documented his vast collection of antiques, furniture, and beautiful things. The son of the wealthy senator and Civil War hero Henry Algernon du Pont, Harry spent his early years floundering around in school, struggling both with academics and athletics, and found few, if any, pursuits at which he excelled. After graduating from Harvard with a less-than-stellar academic record, Harry moved back home to Delaware. There, for lack of anything better to do, he began to manage the family's vast estate, which included sprawling gardens and even bigger cattle farms.

Soon du Pont found his métier. He and his wife established four majestic homes--one each in Manhattan; Southampton; Boca Grande, Florida; and, most famously, Winterthur, Delaware--which they filled with their ever-expanding collection of antiques, art, carpets, and sundry knickknacks. Du Pont took immense pleasure in every detail of domestic life--carrying on a decades-long correspondence with a linens purveyor, for example, in which the two discussed every possible minutia of stitching and quilting, and carefully overseeing the choice of flowers, china, and even doilies for household luncheons.

In 1931, du Pont decided to share his passion with the public and dedicated his beloved Winterthur as a museum. After doubling its size to house all of its holdings, the museum opened in 1951. Du Pont did not stop there. He chaired the committee to save the Cooper Union Museum (now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design) and helped Jacqueline Kennedy redecorate the White House. This affectionate biography, written by the du Ponts' daughter, Ruth, offers an intimate view of one of the century's great cultural philanthropists. --Anna Baldwin

Exhibits for the Small Museum: A Handbook (American Association for State and Local History Book Series)

Arminta Neal

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Film Curatorship: Museums, Curatorship and the Moving Image

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The Dragon's Trail: The Biography of Raphael's Masterpiece

Joanna Pitman

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Raphael's St. George and the Dragon is the work of a genius -- an exquisitely rendered vision of heroism and innocence by one of the greatest painters of all time. Yet the painting's creation is only the beginning of its fascinating story, which spans centuries of power play and intrigue, and has made it a witness to the rise and fall of the great powers of the Western world as it seduced its owners to ever greater heights of corruption and greed.

Raphael's masterpiece was commissioned by Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the ruler of Urbino, in 1506. Raphael was only twenty-three years old, but he had already begun to acquire a reputation as a painter who was as ruthless in his pursuit of money as he was talented. The duke sent the painting to England's King Henry VII as a thank-you for naming him a knight in the Order of the Garter.

The painting then mysteriously disappeared for one hundred years until King Charles I saw it hanging in the collection of the Earl of Pembroke and acquired it for a book of Holbein drawings. After Charles was beheaded in 1649, his collection was broken up and the painting made its way to the private gallery of the third-richest man in France, where it was ensconced in its own special room. Thirty years later, the philosopher Diderot was instructed by Catherine the Great of Russia to buy it for her vast collection at the Hermitage.

The heroic curators of the Hermitage protected St. George and the Dragon from fire, water, and the anarchists of the Russian Revolution, until Joseph Stalin sold it in 1930 to raise cash. The secret buyer was Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary of the United States, who in doing so blatantly violated a U.S. sanction against doing any business with Soviet Russia. Mellon eventually founded The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where St. George and the Dragon rests to this day.

Exceptionally written and breathlessly paced, The Dragon's Trail is a microhistory that touches on the rise of the Tudors, the downfall of a Stuart, the twilight of the French aristocracy, the terrors of the Bolshevik revolution, and the depths of the Cold War -- all witnessed by one painting that inspired the best and the worst instincts in its owners.

EXHIBITIONS MUSEUMS PB (Leicester Museum Studies Series)

Belcher M

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Landscape with Smokestacks: The Case of the Allegedly Plundered Degas

Howard J. Trienens, Scott J. Stone

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Against a background of controversy over the possibility that works of art owned by American collectors may have originally been stolen by the Nazis from Jews later killed in the holocaust, the story of one work of art "Landscape with Smokestacks" by Degas captured the headlines. As told by the media, the story is straightforward. The landscape, owned by Jewish banker in the Netherlands, was sent to Paris in 1939. The Nazis occupied France and stole the Landscape. The Jewish banker and his wife were killed in the Holocaust. Their heirs searched for the landscape but did not locate it until, half a century later, it was found in the possession of an art collector in Chicago. The heirs sued to recover the work. But the real story is far more complicated than that told by the media. Had the landscape been sent to Paris for safekeeping or to be sold? Was the work stolen by the nazis or sold to an art dealer during the war? During the litigation a mass of documents was produced that shed light on the fate of the landscape. But because the suit was settled before trial, the story under the surface of the media headlines has not been publicly presented. Trienens, a lawyer for the defendant collector, tells the story of this Degas work's travels rom its prewar home in the Netherlands to the Art Institute of Chicago where it is now on display. This book demonstrates the unpredictable complexity of Holocaust-related restitution cases, and challenges the performance of the media in their superficial tratment of this emotionally charged story.