Portraits Books - Page 6

The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art

Joseph Leo Koerner

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In this groundbreaking and elegantly written study, Joseph Koerner establishes the character of Renaissance art in Germany. Opening up new modes of inquiry for historians of art and early modern Europe, Koerner examines how artists such as Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung Grien reflected in their masterworks the changing status of the self in sixteenth-century Germany.

"[A] dazzling book. . . . He has turned out one of the most powerful, as well as one of the most ambitious, art-historical works of the last decade." --Anthony Grafton, New Republic

"Rich and splendid. . . . Joseph Koerner's book is a dazzling display of scholarship, enfolding Durer's artistic achievement within the broader issues of self and salvation, and like [Durer's] great Self- Portrait it holds up a mirror to the modern fable of identity." -- Bruce Boucher, The Times

"Remarkable and densely argued." --Marcia Pointon, British Journal of Aesthetics

"Herculean and brilliant. . . . Will echo in fields beyond the Sixteenth-Century and Art History." --Larry Silver, Sixteenth Century Journal

"May be the most ambitious of recent American reflections on the mysteries of German art. His elegantly written book deals with the fateful period in the history of German art when it reached its highest point. . . . Offers deeper and more disturbing insights into German Renaissance art than most earlier scholarship." --Willibald Sauerlander, New York Review of Books

Self-Portraits (Taschen Basic Genre Series)

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Editorial Review:

This work in the Basic Genre series features more than 35 photographs, descriptions, and interpretations of the featured works, and a brief biography of the artists.

Young America: Childhood in 19th-Century Art and Culture

Claire Perry

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In an era of both optimism and anxiety about the nation’s future, Americans in the nineteenth century focused attention on the cultivation and education of children as future citizens. Contemporary portrayals of children—in fine paintings, popular prints, illustrated primers, and advertisements—helped to shape cultural expectations: pictures of hardy country boys, intent schoolchildren, and little girls practicing embroidery were examples of the ways model Americans should look and behave. At the same time, images showing street urchins, young slaves, or children at work in factories reflected troubling conflicts in society.

This appealing book explores representations of children in relation to the currents of American culture, including urbanization, immigration, separate spheres of the genders, and the nation’s professed devotion to egalitarianism. A generous selection of illustrations includes well-loved works by such artists as Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, as well as fascinating archival images. With engaging depictions of children from varied economic, racial, and geographic backgrounds, Young America opens a new window on the life and culture of the United States during a century of vast change and growth.

Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Artist Portrait

Martin Friedman

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Editorial Review:

One of the most admired and innovative contemporary artists working today, Chuck Close has pioneered ideas of scale, form, and color through the theme of portraiture, a genre that he has fundamentally redefined. The first book to focus on Close's self-portraits and the portraits he has made of fellow artists, Close Reading is a uniquely intimate portrait of Close's life and work by the former director of the Walker Art Center, Martin Friedman, a longtime friend who has had unprecedented access to the artist.

After covering the biographical details of Close's life-including the sudden illness in 1988 that led to near-complete paralysis, and the degree of recovery that enabled him to continue his painting career-Friedman moves on to a probing examination of Close's self-portraiture. The final section deals with Close's paintings of artist subjects, among them Cindy Sherman, Francesco Clemente, Jasper Johns, and William Wegman. Included here are Close's insightful comments about these works and Friedman's discussions with the artists themselves, which reveal much about Close's accomplishments and issues of self-portraiture in both Close's art and their own.

The Imaginary Portraits Of George Condo

George Condo, Ralph Rugoff

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Excellent series of works by a contemporary master 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book has 126 full-page color illustrations of the work of George Condo. I must say I was amazed by his work. There are several series of paintings presented here in rough chronological order so that the viewer has a sense of the development of the paintings.

One of the first themes is that of the clown face. The clown face is a much over used image in art. In Condo's work, the features become a predominant element in that the eyes, noses and lips are free standing, not integrated into the head structure, but lay on the surface plane of the heads like small eggs or jelly beans glued to larger eggs or balloons. The features are not integrated into the anatomical structure but are free standing objects in their own right, casting shadows on the balloon like heads. This treatment of the features makes them appear to float and thus they become somewhat frightening. They don't give the impression of being harmless. A smile that looks like a red rubber band floating on a large egg shaped head is not really an anatomical smile but a threatening object. The clown image in Condo's hands becomes an ambiguous presence, who may or may not bring harm to the viewer. In "Infantile Memories" the quality of the painting is compelling as the two clowns smile at each other with odd collars of some unknown material.

"Portrait of Monika" is certainly a nightmare on canvas. A pin headed witch with a long neck appears as if she is a tree or stem growing from a large apple rather than a torso. With a dark blue moody sky, it evokes dark and pensive moods. "Witchbulb" is a wonderful painting where it appears that Condo constructed a female like object but the torso and shoulders appear more like an upholstered chair and the neck and head of the witch appear to be a table lamp set upon the back of the chair. It is if a child made a witch from objects in grandmother's living room and then painted the objects, adding additional ambiguity and mystery. Both paintings are very fine.

Condo also explores the features as a complex geometry that may or may not be integrated into the head structure. The geometry is highly compelling as the face is deconstructed and then pieced together loosely like building blocks. "The Tiger" is a superb painting of a dog's face with wonderful highly playful dog ears forming shapes of great playful energy.

Condo is influenced by Picasso and Bacon and explores these influences openly, extracting new lessons from these masters. But as Picasso attempted to deconstruct the human face and then reconstruct it from pieces taken at different angles so that there is confusion as to the planes of the face, Condo mixes it up further, pushes the pieces further, and comes through with two master works that are influenced by Picasso but have moved into new territory. "Untitled, 1999" and "Memories of Picasso, 1989" are fantastic works.

Condo's work amazes with the dark primal un-pretty "Polyphemus" which is as strong a painting as has been painted in the last 20 years. Dark cave-like background gives way to the odd body of Polyphemus with one giant eye upon a stalk staring at the viewer. "Blue Clown", a vulnerable silly elf-like bumpy headed creature in blue is cast against a big black a blue world. Genet and Sartre burst through these images, they are the illustrations of French existentialism from a previous generation.

"Girl with a Pixie" has disorganized the human face to the point of a grid of shapes and colors, bound by a wonderful black shape evoking hair. The quality of the paint is superb, luscious, always showing the mistakes and the backtracking of the artist, revealing the acts of discover that emerge in Condo's work.

The graphic quality of the work and the painterly brushstrokes and the masterful control of offbeat colors reveal Condo to be an artist of the top order. "Expanding Brown Dog" evokes Picasso and every cartoon strip in the 1960s.

"Grey Seated Female Composition" is another painting that is as strong as any painting of the last 20 years.

Condo goes from exploring Picasso to exploring the completely blank face, odd egg like portraits. These are followed by a wonderful series where Condo takes an odd cartoonish face composed of ball like blobs for checks, eyes, nose, etc and rearranges the shapes to reconstruct the concept of the face.

This book is exceptional, a fully developed look into various conceptions explored by Condo, a most talented and excellent modern master.

Editorial Review:

Since the mid-1970s, George Condo has been painting portraits of people inhabiting his imagination. By transposing the techniques of the Italian Renaissance, Spanish Baroque, French Impressionism, Surrealism, 1950s Modernism, and Pop Art, Condo has created an original movement, which he calls Artificial Realism - the realistic representation of that which is artificial. In his first artist's monograph, The Imaginary Portraits of George Condo, the painter showcases an incredible selection of subjects - from Madonnas and Clowns to Metaphysical mannequins and Antipodular Beings - which had previously existed only on the periphery of his consciousness. Condo painted while on the move, and the imaginary characters were made manifest in hotel rooms during his travels throughout Europe. The result is a carnivalesque collection of creatures, the likes of which will most surely surprise, provoke, confuse, and delight.

Matisse Portraits

John Klein

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The devotion of Henri Matisse to the human figure led him to make portraits of many different sitters--members of his family, fellow artists, professionals in other fields, patrons, and various others. At key points in his career, he was also an obsessive observer of himself, creating intense series of self-portraits. This pioneering book, with some 200 stunning illustrations, offers the first comprehensive account of Matisse's activity as a maker of portraits and self-portraits. Matisse scholar John Klein goes beyond standard approaches to portraiture that focus on questions of likeness and expression of character. He considers the transaction that produces a portrait--a transaction between the artist and the sitter (even when the sitter is oneself) that is social as much as artistic. Klein investigates the various social contexts of Matisse's sitters and finds that differences among these contexts produced different kinds of portraits and self- portraits with different goals. This was in part due to the personal and social identity of the sitter, but partly also to Matisse's self-perception with respect to the sitter and his goal of engaging the genre as a mode of personal expression. Klein also addresses the vexing question of whether depictions of hired models can be considered as portraits and concludes that they lack the social context that is necessary to portraiture. Through the psychological and contextual examination of Matisse's portraits and self-portraits, Klein throws new light on an important body of work by this influential artist. The author also discusses the portrait practice of some of Matisse's contemporaries--Picasso, Kirchner, Bonnard, Vallotton, and Boldini--to develop fresh insights into the status of portraiture within twentieth-century art as a whole.

One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers, and Friends

Barry Moser, Ann Patchett

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Editorial Review:

Portraits have long been a staple of Moser's oeuvre, beginning with his first book, The Red Rag, published by Castalia Press in 1970, which included a frontispiece portrait of the American painter (and author of The Red Rag), James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Nearly thirty years later he published his edition of the King James Bible, in which over half of the images were portraits. In this gathering are many of Moser's old portraits and more than fifty new ones created especially for this collection, including Charles Dickens, Daniel Webster, Stephen Crane, Dante Alighieri, Frédéric Chopin, Nelson Algren, Jean Cocteau, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rembrandt van Rijn, Ben Shahn, Jim Harrison, Flannery O'Conner, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Eric Carle, Kaye Gibbons, Virginia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Patricia MacLachlan, Jack Coughlin, Jane Yolen, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. Ann Patchett, the recipient of the 2002 Pen Faulkner Award and Great Britain's prestigious Orange Award, contributes a splendid essay about Moser's portraits and the subject of portraiture in general. Moser has also penned a note about portraits that appears as an afterword.

Alex Katz Paints Ada (Jewish Museum of New York)

Robert Storr

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For almost fifty years, the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927) has painted a series of portraits of his wife, Ada. This beautifully illustrated book is the first to focus on these iconic paintings, which are unprecedented in their focus on a single figure over many years.
In this volume, leading scholars explore the allure of Ada as a subject and the art-historical importance of Katz’s portraits, asking fascinating questions about Katz’s methods and intentions: What do these paintings reveal and conceal about their subject? What does Katz do in the studio to convey such vitality on his canvases? How does Katz’s work fit into the history of portraiture and the art movements of the 1960s and beyond? Acclaimed art critic and curator Robert Storr examines Ada’s alluring persona, comparing her to other “goddesses” who have captivated centuries of portrait painters. James Schuyler recounts a day in Katz’s studio, and the late British art critic Lawrence Alloway explores the role of repetition in the Ada portraits, which he views as a cycle of images with antecedents in Velázquez and Rembrandt.
Featuring the renowned series of Ada portraits, this book demonstrates the cumulative power and enduring delight of Alex Katz’s achievement, as well as his devotion to his greatest muse.

Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures

Robin Jaffe Frank

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Worth the Wait 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

I began my interest in miniature paintings several years ago, but found that long searches on the internet rarely produced any new information on this topic. Owning about 4 "worthwhile" books in my collection on the subject, I anxiously awaited Robin Jaffee Frank's book (which I became aware was "in the works" about 6 months before publication). I hoped that this book would be the frosting on the cake of knowledge I possessed on miniatures. I was delighted to find it is the cake itself. Miniature itself in size, it contains a whopping 358 pages packed with information and insights, along with plenty of full-size illustrations. It's presented in a format that can be easily followed, with many paintings also shown magnfied to enhance the concept being presented. You will want to take your time in reading and relishing this book, there's alot of information here. Well worth the wait.

Editorial Review:

This volume reproduces and discusses some 100 American portrait and mourning miniatures. Robin Jaffee Frank examines the miniatures in detail, offering insights into their role in American art and social history. She uncovers the stories of those who sat for them, and those who treasured them.

Forever and Ever: New Works by Shawn Barber

Shawn Barber

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Editorial Review:

Forever and Ever is Shawn Barber's second monograph of Tattoo Portraits. An in depth study of tattoo culture through fine art paintings. This edition contains photographs, paintings and essays chronicling a 3 year living journal. Essays are by Grime, Chuck Eldrige, Paul Booth, Henry Lewis, Justin Giarla and Shawn Barber.