The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Illustrated)

Title: The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology
Author: Ed by Donald Preziosi
ISBN 10: 0192842420
ISBN-13: 978-0192842428
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 608
Price: £16.99

The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be.

The Art of Art History is a unique guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen, and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi's introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field.

The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century

Title: The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century
Author: Marsha Meskimmon
ISBN10: 0231106874
ISBN-13: 978-0231106870
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 224
Price: $30.50

Self-portraiture has long been a means for the male artist to assert an identity as masterful creator or tortured soul; women have overwhelmingly been presented as objects, and rarely as subjects of self-portraiture. In recent years, however, women artists have used their work to disrupt this tradition. With 43 illustrations of works by Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence, among others, is the first sustained inquiry into the appropriation of self-portraiture by women. In suggestive critical meditations on paintings, photographic work, sculpture, performance art, and body art, Marsha Meskimmon shows how twentieth-century women artists have undermined male-centered definitions of how "the artist" depicts the self. Drawing upon feminist theory and philosophy from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray, casts doubt on the idea of self-portrait as a mirror, in which the static self is rendered accurately and naturalistically. Meskimmon evokes a series of myths about what an artist is, how "he" should be represented, and how "his" work is to be read as autobiography. Through close readings of the imaginative self-representations of women artists -as male artist and god, as central player in the studio and in the Christian passion- she shatters these myths. In an absorbing assessment of the ways women artists have negotiated the complex group of roles ascribed to "woman," Meskimmon considers the partially nude painting by pregnant artist Paula Modersohn-Becker and performance artist Annie Sprinkle's confrontation of the thin line between celebration of female sexuality and objectification of the female body. As a nuanced appreciation of the interpretations of self-portraiture among women artists, will prove an invaluable resource on a subject that has received little attention from art criticism. Meskimmon's work also presents a bold challenge to critical tradition, compelling readers to rethink the meaning of the genre as a whole.

The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism

Title: The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism
Author: Georges Bataille
ISBN: 9781844675609
Binding: Paper
Date: 2006
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 211
Price: £12.99

A veritable cult figure for postmodernism, Bataille (1897-1962) formulated what is now vanguard received wisdom, and he did so long before Derrida proposed differance in 1967, giving Bataille's pronouncements the additional authority of duration. Furthermore, while eschewing the Orphic, he typically encapsulates his ideas with a near-eminently quotable-paradox (e.g., "The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect"). These pieces, dating mostly from 1945 to 1951, when surrealism was attempting a second wave, are documents of Parisian intellectual life, discussing such issues as the distinctions between existentialism and surrealism and the Camus/Sartre quarrel following The Rebel (1951). Bataille sees successful surrealism as the destruction of self, the individualism that must be sacrificed before liberty can be achieved for the community. Richardson's accurate and readable translations are carefully annotated, making this a useful collection for English readers.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Conversations with Cézanne

Title: Conversations with Cézanne
Edited by Michael Doran
ISBN: 978-0-520-22519-0
Binding: Paper
Publisher: University of California Press
Number of Pages: 278
Price: $19.95

Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)—including artists, critics, and writers—that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cézanne's own letters.

In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cézanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print.

Cézanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians—indeed to all students of modern art.

50 Drawings to Murder Magic- Antonin Artaud

Title: 50 Drawings to Murder Magic
Author: Antonin Artaud
ISBN: 978-1905422661
Binding: Hard bound

Date: 2008
Publisher: Seagull Books
Number of Pages: 82
Price: INR 950/-

For the poet, theorist, philosopher, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud, magic was always a central concept and positive force, capable of healing the rift between words and things, culture and life. But during his nine years of incarceration in mental asylums, magic seemed to lose its illuminating transformative power and to become demonic and persecutory. Artaud entered the realm of spectres and vampires which he believed were sucking the vitality from his mind and body. Artaud later filled twelve little exercise books with an account of his struggles to escape this physical, psychological and artistic hell. The first eleven books are filled with fragments of writing and extraordinary sketches of totemic figures, pierced bodies and enigmatic machines. Two months before his death, he took a twelfth exercise book and wrote a remarkable, incantatory text, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. It was the last thing he wrote.

WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution

Title: WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution
Author: Cornelia H. Butler (Editor), Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Editor)
ISBN 10: 0914357999ISBN-13: 978-0914357995
Binding: Vinyl Bound
Date: (March 2, 2007)
Publisher: The MIT Press
Number of Pages: 512 pages
Price: $ 59.95

Product Description
There had never been art like the art produced by women artists in the 1970s—and there has never been a book with the ambition and scope of this one about that groundbreaking era. WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period—Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Ivekovič, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others—as well as important works made in those years by artists whose whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono.

The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media—from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video—arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Autophotography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK!, which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 color images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz.
Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics—including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism—provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves. WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.
for more info http://www.moca.org/wack/