Reading Room catalogue

Art and Photography surveys the major presence of photography at the centre of artistic practice from the 1960s onwards. On its invention, the photograph was considered a purely mechanical, an artless object that could not be included in the fine arts. Despite its increasing use by the twentieth century’s most significant artists, only since the late 1960s have art museums gradually begun to exhibit and acquire photography as artworks in a wide range of forms and practices.

Among more than 190 examples of the most significant photographic projects by artists are works by John Baldessari, Lewis Baltz, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Chris Burden, Victor Burgin, Sophie Calle, Elinor Carucci, Chuck Close, James Coleman, John Coplans, Gregory Crewdson, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, William Eggleston, Joan Fontcuberta, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Andreas Gursky, John Hilliard, Candida Höfer, Roni Horn, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Long, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Joel Meyerowitz, Duane Michals, Boris Mikhailov, Richard Misrach, Gabriel Orozco, Giuseppe Penone, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, Georges Rousse, Thomas Ruff, Ed Ruscha, Lucas Samaras, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Katharina Sieverding, Lorna Simpson, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Larry Sultan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Boyd Webb, Carrie Mae Weems, William Wegman and Francesca Woodman.

Surrealism is the first in an expanded range of Themes and Movements titles which look beyond the post-1945 period to survey all of the twentieth century’s major art movements. Mary Ann Caws is an internationally respected scholar of Surrealism who has translated many of its major texts and published extensively on the Surrealists’ art and writings.

Aside from academic studies and museum catalogues this is the first comprehensive, art book format survey on Surrealism to be published for a number of years. It also provides an overview of the essential links between the Surrealists’ famous artworks and their equally renowned writings.

The definitive overview and anthology of the artworks and writings associated with Arte Povera, the influential art movement that explored the relation between art and life, made manifest through natural materials and human artifacts, and experienced through the body.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an internationally recognized scholar of late 20th-century Italian art. She has published interviews and texts on artists such as Boetti, Pistoletto, Merz, Fabro and Kounellis. Formerly Senior Curator at P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, she is Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin.

From the late 1950s to the late 1960s the word Pop described art, film, photography and architectural design which engaged with the new realities of mass production and the mass media. Unlike books which present Pop art in isolation, this is a comprehensive survey of Pop in all of its forms across America, Britain and Europe

In addition to the key artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Sigmar Polke, Martial Raysse and many others the book includes works of photography and avant-garde film, as well as what the critic Reyner Banham defined as Pop architecture, ranging from Alison and Peter Smithson’s House of the Future to Archigram’s Walking City and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas

Editor Mark Francis was former Founding Director of the Andy Warhol Museum and editor of “Les Années Pop” (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2001). Survey author Hal Foster is Professor of Art at Princeton University, author of The Return of the Real and editor of the bestselling The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture and Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics.

The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by vast, uncultivated spaces of desert and mountain as well as by post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson moved earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo’s Running Fence and Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field. For Richard Long, journeys became works of art while Dennis Oppenheim immersed his entire body in the contours of the land.

Eminent scholar Rudolf Kuenzli presents a rich selection of the Dadas’ experimental visual and literary works to give a lively, accessible and comprehensive assessment.

Rudolf Kuenzli taught courses at the University of Iowa in contemporary theories, literatures and cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries, interarts, and the avant-garde. He has published books on Marcel Duchamp, Dada and Surrealist Film, André Breton, Surrealism and Women, and New York Dada. He served as the editor of Dada/Surrealism and the Director of the International Dada Archive at the University of Iowa.

“The advent of conceptual art marked a major shift in the history not only of art but of ideas. As a philosopher and critical writer on art and aesthetics, Peter Osborne describes and contextualizes in his Survey the distinct ways in which artists contested the aesthetic definition of the artwork by highlighting the role of ideas in the production of meaning from visual forms. The Works section illustrates the most influential artworks associated with conceptual art, as well as those of its most significant precursors and of recent artists who draw upon its legacy. Critical writing by conceptual artists is integral to their practice. In the Documents section essential writings by artists and critics who shaped the movement are juxtaposed with those of thinkers and philosophers whose influence was crucial to its development.” (first flyleaf)

Feminism has had a crucial impact on late twentieth-century art, inspiring some of the most pioneering developments in sculpture, painting, performance, photography, film and installation. The art world has been transformed by feminists who at the same time have been among its chief critics. Feminism has redefined the very terms of late twentieth-century art: it has exposed assumptions about gender; it has politicized the link between private and public; it has stressed the specificity of art marked by gender, race, age and class.

Selected by editor and researcher Helena Reckitt, this collection presents the rich diversity of art informed by feminism from the 1960s to the start of the twenty-first century. Not just a comprehensive history, the book juxtaposes works by many artists who are not usually shown or discussed together, opening up new connections between key figures. Peggy Phelan, among the best known contemporary feminist theorists, surveys the history of feminist art, opening up new perspectives on the work of artists ranging from Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois to Cindy Sherman and Pipilotti Rist. The Documents include the key critical texts of each period, ranging from the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, to the pioneering art criticism of Lucy R. Lippard, to Craig Owens’ feminist-derived contributions to postmodern criticism, as well as many important previously unpublished artists’ statements and interviews.

A timely survey that addresses the relationship between art and electronic technology, including mechanics, light, graphics, robots, virtual reality and the web.

Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York in the years immediately following the Second World War and quickly became one of the most powerful and influential movements in the history of modern art. Building on developments in European avant-garde art of the preceding decades, a wave of artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still developed a new abstraction that was simultaneously elemental and sophisticated. Though several of Abstract Expressionism’s key figures were emigres, including Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky, it was art’s first definitively American movement, establishing New York as the new capital of artistic innovation for years to come while creating a visual language that would soon reach to the farthest corners of the globe.

Editor Katy Siegel has assembled a complete overview of the subject in three sections. The definitive Survey recounts in detail the movement’s emergence, high period and later accomplishments, incorporating both contemporaneous critical writing and up-to-the-minute scholarship. The Works section presents large full-colour images of over 200 key artworks, each accompanied by an informative caption. And the Documents section provides a generous archive of primary and secondary texts, including artist’s statements, exhibition reviews and critical writings. The extensive back matter includes biographies on all the artists and authors plus a full bibliography.

This definitive work charts the evolution of an influential movement that continues to provoke controversy today. Over 250 images of performance, painting, photography, sculpture and installation bring together the largely untold story of these influential works with clear, insightful, explanatory texts.

Includes work from Leigh Bowery, Nelly Richard, Cindy Sherman, Katharina Sieverding, Richard Long, Joan Jonas, Jim Dine, Bill Viola, Robert Pincus-Witten, Valie Export, Peter Weibel, Charlotte Moorman, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Molinier, Tetsumi Kudo, Jackson Pollock, Franko B., Judy Chicago, John Coplans, Urs Lüthi, Renée Cox, Oladele Ajiboyé Bamgboye, Keith Boadwee, Lynda Benglis, Shigeko Kubota, Atsuko Tanaka, Joseph Beuys, Jenny Saville, Janine Antoni, Ulrike Rosenbach, Miroslaw Balka, Harold Rosenberg, Carlos Leppe, Allen Kaprow, Skip Arnold, Elaine Scarry, Georg Maciunas, Sherman Fleming, Oleg Kulik, Rebecca Schneider, Margaret Sundell, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Paul Virilio, Linda & Tehching Hsieh Montano, Jayne Parker, Faith Wilding, Paul McCarthy, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Günter Brus, Karen Finley, Adrian Piper, Barry Leva, Andres Serrano, Jürgen Klauke, Peggy Phelan, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Sontag, Hermann Nitsch, Mike Parr, Ulay., James Luna, Wolf Vostell, Mike Kelley, Moira Roth, César., James Lee Byars, Bob Flanagan, Marcia Tucker, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Shirin Neshat, Georges Mathieu, Elke Krystufek, Cheryl Donegan, Saburo Murakami, Hannah Wilke, Willoughby Sharp, Mariko Mori, Dick Higgins, Robert Morris, Kazuo Shiraga, Lucas Samaras, Lyle Ashton Harris, Bas Jan Ader, Vito Acconci, Stelarc., Gideon Gechtman, Gianni Pisani, Marc Quinn, Jeff Koons, Ron Athey, Cindy Nemser, Annie Sprinkle, Alan Sonfist, Helen Chadwick, Coco Fusco, Mary Beth Edelson, Raum Zurita, Orlan., Barbara Smith, Terry Fox, William Wegman, John Duncan, Helen Molesworth, Thomas McEvilley, Charles Ray, Paul Cotton, Yayoi Kusama, Diamela Eltit, Eleanor Antin, François Pluchart, Stahl Stenslie, Carolee Schneemann, Gilbert & George., Gloria Feman Orenstein, Bruce McLean, Rafael Montanez Ortiz, Lorna Simpson, Arnulf Rainer, Otto Muehl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pepe Espaliu, Herbert Marcuse, Pipilotti Rist, Piero Manzoni, Bonnie Sherk, Matthew Barney, Rebecca Horn, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Journiac, Stuart Brisley, Howard Fried, Kathy O’Dell, Laura Aguilar, Stuart Morgan, Jiro Yoshihara, Chris Burden, Shozo Shimamoto, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Teresa Murak, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic, Antony Gormley, Ana Mendieta, Yoko Ono, Heli Rekula, Dennis Oppenheim, Milan Knizak, Petr Stembera, de Niki Saint-Phalle, Yasumasa Morimura, Alison Knowles, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin, Giuseppe Penone, Andy Warhol, Bruce Gilchrist, Klaus Rinke, Claes Oldenburg, Hélio Oiticica, Tehching Hsieh, Kristine Stiles, Gina Pane, Lygia Clark, Rachel Lachowicz, Nam June Paik, Eglé Rakauskaité, Yves Klein, Eve Kokofsky Sedgwick, Lea Vergine, Lucy Orta, Ben Vautier.