Books are a staple of the gift-giving season, and for good reason. Whether you’re looking for a elegant tome for a colleague, a playful yet smart book kids will love as much as parents, or a classic edition for an art connoisseur, you’ll find a book to suit every taste from MoMA’s award-winning publications. Here are our picks in some of the most popular categories:
Posts by Makiko Wholey
October 23, 2014
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Artists,
Collection & Exhibitions,
Publications
Robert Gober in Time
Cover of Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, published by The Museum of Modern Art
June 4, 2014
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Collection & Exhibitions,
Publications
Sigmar Polke Der Illusionist
Cover of Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 is the first comprehensive Sigmar Polke retrospective to cover the broad range of mediums he worked in from 1963 until his death in 2010. The accompanying catalogue is as comprehensive and diverse as the show,
April 25, 2014
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Artists,
Collection & Exhibitions
Rebel Photography: Robert Heinecken as Visual Guerrilla
Cover of Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, the first retrospective since the artist’s death in 2006, contains over 100 photo-based works created by Heinecken between 1962 and 1999. Heinecken was best known for working in the medium of photography and with manipulating images, but surprisingly, he seldom used a camera,
January 15, 2014
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Collection & Exhibitions,
Publications
Paying Tribute: Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New
Cover of Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador For the New, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New is the catalogue published to accompany the exhibition of the same name currently on view at MoMA. Both are a tribute to art dealer and gallerist Ileana Sonnabend (1914–2007) for her taste and enduring influence.
December 19, 2013
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Collection & Exhibitions,
Publications
Portrait of an Artist: Isaac Julien: RIOT
Cover of the publication Isaac Julien: RIOT, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Isaac Julien: RIOT is not your typical exhibition catalogue. With most of the writing done by artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien himself, it is more like an illustrated intellectual biography.
November 20, 2013
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Artists,
Collection & Exhibitions
Writing on Isa Genzken
Cover of the publication Isa Genzken: Retrospective published by The Museum of Modern Art
Isa Genzken is arguably one of the most influential female artists of the past few decades, her impact visible in the work of young sculpture and assemblage artists worldwide. MoMA’s upcoming exhibition Isa Genzken: Retrospective is the first comprehensive survey of her career in the United States, and the largest exhibition of her work to date. The accompanying catalogue explores her unique and decidedly diverse career through illustrated-plate sections and essays spanning a more than 40-year period. Genzken’s artwork is markedly varied and the narrative of her career is unconventional. She’s worked in nearly every imaginable medium, including sculpture, photography, film, assemblage and collage. The catalogue’s essays offer new insights on her aesthetic outlook and approach.
Curator Sabine Breitwieser’s essay covers Genzken’s artistic output from 1970 to 1996, discussing her early geometric drawings and sculptures, and her presence in the art centers of West Germany as a student at the Düsseldorf Academy and in Cologne. In the 1990s, Genzken moved away from post-Minimalism and began to make her first collage works.
Isa Genzken in her studio in Düsseldorf, 1982. Image courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin
Laura Hoptman, curator in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, explores this career break and later parts of Genzken’s career—from 1993 to the present—when her collage and sculptural assemblages and installations grew in scale and conceptual complexity.
Isa Genzken. Empire/Vampire III, 13. 2004. Spray paint on metal and glass, chromogenic color prints, and plastic on wood pedestal, 65 3/4 x 23 5/8 x 18 1/8″ (167 x 60 x 46 cm). neugerriemschneider gallery, Berlin. © Isa Genzken
The book also includes focused thematic essays. Scholar Lisa Lee writes on Genzken’s relationship with architecture and public sculpture in “Isa Genzken: Model Citizen,” considering her experiments with scale, perception and even mutiny, with projects like Fuck the Bauhaus. In “Isa Genzken: Himmel und Erde (Heaven and Earth),” Michael Darling argues for a thematic consistency in Genzken’s variegated oeuvre, positing that she “has married radical formal experimentation and variety to themes that are timeless, poignant and deeply humanistic, rooting her inquiries in the material facts of our world but offering pathways to topics, experiences, and concepts that, by definition, escape the grasp of easy resolution.” Jeffrey Grove’s essay, “Isa Genzken’s Homage to Herself” discusses motifs of autobiography and self-representation in her work, particularly in photography and film. An illustrated chronology by Stephanie Weber, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Media & Performance Art at MoMA guides readers through the exciting trajectory of Genzken’s career, from birth to her first American retrospective at MoMA.
Isa Genzken: Retrospective is on view from November 23, 2013–March 10, 2014 in the The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery on the Museum’s sixth floor. A preview of the catalogue can be downloaded here.
September 26, 2013
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Publications
Charles Burchfield’s Hepaticas
Charles Burchfield. The First Hepaticas. 1917–18. Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper. 21 1/2 x 27 1/2″ (54.6 x 69.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich
Artist Charles E. Burchfield is known for his mystical and visionary interpretations of American nature. His paintings of natural scenes and landscapes are often florid and psychedelic—the colors richer and deeper, light more radiant and intense, and always with florid texture that seems to radiate on forever. His paintings are nearly fantastical, but seem to speak to something beyond a pure fantasy realm—it is as if he is communicating his sense of an innate, organic technology at work in the natural world.
The First Hepaticas, a 1917–18 painting by Burchfield, is currently on display as part of the American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe exhibition. Burchfield completed The First Hepaticas in the location where he created most of his early works, his <a title="childhood home" href="http://www.burchfieldpenney.org/" target=_blank>childhood home</a> in the city of Salem, Ohio, where he lived from the ages of five to 28. It was there that he experienced what he later deemed his “Golden Year,” 1917, because of a prolific, inspired output.
Hepaticas are a wildflower found in most Northeastern states in America. Their appearance at the end of winter is taken to signal the coming of spring, as they are often one of the first flora to sprout amongst the carpet of brush and fallen leaves left from the cold seasons.
Here, Burchfield captures this symbolic moment. Most of The First Hepaticas is a gloomy landscape of drab, brown leafless trees, some with hollows like gaping mouths. In the bottom right corner you see a small grouping of white flowers haloed by light. The flowers are suggestive of life and optimism in the morass of gloom and deadness. They are harbingers of regeneration, and perhaps Burchfield believes we can learn from nature in this respect.
Cover of the publication American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe, published by The Museum of Modern Art
Several of Burchfield’s early paintings (spanning the years 1916–20) are included in the show and in the exhibition catalogue. The catalogue also includes an essay by MoMA Drawings curator Esther Adler, “The Problem of Our American Collection: MoMA Collects at Home” exploring the museum’s beginnings, drawing on numerous quotations from Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of MoMA. The essay provides much insight into the ideas that founded the institution, and the roles figures like Burchfield and his contemporaries played in the shaping of its collection.
The exhibition catalogue is available at the MoMA online store and is also available as a fixed-format e-book. Download a free sample here.
American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe is on view now until January 26, 2014, in The Michael H. Dunn Gallery on the second floor.
September 11, 2013
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Publications
Considering One, Once More
If you’ve been following the Jackson Pollock Conservation Project on Inside/Out, you know that Jackson Pollock’s monumental painting One: Number 31, 1950 underwent some changes in our Department of Conservation this past spring after conservators discovered sections of overpaint on its surface, vestiges of a restoration campaign from the 1960s. You can follow the entire process here.
Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31, 1950. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange). © 2013 Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Cover of the publication Pollock: One: Number 31, 1950, published by The Museum of Modern Art
The newest book in our One on One Series, Pollock: One: Number 31, 1950, also examines the history of this specific painting, but in an entirely different way. Author Charles Stuckey’s essay begins its investigation before the painting’s inception and follows it to the present day, considering its legacy and influence, which is visible in numerous contemporary artworks included in the book. In the late 1940s, Pollock began experimenting with a new method of painting, “drip painting” as it came to be known, where he would stand above a vast unframed piece of canvas and render kinetically: flinging, flicking, and, of course, dripping colors onto the canvas with various implements.
Pollock’s method eschewed the conventional notions of painting of the time, opting for raw, unstretched canvas and housepaint over prepared canvas and traditional oils, and darting around the floor of his barn studio rather than working quietly with a palette and easel. One: Number 31, 1950 is a masterful example of this signature style, a monumental work displaying Pollock’s energy and dexterity.
Did you know Jackson Pollock worked as a janitor at the Guggenheim Museum? Or that One: Number 31, 1950 was actually painted after Number 32, 1950 and before Number 30 (now called Autumn Rhythm) and Number 27, 1950?
Drawing from period magazine articles and quotes by Pollock, Lee Krasner, critics, and friends, Stuckey offers a narrative trajectory for the famed painting, following One: Number 31, 1950 from its premiere exhibition, to a stint in an apartment on Central Park West, to its final place in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
For more of Stuckey’s essay, download a preview of Pollock: One: Number 31, 1950 from our website.
September 4, 2013
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Collection & Exhibitions
Altered States of Sound
Cover of Soundings: A Contemporary Score, published by The Museum of Modern Art
The 16 artists featured in Soundings: A Contemporary Score treat sound as material. Much in the way many painters explore subjective interests through the material properties of paint and pigment, these artists manifest their philosophical and political concerns through sound (though not necessarily always audible).
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