The first biography of visionary artist Agnes Martin, one of the most original and influential painters of the postwar periodOver the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin’s austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be...

"Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" asked the prominent art historian Linda Nochlin in a provocative 1971 essay. Today her insightful critique serves as a benchmark against which the progress of women artists may be measured. In this book, four prominent critics and curators describe the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement.

The authors of After the Revolution return with an incisive study of the work of contemporary women artists.In After the Revolution, the authors concluded that "The battles may not all have been won . . . but barricades are gradually coming down, and work proceeds on all fronts in glorious profusion." Now, with The Reckoning, authors Heartney, Posner, Princenthal, and Scott bring into focus the accomplishments of 24 acclaimed international women artists b...

Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin's austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. 'I paint with my back to the world', she claimed; when she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century.Nancy Princenthal tells her whole story chronologically from Martin's birth in Saskatchew...

This is the definitive guide to writing engagingly about the art of our time. Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other writers, it brims with practical tips that range across the full spectrum of art-writing including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews and writing for websites and blogs. Gilda Williams, a London correspondent for Artforum, points...

In today's art world many strange, even shocking, things qualify as art. In this Very Short Introduction Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy and art theory with many fascinating examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, museums, sex, and politics, clarifying contemporary and historical accounts of the nature, function, and interpretation of the arts. Freeland also propels us into the future by surveying c...

This compelling narrative goes behind the scenes with the world’s most important living artists to humanize and demystify contemporary art.The best-selling author of Seven Days in the Art World now tells the story of the artists themselves—how they move through the world, command credibility, and create iconic works.33 Artists in 3 Acts offers unprecedented access to a dazzling range of artists, from international superstars to unheralded ...

A study of Kusama's era-defining work, a “sublime, miraculous field of phalluses,” against the background of abstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness.Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installation Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remains challenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and the metaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psych...

As public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of Tate Modern and the Bilbao Guggenheim, there is a real need for a book that will engage general readers, offering them not only information and ideas about modern art, but also explaining its contemporary relevance and history. This book achieves all this and focuses on interrogating the idea of 'modern' art by asking such questions as: What has made a work of art qualify as modern (or f...

The years since 1989 have seen a complete untethering of what art can be, who makes it and where it can be found, which has been matched by a reassessment of art's appropriate place in society and the financial value that should be attached to it. In this new book in the World of Art series, Kelly Grovier surveys the dynamic developments in art practice worldwide since 1989, going in search of those artists who have undertaken to shape a fresh visual vocabulary and whose work reflects on t...

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Ranci�re, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated t...

The leading lexicon of contemporary art returns in an expanded, full-color third edition.An indispensable guide for art-world neophytes and seasoned professionals alike, the best-selling ArtSpeak returns in a revised and expanded third edition, illustrated in full color. Nearly 150 alphabetical entries—30 of them new to this edition—explain the who, what, where, and when of postwar and contemporary art. These concise mini-essays on the key terms of the art...