How artists created an aesthetic of "positive barbarism" in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a "brutal aesthetics" adequate to the destruction around them. With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with "human animals"? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap? A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers--among them Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stolzl--in an extraordinary conversation on the nature of art in the industrial age. Aiming to rethink the form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today. "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity," published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art's first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, and offers a new generational perspective on the twentieth century's most influential experiment in artistic education. Organized in collaboration with the three major Bauhaus collections in Germany (the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassic Stiftung Weimar), "Bauhaus 1919-1933" examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school's products, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture. Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen or published outside Germany. Featuring approximately 400 color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, "Bauhaus 1919-1933" includes two overarching essays by the exhibition's curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that present new perspectives on the Bauhaus. Shorter essays by more than 20 leading scholars apply contemporary viewpoints to 30 key Bauhaus objects, and an illustrated narrative chronology provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus' lived history.

As this fourth volume begins, Prince Valiant, haunted by Aleta, seeks Merlin s wise counsel. This brief episode segues into one of Hal Foster s patented epics, The Long Voyage to Thule, which ran for seven straight months and featured Valiant s return to his birthplace and reunion with his father. Of course, Foster s astonishingly detailed and evocative depictions of Val s homeland contribute greatly to this sprawling epic. After a series of shorter adventures including The Seductress, The Call of the Sea, and The Jealous Cripple, Val finally decides he can stand it no more and sets out to find his long-lost love. Long-time fans know that his quest will eventually be successful, but Foster throws so many obstacles in the way of true love that the saga The Winning of Aleta would end up stretching a full year and a half, well into the next volume. With its stunning art reproduced directly from pristine printer s proofs, Fantagraphics has introduced a new generation to Foster s masterpiece, while providing long-time fans with the ultimate, definitive version of the strip."

Kerry James Marshall is one of America's greatest living painters. History of Painting presents a groundbreaking body of new work that engages with the history of the medium itself. In Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting, the artist has widened his scope to include both figurative and nonfigurative works that deal explicitly with art history, race, and gender, as well as paintings that force us to reexamine how artworks are received in the world and in the art market. In all the paintings in this book, Marshall's critique of history and of dominant white narratives is present, even as the subjects of the paintings move between reproductions of auction catalogues, abstract works, and scenes of everyday life. Essays by Hal Foster and Teju Cole help readers navigate Marshall's masterful vision, decoding complexly layered works such as Untitled (Underpainting), 2018, and Marshall's own artistic philosophy. This catalogue is published on the occasion of Marshall's eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, London in 2018.

A lavishly illustrated monograph that spans the entire career of Gerhard Richter, one of the most celebrated contemporary artists "Spans the contemporary German artist's six-decade career. . . . [A] stirring exhibition in [its] own right."-New York Times "[A] weighty catalogue... illuminat[es] some less-visited corners of Richter's oeuvre."-New York Review of Books Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post-Second World War Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book features approximately 100 of his key canvases, from photo paintings created in the early 1960s to portraits and later large-scale abstract series, as well as select works in glass. New essays by eminent scholars address a variety of themes: Sheena Wagstaff evaluates the conceptual import of the artist's technique; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discusses the poignant Birkenau paintings (2014); Peter Geimer explores the artist's enduring interest in photographic imagery; Briony Fer looks at Richter's family pictures against traditional painting genres and conventions; Brinda Kumar investigates the artist's engagement with landscape as a site of memory; Andre Rottmann considers the impact of randomization and chance on Richter's abstract works; and Hal Foster examines the glass and mirror works. As this book demonstrates, Richter's rich and varied oeuvre is a testament to the continued relevance of painting in contemporary art. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Met Breuer, New York (March 4-July 5, 2020) Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (August 14, 2020-January 19, 2021)

This career-spanning publication features conceptual, political, formal, and technical perspectives on the work of contemporary sculptor Charles Ray For Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Charles Ray: Figure Ground spans the whole of the artist's fifty-year career, from his early photographs and performances through his intriguing, often unsettling sculptures, some of which are published here for the first time. The essays foreground Ray's engagement with preexisting traditions, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality (notably expressed through his explorations of Mark Twain's 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and investigate the modalities of touch that run through his work. In addition, a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (January 31-June 5, 2022)

From the late 1950s to the late 1960s the word 'Pop' described any example of art, film, photography and architectural design that engaged with the new realities of mass production and the mass media. In addition to key artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton and many others, this 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.
Edited by an internationally recognized expert on Pop art and culture, this book surveys Pop across all artforms and gives equal coverage to its American, British and European manifestations. Survey: renowned scholar and critic Hal Foster focuses on the Pop image as it developed over the period: Reyner Banham, The Independent Group and Pop Design; Richard Hamilton and the Tabular Image; Roy Lichtenstein and the Screened Image; Andy Warhol and the Seamy Image; Gerhard Richter and the Photogenic Image; Ed Ruscha and the Cineramic Image; and, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and the Postmodern Absorption of Pop. Works: each image is accompanied by an extended caption. This section is chronologically sequenced: Revolt into Style (1956-60) surveys the birth of Pop culture and its images, including the American Beat generation artists, photographers and filmmakers; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the French Decollageistes, Richard Hamilton and the 'British Pop' of the Independent Group. Consumer Culture (1960-63) chronicles American Pop's explosion, from Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon-based paintings to Claes Oldenburg's Store and Andy Warhol's Factory. Colonization of the Mind (1963-66) looks at American Pop's reception in Europe, in the work of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and others. Spectacular Time (1966-67) surveys late Pop developments, from Warhol's Silver Clouds to Malcolm Morley's Photorealism. Helter Skelter (1968) documents Pop's demise and transformation into postmodernism, in projects such as Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas.

The Forgings, the groundbreaking series of industrially forged steel sculptures that the artist produced in 1955 and 1956, are brought together in one book for the first time, alongside complementary sketchbook drawings of the sculptures. This catalogue, documenting an exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, New York, is the first time that all ten Forgings have been on view together since 1956. The sculptures are accompanied by a series of works on paper leading up to The Forgings, as well as sketchbook drawings of the completed sculptures. With the The Forgings, David Smith translated the spontaneity of a brushed line drawing into sculptural form, manipulating thin steel bars to achieve expressive vertical abstractions. The Forgings were unprecedented as works created solely through an industrial machined process, but were perhaps even more radical as pre-Minimalist forms intended to provoke discrete responses in each viewer.

The title of this book, "Autofocus Retina" means a configuration of four diamond shaped mirrors connoting the inner mechanics of a camera lens: the photographic eye. Lothar Baumgarten (b. Germany 1944, living and working in Berlin/New York) presents a personal selection of photographs, sculpture, drawings and film, from the late 1960s to the present day. The book follows the creative trajectory of an artist who does not comply with the aesthetic vision of art but who continually questions the logic structuring Western thought and systems of representation. It features essays on Baumgarten's work by Hal Foster, Michael Jakob, Craig Owens, Anne Rorimer and Friedrich Wolfram Heubach. Each text has been chosen by the artist himself along with special graphic illustrations and images.

Will marriage mean Valiant's gallant adventures have come to an end? Not if he has anything to say about it

A "Village Voice" Best Book of the Year, this seminal work presents new models of vision and examines modern theories of seeing in the context of contemporary critical practice.

With contributions by: Norman Bryson Jonathan Crary Martin Jay Rosalind Krauss Jacqueline Rose

Discussions in Contemporary Culture is an award-winning series co-published with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. These volumes offer rich and timely discourses on a broad range of cultural issues and critical theory. The collection covers topics from urban planning to popular culture and literature, and continually attracts a wide and dedicated readership.

In Junkspace (2001), architect Rem Koolhaas itemised in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster. 'The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future - Junkspace makes no such claim: "Architecture disappeared in the twentieth century," states Koolhaas matter-of-factly. Junkspace does a harder thing: it "foretells" the present, which is to say that it calls on us to recognize what is already everywhere around us.' Hal Foster Is there a future for architecture? If so, it might begin with the meditations - by turns elegant and frantic - of Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster: 'even if there is no outside to Junkspace, there is still running room to be made in its cracks - ' 'Junkspace is the new flamboyant, flexible, forgettable face of architecture, rendered by Rem Koolhaas in a visceral and rampantly analytical essay.' Office for Metropolitan Architecture

"The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work."-Richard Serra Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra's prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. Conversations about Sculpture is both an intimate look at Serra's life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist's work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration-from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu-revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium's most brilliant figures. Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

If farce follows tragedy, what follows farce? Where does the double predicament of a post-truth and post-shame politics leave artists and critics on the left? How to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions? How to belittle a political elite that cannot be embarrassed, or to mock party leaders who thrive on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu? And, in any event, why add outrage to a media economy that thrives on the same? What Comes After Farce? comments on shifts in art, criticism, and fiction in the face of the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. A first section focuses on the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, paranoia, and kitsch. A second reviews the neoliberal makeover of art institutions during the same period. Finally, a third section surveys transformations in media as reflected in recent art, film, and fiction. Among the phenomena explored here are "machine vision" (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface),"operational images" (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information so pervasive in our everyday lives.

In these diatribes on the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle-architecture and the rise of global cities, Hal Foster surveys our new political economy of design. Written in a lively style, Design and Crime explores the historical relations of modern art and modern museum, the conceptual vicissitudes of art history and visual studies, the recent travails of art criticism, and the double aftermath of modernism and postmodernism in an attempt to illuminate the conditions for critical culture in the present.

Our tenth volume finds our band of heroes making their way back to the Kingdom of Thule by way of Constantinople and Eastern Russia. Soon they are attacked by a tribe of barbarians who kidnap Aleta for the great Dragada Khan who wants to make her one of his wives. After nearly being killed in battle, Valiant returns to his homeland only to find the threat of hunger hovers over Thule. As Val explores new ways of feeding the kingdom s growing populace, raiders threaten the lives of his family and friends. The volume ends with Val s return to Camelot, a tournament of champions, and the threat of new treachery in Cornwall. This volume also includes an introduction by legendary comics artist Timothy Truman, and a special gallery containing more of Hal Foster s incredible Mountie paintings annotated by comics historian Brian M. Kane."