Entertaining, lyrical, and informative, Art Life is a selection of essays by well-known contemporary art curator Lawrence Rinder, all written since 1991. Rinder's work is distinguished by a concern for art's role in reflecting and shaping daily life. Informed by history, philosophy, and popular culture, these essays provide keys to understanding a broad range of contemporary practices--from painting and drawing to net art and video installation. In each of these texts, Rinder muses on how the intersection of material, image, and idea creates meaning in some of the most compelling artworks of the past few decades. Among the many artists discussed are Luc Tuymans, Sophie Calle, Martin Creed, Ara Peterson, Jim Drain, Louise Bourgeois, Mark Lombardi, Jack Smith, and Irit Batsry. All of the essays in Art Life are unified by Rinder's clear writing style--seamlessly interspersed with a selection of images--and his consistent engagement with the experience of art and art's relevance to our daily lives. Ideal for scholars and students alike.

This collection of rare, abstract Tantra drawings was conceived when the French poet Franck Andre Jamme stumbled on a small catalogue of Tantric art at a Paris bookseller's stall. The volume included writings by Octavio Paz and Henri Michaux, and Jamme became fascinated by the images' affinity with modern art and poetry. He read voraciously and even journeyed to India, searching in vain for Tantric practitioners, until a bus accident on the road to Jaipur sent him home to France with serious injuries. When he returned a few years later, he met a soothsayer who proclaimed that Jamme had now paid sufficient tribute to the goddess Shakti and required him to take a vow: he must visit the "tantrikas" alone or only in the company of a loved one. Since then, Jamme has gained extraordinary access to very private communities of adepts and their intensely beautiful works. These contemporary, anonymous drawings from Rajasthan are unlike the more familiar strands of Tantric art--the geometric yantras, or erotic illustrations of the "Kama Sutra." The progeny of seventeenth-century illustrated religious treatises, these drawings have evolved into a distinct visual lexicon designed to awaken heightened states of consciousness and are imbued with specific spiritual meanings (e.g. spirals and arrows for energy, an inverted triangle for Shakti). A revelatory volume on this occluded genre of Indian art, "Tantra Song" is a convergence of east and west, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern.
Franck Andre Jamme is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. His translated workds (by John Ashbery, Charles Borkuis, David Kelley and others) include "New Exercises," "Another Silent Attack," "The Recitation of Forgetting" and "Extracts of the Life of a Beetle." He has collaborated on books with a number of artists including Philippe Favier, Suzan Frecon, Acharya Vyakul and Hanns Schimansk. A specialist in Art Brut, Tantric and tribal art of India, he has participated in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Beaux-Art de Paris and The Drawing Center, among others.

Hans Hofmann, a representative of Abstract Expressionism and American Modernism during the 20th century with European roots, had a fundamental influence as a teacher on the development of modern art in America. His brightly coloured paintings, watercolours and drawings can now be discovered in a European retrospective. From 1904 until 1914, the painter Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966), who was a friend of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, the Fauves and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, witnessed and absorbed the new art in Paris, the centre of European art. In his art school, founded in Munich in 1915, he became a mediator of French modernism and achieved international fame as an art teacher. In 1932 he emigrated to the United States and two years later opened the Han s Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York. He influenced a new generation of American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman.