A sweeping retrospective exploring the oeuvre of an incandescent artist, revealing the ways that Mitchell expanded painting beyond Abstract Expressionism as well as the transatlantic contexts that shaped her Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) was fearless in her experimentation, creating works of unparalleled beauty, strength, and emotional intensity. This gorgeous book unfolds the story of an artistic master of the highest order, revealing the ways she expanded abstract painting and illuminating the transatlantic contexts that shaped her. Lavish illustrations cover the full arc of her artistic practice, from her exceptional New York paintings of the early 1950s to the majestic multipanel compositions she made in France later in her career. Signature works are represented here along with rarely seen paintings, works on paper, artist's sketchbooks, and photographs of Mitchell's life, social circle, and surroundings. Featuring scholarly texts, in-depth essays, and artistic and literary responses, this book is organized in ten chronological chapters. Each chapter centers on a closely related suite of paintings, illuminating a shifting inner landscape colored by experience, sensation, memory, and a deep sense of place. Presenting groundbreaking research and a variety of perspectives on her art, life, and connections to poetry and music, this unprecedented volume is an essential reference for Mitchell's admirers and those just discovering her work. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Schedule: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (September 4, 2021-January 17, 2022) Baltimore Museum of Art (March 6-August 14, 2022) Fondation Louis Vuitton (October 5, 2022-February 27, 2023)

In his engaging and penetrating observations of major modern and contemporary visual art, Shiff has written about an impressive range of artists, including Willem de Kooning, Marlene Dumas, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, and Peter Saul. A leading scholar and powerful voice, Shiff’s insight into prominent artistic practices spans generation, place, and approach, as seen in this considered selection of essays on twenty-seven artists. These writings first appeared in exhibition catalogues for institutions including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Tate Modern. Shiff supplements his unquestionable fluency in art history with insights cultivated from his readings in philosophy, phenomenology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis, among other fields. Shiff’s writing—conceptually rich, meditative, and enjoyable to read—is attuned to the nuances of artistic style and technique, drawing out art’s social implications not merely from broad histories but also directly from artists’ mark making and technical gestures. Actively engaged as a viewer and a writer, Shiff has transformed the act of looking at art into contemplative and captivating writing. Writing After Art includes essays on Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, Georges Braque, Jim Campbell, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Suzan Frecon, Lucian Freud, Ellen Gallagher, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Julie Mehretu, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley, Peter Saul, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Jack Whitten, and Zeng Fanzhi.

While Munch's pessimistic, melancholy world view crucially defines our understanding of his work, many important postwar and contemporary artists have drawn inspiration from several aspects of his oeuvre. This richly illustrated book explores how seven such artists- Georg Baselitz, Miriam Cahn, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol-engaged with Munch's work at different points in, or throughout, their careers. It features elaborate reproductions of sixty works by Munch juxtaposed with those inspired by him. Readers discover how Baselitz cunningly pays tribute to his artistic hero how Tracey Emin's practice, like Munch's, is autobiographical, both drawing from their personal torment to create their unnerving works ; how Marlene Dumas was drawn to the expressiveness of Munch's portraits; and how Peter Doig draws on Munch's radical treatment of pigments and materiality. Essays by leading scholars detail each artist's unique preoccupation with Munch and offer a focused exploration of the ways women artists in particular were inspired by his examinations of loneliness, fear, and trauma.

In an age where art history's questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential new addition to James Elkins's series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be.

Shiff's turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes. With an introduction by Rosie Bennett, Doubt is a study of the tension between practicing art and practicing criticism.

The fourth volume in the Essays by Leo Steinberg series, focusing on the artist Pablo Picasso. Leo Steinberg was one of the most original art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretive risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures ranging from old masters to modern art, he combined scholarly erudition with eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His writings, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. Steinberg's perceptions evolved from long, hard looking at his objects of study. Almost everything he wrote included passages of formal analysis but always put into the service of interpretation. This volume brings together Steinberg's essays on Pablo Picasso, many of which have been studied and debated for decades, such as "The Philosophical Brothel," as well as unpublished lectures, including "The Intelligence of Picasso," a wide-ranging look at Picasso's enduring ambition to stretch the agenda of representation, from childhood drawings to his last self-portrait. An introduction by art historian Richard Shiff contextualizes these works and illuminates Steinberg's lifelong dedication to refining the expository, interpretive, and rhetorical features of his writing. Picasso is the fourth volume in a series that presents Steinberg's writings, selected and edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz.

As the focal point of numerous high-profile exhibitions, the sculpture of Richard Serra (b. 1939) has drawn international acclaim. Yet even those who have marveled at Serra's intellectually rigorous and large works of sculpture may not be familiar with his equally intriguing drawings. This handsome book brings together for the first time Serra's drawn work, considering the artist's investigation of medium as an activity both independent from and linked to his pioneering sculptural practice. First working in ink, charcoal, and lithographic crayon on paper, Serra originally used drawing as a means to explore form and perceptual relations between his sculpture and the viewer. Over time, his drawings underwent significant shifts in concept, materials, and scale and became fully realized and autonomous works of art. The grand, bold forms he created with black paintstick in his monumental Installation Drawings were designed to disrupt and complement existent spaces and eventually began to occupy entire rooms. In the late 1980s, Serra explored the tension of weight and gravity through layering, and his most recent work experiments with surface effects, using mesh screens as intermediaries between the gesture and the transfer of pigment to paper. Distributed for The Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art(04/11/11-08/28/11) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (10/15/11-01/16/12) The Menil Collection (03/02/12-06/10/12)

Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cezanne's painting. He shows how Cezanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cezanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.

In every generation of artists, there are a few who propose a new set of ques- tions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. This handsome monograph considers the painter's entire career, beginning with the early work produced in the 1990s when Doig's enigmatic but wholly new conception of painting was first introduced to audiences. Doig was born to Scottish parents, spent several years as a child in Trinidad, later settling in Canada for his formative early teen years. He found his voice while at art school in London, albeit one that was out of step with the work of the time (much of it installation-based and dripping with neo-conceptualist leanings). He had developed a small following of fellow artists and critics when the rest of the art world caught up and took notice. In 2002, he left London for Trinidad, where he has remained. The small Caribbean island-with its own distinctive light and landscape-has deeply influenced his recent work. This volume was designed in close collaboration with the artist, with a cover and various interior elements created especially by the artist.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

A beautiful book on the famed Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas The Chinati Foundation, a world-famous destination for large-scale contemporary art, was founded by Donald Judd (1928-1994) to preserve and present a select number of permanent installations that were inextricably linked to the surrounding landscape in Marfa, Texas. This handsome publication, first published in 2010 and now available with a new chapter devoted to the permanent installation by Robert Irwin that was inaugurated in 2016 and a new foreword by Jenny Moore, director of the Chinati Foundation, describes how Judd developed his ideas of the role of art and museums from the early 1960s onward, culminating in the creation of Chinati. The individual installations featured here include work by John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, David Rabinowitch, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Ingolfur Arnarsson, Carl Andre, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, and John Wesley, as well as by Judd himself. The book also features a complete catalogue of the collection and writings by Judd relating to Chinati and Marfa. Published in association with the Chinati Foundation/La Fundacion Chinati

In an age where art history's questions are now expected to receive answers, Richard Shiff presents a challenging alternative. In this essential new addition to James Elkins's series Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts, Richard Shiff embraces doubt as a critical tool and asks how particular histories of art have come to be.

Shiff's turn to doubt is not a retreat to relativism, but rather an insistence on clear thinking about art. In particular, Shiff takes issue with the style of self-referential art writing seemingly 'licensed' by Roland Barthes. With an introduction by Rosie Bennett, Doubt is a study of the tension between practicing art and practicing criticism.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)--including artists, critics, and writers--that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cezanne's own letters. In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cezanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print. Cezanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians--indeed to all students of modern art.

Often simple in composition, the art of Waltercio Caldas invites a host of complex questions about perception and space. Caldas challenges not only the way we look at his objects in the moment, but also our perspectives on art more generally. For decades he has been a central figure in Brazilian art. While his influence extends across much of the art world, he has remained largely underrecognized in the United States. To make this exceptional artist more widely known to the U.S. audience, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin and the Fundacao Ibere Camargo, a premier art organization in Porto Alegre, Brazil, have organized the exhibition The Nearest Air: A Survey of Works by Waltercio Caldas.

The exhibition catalog Waltercio Caldas is the first illustrated English-language publication to fully explore Caldas's four-decade artistic trajectory, his influences, and his impact. The catalog includes essays by the exhibition's curator, Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, director of the Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; leading art critic Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, who investigates Caldas's work in relationship to that of his international peers and its importance in the history of art; and renowned art historian Richard Shiff, modern and contemporary art professor at the University of Texas, who discusses key Caldas works that epitomize his investigation of the history of art. The catalog also includes a selected chronology of the artist's career and a selected bibliography.

A celebration of the stunning collection of artworks donated in honor of the creation of The Menil Drawing Institute Featuring outstanding 20th-century drawings promised or bequeathed to the Menil Collection for the opening of the Menil Drawing Institute, this elegant volume is a testament to the growing significance of drawings as stand-alone artworks over the past century. The drawings come from the private collections of well-known connoisseurs Janie C. Lee, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and David Whitney, and include works by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Eva Hesse, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock. Its chief curator Edouard Kopp profiles the Drawing Institute's nature and scope, and noted scholars John Elderfield and Richard Shiff discuss historical aspects of drawing, while Terry Winters muses from an artist's viewpoint. Distributed for the Menil Collection

The first comprehensive examination of the painter's formative years, tracing the evolution of Monet's early style and personal ambitions that drove the rest of his career This elegant volume is the first to be devoted to the young genius of Claude Monet (1840-1926). Bringing together the greatest paintings from his early career-including his first Salon-exhibited work, the Kimbell Art Museum's La Pointe de la Heve at Low Tide; Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) and The Magpie from the Musee d'Orsay; and The Green Wave and La Grenouillere from the Metropolitan Museum of Art-it features essays by distinguished scholars, focusing on the evolution of Monet's own distinctive mode of painting. Through the 1860s, the young painter absorbed and transformed a variety of influences, from the lessons of the Barbizon school and his mentor Boudin to the challenges posed by his friends Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley. Artistic innovation and personal ambition shaped the work of the celebrated impressionist painter from the very start of his long and illustrious career. Distributed for the Kimbell Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Kimbell Art Museum (10/16/16-01/29/17) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (02/25/17-05/29/17)

'Order to me is to be ordered about', Willem de Kooning said. Between Sense and de Kooning is an exploration of how de Kooning both worked and thought concerning art, while respecting the artist's own ambiguities and his reluctance to embrace categorical distinctions between representation and abstraction. Richard Shiff acknowledges de Kooning's idea that art is not about concepts like progress or development, but is instead a sensory phenomenon. The word Sense in this book's title carries a dual meaning - it is used here as both a sensation or feeling and as reason or direction. Employing both definitions, Shiff addresses the difficulty in interpreting de Kooning's work that has complicated its critical reception in the art and scholarly world. With detailed analysis of specific works from throughout de Kooning's career, many of which have never been published or studied before, Shiff discusses de Kooning's use of materials and his technical experimentation. He looks at the artist's painting processes, highlighting his tendency to transfer images, and even paint itself, from one work to another, and considers his creation of an exotica of the mundane. Between Sense and de Kooning provides a much-needed analysis and appreciation of de Kooning's complete oeuvre and will appeal not only to art historians but to anyone curious to understand how such an independent and daring artist gained lasting recognition as one of the key figures of twentieth-century art.