Instrumental in the formation of the underground comics scene in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s, Crumb has ruptured and expanded the boundaries of the graphic arts, redefining comics and cartoons as countercultural art forms. Presenting a slice of Crumb's unique universe, this book features a wide array of printed matter culled from the artist's five-decade career-tear sheets of drawings and comics taken directly from the publications where the works first appeared, magazine and album covers, broadsides from the 1960s and 1970s, tabloids from San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, Oakland, Manhattan's Lower East Side, and other counterculture enclaves, as well as exhibition ephemera. Complementing this volume are historical works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have inspired Crumb and pages from his rarely seen sketchbooks from the 1970s and 1980s that reveal his exemplary skill as a draftsman. Documenting the critically acclaimed exhibition Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, curated by Robert Storr, this publication offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in Crumb's singular mind. In the accompanying text, Storr explores the challenging nature of some of Crumb's work and the importance of artists who take on the status quo.

Zhang Huan has emerged as one of the most important artists of the past decade, a fearless explorer of the limits of the human body and a key figure in the flourishing Chinese art scene. His earliest performances, including 12 Square Meters, 65 Kilograms, and To Raise the Water-Level in a Fishpond, subjected his body to grueling tests of endurance while addressing the relationship between physical endurance and spiritual tranquility. Zhang 's move to New York in 1998 contributed to establish himself as a widely recognized figure in the international contemporary art world, staging performances in several cities around the globe, including Sydney, Rome, Shanghai and Hamburg where he reflected on his experiences in the cities he visited and his ethnic identity in a foreign land. In 2006 Zhang established a studio in Shanghai, where he began to seek a greater connection to Chinese heritage and history. This marked a new direction in his work, as he turned from performance to sculpture, painting, and installation. Through creating large-scale sculpture in diverse media, such as ash from local Buddhist temples, and with found objects, such as doors from the Chinese countryside homes, Zhang Huan continues to explore new ways to render his interest in the body and its language. A significant aspect of Zhang's new work revolves around his interest in Buddhism. Although Buddhist themes figured indirectly into his early work, they took on a more prominent role after a visit to Tibet in 2005. There, Zhang began to collect fragments of Buddhist sculptures, which he then used as models for massive copper figures. Upon his return to Shanghai, Zhang Huan began to collect ash from local Buddhist temples for use in sculptures and paintings. The use of burnt incense, the product of religious offerings, strengthens the link between his art and Buddhist practices.

In the 1950s, American painter Philip Pearlstein completed his M.A. thesis, ‘The Paintings of Francis Picabia 1908–1930’. When his research coincided with Picabia’s death in 1953, Pearlstein became the authority on the work of Picabia and his influence in European modernism that set the stage for modern art in America. Of course, it is impossible to discuss Picabia without also considering the work of Marcel Duchamp. At different intervals in his career, Pearlstein wrote three subsequent essays on Picabia for major arts journals: ‘The Symbolic Language of Francis Picabia’ for Arts magazine, 1956; ‘Hello & Goodbye, Francis Picabia’ for Art News, 1970, and ‘When the Dada Daddies Got Real; Or, How I Turned Picabia Inside Out’ for Brooklyn Rail, 2017. Pearlstein’s articles present a fascinating comparison between Picabia, Duchamp and Pearlstein himself. Picabia Inside Out brings together Pearlstein’s articles in full, published in an illustrated paperback book with a facsimile of the 1955 M.A. thesis presented as an historical document showing all the nuances of his typewriter. A foreword by Robert Storr highlights the broader art historical context and Pearlstein’s importance as a precursor to what became known as postmodernism.

An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston. Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a substantial, accessible and revealing analysis of his work. With more than 850 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions. Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.

Following the success of Writings on Art 1980-2005, HENI presents the highly anticipated final volume to complete a two-volume collection of writings on art by Robert Storr, one of the world's leading art critics and curators. Featuring the best of Storr's criticism - reviews, essays, articles, many of which previously unpublished - from 2006 to the present day, the book includes his texts on artists such as Gego, Carrie Mae Weems, David Hammons, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, El Anatsui and Francesco Clemente. Written with his signature intellect and wit, his writings range from essays on performances of femininity in Cindy Sherman's photographic oeuvre to dialectics of race in the work of Kara Walker. Expertly curated from his prolific output, and illustrated with 175 images to accompany 51 texts, Writings on Art is the definitive collection of Storr's multi-faceted writing with his finger on the pulse of contemporary art - a must-read for curators and students, artists, exhibition-goers and all those interested in the art and culture of today.

From essays on gender in the work of Louise Bourgeois to a review of Art Spiegelman's comix memoir Maus, Writings on Art is expertly curated from his prolific output and illustrated with 175 images to accompany the texts. Written with Storr's signature intellect and wit, the book is the definitive collection of his multi-faceted writing and features the best of Storr's criticism, reviews, essays, and other writings from the 1980s to the mid 2000s. A must read for curators, students, artists, exhibition-goers and all those interested in the art and culture of today.

Self-Portrait explores 30 years of artistic research by Paolo Canevari (Rome, 1963), proposing a series of sculptures, drawings and installations ranging from the first creations in the wake of Arte Povera, to those made of rubber from the 1990s, up to the more recent series Monuments of the Memory: Landscape and Constellations. The works tell of Canevari's vision of art-making, which moves from a classical training combined with a profound conceptual research, while also animated by a strong political character. Through the use of different media and materials - with a predilection for the rubber of inner tubes and tyres - Canevari adopts a language that is sometimes brutal, often ambiguous, certainly evocative, to bring light into the dark territories of man, understood both as an individual and as humanity. His radical and subversive approach aims to stimulate a reaction in the observer, with the intention, on the one hand, of breaking prejudices and cliches, on the other of investigating personal, intimate and inner aspects in relation to the work of art and its universal meaning. The volume includes a critical text by Robert Storr, two interviews with the artist collected respectively by Robert Storr and Francesca Pietropaolo and by Shirin Neshat, and a tribute to Canevari written by late Sicilian novelist Andrea Camilleri. Text in English and Italian.

The groundbreaking sculptor's most comprehensive monograph to date

Jean-Michel Othoniel is an artist who creates sculptures that explore themes of fragility, transformation, and ephemerality. Using the repetition of such modular elements as bricks or beads, his work deploys various strategies that hint at loss and despair – cracks in his objects' perfect surfaces, negative spaces and, early in his career, transient materials such as sulfur. The most authoritative study of the artist's work to date, it includes intimate gallery pieces as well as monumental public commissions around the world.

With vivid memories of his first visit to the Scottish National Gallery in the 1970s and his initial encounter with Hugo van der Goes' The Trinity Altarpiece, Rembrandt's A Woman in Bed, Velazquez's An Old Woman Cooking Eggs and Degas' Diego Martelli, Robert Storr discusses the shifting balance of museum collections from historically 'certified' classics to art whose status and significance remains in active contention and from singular 'treasures' to ensembles that speak to the larger scope of an artist's endeavour. Also Available: Unfinished Paintings: Narratives of the Non-Finito Watson Gordon Lecture 2014 (ISBN 9781906270919), 'The Hardest Kind of Archetype': Reflections on Roy Lichtenstein The Watson Gordon Lecture 2010 (ISBN 9781906270384), Picasso's 'Toys for Adults' Cubism as Surrealism: The Watson Gordon Lecture 2008 (ISBN 9781906270261), Sound, Silence, and Modernity in Dutch Pictures of Manners The Watson Gordon Lecture 2007 (ISBN 9781906270254), Roger Fry's Journey From the Primitives to the Post-Impressionists: Watson Gordon Lecture 2006 (ISBN 9781906270117).

It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents' Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist's influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and videos he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters's renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy. Waters has broadened our understanding of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity, racial equality, and freedom of expression. In bringing "bad taste" to the walls of galleries and museums, he tugs at the curtain of exclusivity that can divide art from human experience. Waters freely manipulates an image bank of less-than-sacred, low-brow references-Elizabeth Taylor's hairstyles, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse Divine-to entice viewers to engage with his astute and provocative observations about society. This richly illustrated book explores themes including the artist's childhood and identity; Pop culture and the movie business; Waters's satirical take on the contemporary art world; and the transgressive power of images. The catalogue features essays by BMA Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman; art historian and activist Jonathan David Katz; critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr; as well as an interview with Waters by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. Published in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Exhibition dates: The Baltimore Museum of Art: October 7, 2018-January 6, 2019 Wexner Center for the Arts: February 2-April 28, 2019

A must-have for the core contemporary art audience: Robert Storr's singular and long-awaited book is unprecedented in treating the full range of Louise Bourgeois's artistic achievement. In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

The Cage paintings were conceived as a single coherent group, and displayed for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Their titles, Cage (1) (6), pay homage to the American avant- garde composer John Cage (1912 92). In his Lecture on Nothing , Cage famously declared I have nothing to say and I m saying it . Richter is equally suspicious of ideologies and any claim to absolute truth. He shies away from giving psychological interpretations to his paintings, preferring to allow viewers and critics to make up their own minds. Leading critic Robert Storr considers the importance of the Cage paintings within Richter s practice and within the wider context of abstract art. A series of extraordinary, detailed photographs document the development of each painting, day by day, and show the artist at work on these monumental canvases, giving unique insight into his working methods.

Collating, in a single volume, the major body of interviews conducted by the revered American critic and curator Robert Storr, Interviews on Art includes 62 illustrated discussions with some of the most renowned names in the artworld over the last century. Storr s interviewees include Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons, Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Richard Serra, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Murray, Harald Szeemann and Mike Kelley, whilst each text is accompanied by relevant works and previously unpublished photographs of the artists themselves.

Over the past thirty years, Y.Z. Kami has built a resounding oeuvre that spans both portraiture and abstraction, using direct observation, poetic reference, and repeated geometries to create poignant evocations of the sublime. This comprehensive monograph explores the breadth of Kami s work with over 300 color illustrations, and texts by leading scholars and curators Robert Storr, Laura Cumming, and Elena Geuna. Y.Z. Kami s large-scale portraits recreate the visceral experience of a face-to-face encounter, suggesting a connection to the presence of each subject. Through a matte, uniform haze, he depicts his subjects with eyes open or closed, gazing forward or looking down. Kami s focus on each individual s face reveals an inner life beneath immediate appearancess a feat that is particularly resonant in the context of contemporary portraiture.

Rendered in oil paint on linen, the portraits also recall Byzantine frescoes or Fayum funerary portraits, continuing the art historical quest to locate the unknown and the infinite within material form. In his abstract work, Kami continues this interplay of surface and interior, using forms inspired by architecture, geometry, and poetry. In the Endless Prayers series, prayers and verses in Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit are cut into rectangular fragments and pasted into mandala formations, their spiraling patterns echoing the repetitive nature of prayer. Comprised of square or rectangular marks arranged in concentric circles, the Dome paintings create tessellated, pulsing voids as if passing from darkness into light.

Schjeldahl provides a sharp perspective on individual artists, their work, art-world events and ethics, and new, creative directions. Above all, he challenges established views, infecting readers with his passion for art. "To read Schjeldahl is not to agree or disagree, but rather to enter the enchanting flow of a fertile imagination".--Art in America. (HC:1991)