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.

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articles in full, published in an illustrated paperback book with a facsimile of the 1955 M.A. thesis presented as an historical document showing all the nuances of his typewriter.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.

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.

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.

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.

The accompanying volume to an exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's personal collection, held at Gagosian Gallery, New York. Expanding upon the exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York (2011), this book doubles as an accompanying "reader" and features works by over sixty-five artists from Rauschenberg's collection, including Joseph Beuys, Mathew Brady, Alexander Calder, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Henri Matisse, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. Art historian and scholar Robert Storr contributes an essay focusing on Rauschenberg's inspirations, friendships, and affinities as well as their myriad of interrelations. Biographies of each artist written by Mimi Thompson complement the illustrations of artworks and rare archival photographs, and show the influence of the artist's work within Rauschenberg's unique collection.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

Gerhard Richter is one of the most influential artists of modern times. His painting "September" is a response to the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, made some four years after the event. The eminent American critic and curator Robert Storr, who has had a long working relationship with Richter, explores both the painting and the event itself, through a very personal account of his experience of being in New York on the day of the bombing. Storr shows, through words, details and comparative illustrations, how this painting is part of a current running throughout Richter's career that responds to traumatic and controversial events, including works based on the bombing of cities in World War II and the capture of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group. It comes with a foreword by Sir Brian Urquhart.

In 1981, The Stuart Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to funding experimental public sculpture, and the University of California, San Diego formed an extraordinary partnership to create a major public, site-specific sculpture collection with works throughout the campus. This collection has played an important role in the arena of public art. Instead of asking artists to create an object, without reference to the site, they ask that each artist explore the campus carefully, and create a site-specific piece that could be integrated into the beautifully landscaped, 1,200-acre UCSD campus in La Jolla. The collection now includes 20 works by some of the most important contemporary artists, including William Wegman, Bruce Nauman, Kiki Smith, Robert Irwin, Do Ho Suh and Mark Bradford, among others. Landmarks is an updated edition of the only book focused on this premier collection of site specific public art. The catalogue features an essay from an interview with the collection's founding director, Mary Beebe; an essay on the importance of the collection by Rob Storr; and in-depth interviews with the 20 artists featured in the collection and two artists whose work is underway. Published in association with the Stuart Collection.

The fourth volume of the John Baldessari Catalogue Raisonne comprises approximately 370 works that represent the activity of this iconic conceptual artist between 1994 and 2004. Here, John Baldessari (b. 1931) continues to interrogate the possibilities of photographic appropriation, further developing his unique strategies for the production of meaning and narrative within the picture frame. Included in this crucial volume is the landmark Goya series, which shows the artist revisiting his characteristic photo-text pieces established early in his career. In the serial trio Overlap, Intersection,and Junction, produced between 2000 and 2002, Baldessari riffs on the notion of pictorial space, with each series building on the preceding one. Along with a full chronology, an essay contributed by the eminent critic Robert Storr closely examines a selection of these works, articulating their place within the evolution of the artist's career and their much broader historical climate. Published in association with Marian Goodman Gallery

One of the most innovative, provocative, and influential of America's contemporary artists, Bruce Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California--first as a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, then living in and around San Francisco. This splendidly illustrated book explores Nauman's relationship to the place where he created his earliest and most strikingly original works during the mid to late 1960s. "A Rose Has No Teeth "demonstrates that Nauman established much of his artistic vocabulary during this period and that he laid the groundwork for fundamental ideas he addressed throughout his oeuvre, such as the role of the artist, the function of art, and the primacy of the idea over its form. Curator Constance M. Lewallen describes how the late 1960s were not only a time of political and social change in the San Francisco Bay Area; this was also a watershed period in art internationally, when Minimalism gave way to Post-minimalism and Conceptual Art, expanding into performance, film and video, installation, text works, and the photographic documents. This book shows that Nauman was at the forefront of these revolutionary changes and almost single-handedly redefined what it meant to be an artist.
"Copub: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive"

The first comprehensive monograph on painter and poet Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922-1993), a major contributor to postwar American art, known for his unique, bold style of painterly representation. De Niro was a visionary artist in the early days of Abstract Expressionism and a celebrated member of the New York School of painters, along with Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Over the course of his fifty-year career, he painted portraits, still lifes, the female nude, and interiors with a signature gestural painting style and brilliant color, which bear the influence of Henri Matisse as well as his teacher, Hans Hofmann. During the height of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in the 1960s, De Niro remained faithful to his own vision in his paintings and poetry; today his powerful figural works are ripe for rediscovery. This lavishly illustrated book brings together De Niro s paintings, prints, and drawings as well as a never-before-published selection of his writings and poetry. Featuring essays by noted scholars and an illustrated biography including many unpublished photographs and ephemera, this seminal volume explores the depth and breadth of De Niro s oeuvre.

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)

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.