Vasya (Video Sitni .S58 .V389 2002 DVD) Vasiliy Sitnikov is a man without a passport, officially declared insane and having spent his life in and out of mental institutions. Yet, he is the key figure of the non-conformist art movement in the former Soviet Union.
Edward Hopper (Video .H75 E38 2007 DVD) new documentary produced by the National Gallery of Art features archival footage of Edward Hopper (1882–1967), including places that inspired him in New York and New England, his boyhood home in Nyack, and his studio on Washington Square, where he lived and worked for more than 50 years. Narrated by actor and art collector Steve Martin, this film traces Hopper’s varied influences, from French impressionism to the gangster films of the 1930s. Artists Red Grooms and Eric Fischl discuss Hopper’s influence on their careers.
Alex Katz: What About Style (Video Katz .K33 .A43 2008 DVD) For over 50 years, painter Alex Katz has bucked the trends and fashions of modern art to present his own style of figure painting. His flat, elegant, and realistic style makes him a pioneer in figure painting but an unsung hero to the general public. What About Style? offers an unflinching portrait of a maverick artist.
Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think (Video Nauma .N38 B776 2008x DVD) Visit the challenging world of Bruce Nauman, a multi-faceted artist who believes that the importance of a work of art is in the process of making it. With this philosophy at the core of his work, he became a major player in the conceptual art movements of the 20th century.
Gustav Courbet (Video Courb .C9 G87 2007 DVD) In Gustave Courbet, French filmmaker Romain Goupil gets at the heart of this legendary artist and uncovers what drove him to pursue the controversial style known as realism. Painting with passion and purpose, he walked a decidedly different path than other artists who chose the academy style that was the standard for the day.
Louise Bourgeois (Video Bourg .B65 .L68 2008 DVD) Sculptor Louise Bourgeois lifts the veil on her life and work in this revealing portrait of a modern artist. Focusing on themes of sexuality, femininity, and isolation, her work has been associated with all the major artistic movements of the 20th century, but Bourgeois never let her work get stalled by the tenets and dogma of any one movement. In a career that spanned 50 years, she was always at the vanguard, moving from painting to sculpture and finally to performance art
The seminal Ferus Gallery groomed the LA art scene from a loose band of idealistic beatniks into a coterie of competitive, often brilliant artists, including Ed Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Craig Kauffman, Wallace Berman, Ed Moses and Robert Irwin. The Ferus also served as launching point for New York imports, Andy Warhol (hosting his first Soup Can show), Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein as well as leading to the first Pop Art show and Marcel Duchamp’s first retrospective. What was lost and gained is tied up in a complex web of egos, passions, money, and art.
In the span of only a few months, 4-year-old Marla Olmstead rocketed from total obscurity into international renown – and sold over $300,000 dollars worth of paintings. She was compared to Kandinsky and Pollock, and called “a budding Picasso.” But not all of the attention was positive. From the beginning, many faulted her parents for exposing Marla to the glare of the media and accused the couple of exploiting their daughter for financial gain. Others felt her work was, in fact, comparable to the great Abstract Expressionists – but saw this as emblematic of the meaninglessness of Modern Art. And then, five months into Marla’s new life as a celebrity and just short of her fifth birthday, a bombshell dropped. CBS’ 60 Minutes aired an exposé suggesting strongly that the paintings were painted by her father, himself an amateur painter.
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.
Executive Producer of the series. “Viewers can discover what goes on inside the minds of these dynamic and thoughtful people, and what they have to say can significantly expand our knowledge and understanding of the world.”
the influences and secrets behind many of Picasso’s masterworks. In this documentary, John Richardson, biographer and friend of Picasso, looks at the impact the themes of magic, sex, and death had on the artist’s life and work. ”
perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Through an ingenious use of camera and flashbacks, Kurosawa reveals the complexities of human nature as four people recount different versions of the story of a man’s murder and the rape of his wife. Toshiro Mifune gives another commanding performance in the eloquent masterwork that revolutionized film language and introduced Japanese cinema to the world.” Read Stephen Prince’s 
proposed museum in Paris. The museum was never built, but The Gates of Hell became Rodin’s most ambitious endeavor, taking over twenty years to complete.
Over the past two years the five-part exhibition cycle of the 
“A key aim of Expanded Paint Tools is to demonstrate that painting is an established part of contemporary art. There has always been painting – and talk of a rebirth of painting seems illogical to me, as it has never ceased to be something artists did. At times it was more popular, at others less popular. Sometimes the public couldn’t get enough of it, at others they ignored it.
dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its pivotal role in contemporary global society. Moving through human history from the cave paintings at Lascaux, to the ’stealth technologies’ deployed in contemporary warfare, this book shows how resistance to speed and movement has consistently been eroded. 
dimensional space by Einsteinian space/time as it is related to the transparent boundaries of the postmodern city and contemporary economy. Virilio imagines a coming world of interactive, informational networks offering a prison-house of illusionary transcendence. He pictures global terrorism (perpetrated by and against technological states) filling up the surreal void of an abandoned real. In a multidisciplinary excavation of contemporary physics, architecture, esthetic theory, and sociology, Virilio traces the dystopic unity of the contemporary Western predicament.
so on) has surpassed the static nature of the visual arts. Digital technology has replaced the analogical and art has become extra-retinal. Something has been lost in the arts of the 20th century and their very success is their failure. Rather than a condemnation, this critique is always positive. It reveals something that otherwise would not have been perceived, and acknowledging it is a sign of hope. The accident of art announces a reversal of the tendencies and values traditionally associated with art.
Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers
“From its beginnings as a royal fortress to the magnificent structure we see today, the Louvre Museum embodies the concept of that of a universal institution. Dedicated to conservation, restoration and the development of artistic treasures from all over the world, the Louvre welcomes over 6 million visitors through its doors each year and houses 35,000 works of art.
From 
connection between post-impressionist master Paul Cézanne — credited by many as the father of modern art — and his native Provence, illuminating how the region and its history fostered the painter’s genius. Featuring footage of some of the same locales made timeless by Cézanne and his work, Cézanne in Provence was inspired by the major international exhibition of the same name.
From PBS’s 
Travelling around the country, Art City: Simplicity takes viewers on a revealing trip into the studios and lives of a group of singular artists. On a desert mesa outside Santa Fe, Richard Tuttle invents his mysterious and marvellously humble forms, made of wire, cardboard, wood. In Taos, Agnes Martin rhythmically repeats extremely simplified images. Near the Santa Monica surf, John Baldessari, aims for successful juxtapositions of photographs and text. In his North Hollywood living room, Robert Williams revels in surreal cartoon imagery. At a cabin in Woodstock, Joan Snyder refines her sensuous art amid a lush forest. Mike Bidlo salutes Duchamp in a SoHo Gallery, while on Sunset Boulevard, Amy Adler reclaims personal history through self-portraits. Through this group of memorable iconoclasts, the creative ìactî is there to see and study. Along with writer Dave Hickey, and others, Simplicity addresses artists’ relations with the press, feelings about showing oneís work, distilling concepts into an essence, and what it means to succeed in the artworld.
Many artists use the pain, exhilaration and resolution of private desires to express themselves. Art City: A Ruling Passion focuses on intense personalities who’ve used their art to explore the emotional impact of psychological truths. Everything that Louise Bourgeois creates – whether in marble, fabric or bronze – comes from memory. Michael Ray Charles investigates the marketing of black memorabilia, using early American advertising imagery. Elizabeth Peyton reinvents portraiture, using her friends as subjects, as well as pop culture royalty. Ed Ruscha’s literary landscapes burst from the physical world ìright outside the window.î The comic spirit of Lari Pittman contrasts with his graphic declarations. In a landmark house, Richmond Burton remembers his dreams to build “psychic fields” of abstraction. The arrays of featureless faces by David Deutsch are stimulated by sub-conscious sensations. Along with writer Dave Hickey and others, A Ruling Passion plumbs issues that affect artists – preoccupations of startling universality – like community, motivation and controversy, finding oneís audience, and just ìgetting it right.
Okwui Enwezor, Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute and past Artistic Director of Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002, the catalogue traces the formal and conceptual transformation of Campos-Pons’ work in relation to contemporary aesthetic practices and serves as a resource for specialists in the field of contemporary, African Diasporic, Caribbean, and African American art and culture. The hardcover catalogue is 184 pages in length and features 58 color and 7 black-and-white illustrations.
because I create my pictures with the remains and dead parts of other artists’ works.” So says the rising London painter, Glenn Brown, while essayist Tom Morton likens Brown’s canvases to a zombie comedy. Thus, “Theater” is a half-length portrait of a skeleton whose bones resemble a slimy organic mass of meat, paste and raspberry ice cream, while the sad mutant heads in “Asylums of Mars” and “The Hinterland” look as if they were bred in a mad geneticist’s laboratory. In this monograph, six recent works are presented on deluxe tipped-in color plates, each accompanied by a detail that reveals Brown’s technique: the artist fills his grounds with flowing whirlpools of shifting colors–but what initially look like thick brushstrokes are revealed upon closer examination to be very thin layers of paint that could almost be mistaken for photographs or digitally manipulated prints.”
show in Boston in 1964. The following year she was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and others, in the First International Girlie Exhibit, a survey of the influence of the “pinup girl” on contemporary art at the recently opened Pace Gallery in New York. I am the Beautiful Stranger reexamines the distinct contributions Drexler made as the Pop Art Movement was coalescing. As early as 1960, Drexler was using the icons of Pop Culture as the organizing subject matter of her work. Images of gangster B-movies, tabloid journalism, and pulp detective novels were collaged directly onto the canvases and then entirely “re-painted” to create the kind of graphically transformed and narratively intensified work associated with the great pioneers of art in the early sixties. Drexler went on to hone her technique to powerfully expose society’s raw nerves in her emotionally charged, ambiguous scenes of sex, violence and the isolation of man in the 20th century.
story of Pinocchio written by Carlo Collodi, an author and journalist, first appeared in 1881 as a serial in an Italian newspaper. The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet became a book in 1883 and the celebrated Walt Disney film version premiered in 1941. Since he was six years old and saw the Disney adaptation, Dine has been fascinated with the subject. A little more than twenty years later the artist bought a figurine of the puppet and he has continually explored the subject in the decades since through photographs, drawing, sculpture, and painting. Jim Dine: Pinocchio is a culmination of this investigation. The new work represents Dine’s most physical exploration of the subject and perhaps his most radical treatment of material in a series.
politics, reclaiming ‘aesthetics’ from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance for contemporary experience. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics ranges across art and politics, the uses and abuses of modernity, the role of visual technologies, the relationship between history and fiction, utopias, the avant-garde and the three aesthetic regimes which constitute the ‘partitions of the sensible.’ Already translated into five languages, this English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics includes a new afterword by Slavoj Zizek and a new interview with Ranciere.”
context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the “affective” quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. 
Are viewers inured–or incited–to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In 
research and entertaining anecdotal material, Guffey unearths the roots of the term “retro” and chronicles its evolving manifestations in culture and art throughout the last century. Whether in art, design, fashion, or music, the idea of retro has often meant a reemergence of styles and sensibilities that evoke touchstones of memory from the not-so-distant past, ranging from the drug-induced surrealism of psychedelic art to the political expression of 1970s afros. Guffey examines how and why the past keeps coming back to haunt us in a variety of forms, from the campy comeback of art nouveau nearly fifty years after its original decline, to the infusion of art deco into the kitschy glamor of pop art, to the recent popularity of 1980s vogue. She also considers how advertisers and the media have employed the power of such cultural nostalgia, using recycled television jingles, familiar old advertising slogans, and famous art to sell a surprising range of products. 
English has no word for the visual counterpart to literacy, Heffernan argues that the capacity to interpret pictures must be cultivated and deserves a name: picturacy. Using examples such as the pre-historic cave paintings of Lascaux, film versions of Frankenstein, the provocative photographs of Sally Mann, and the abstract canvases of Gerhard Richter, the volume illustrates how learning to decode the language of pictures resembles the process of learning to read. While words typically frame and regulate our experience of art, the study also explains how pictures can contest the authority of the words we use to interpret art. 
speculates on the allure of these and other iconic images of the Kennedys, using them to illuminate the entire American cultural landscape. He draws from a spectacularly varied intellectual and visual terrain–neoclassical painting, Victorian poetry, modern art, Hollywood films, TV sitcoms–to show how the public came to identify personally with the Kennedys and how, in so doing, they came to understand their place in the world. This heady mix of art history, cultural history, and popular culture offers an evocative, consistently entertaining look at twentieth-century America. 
shadow of her departing lover on the wall in an act that anticipates future grief and commemoration. Lisa Saltzman shows here that nearly two thousand years after this story was first told, contemporary artists are returning to similar strategies of remembrance, ranging from vaudevillian silhouettes and sepulchral casts to incinerated architectures and ghostly processions. Exploring these artists’ work, Saltzman demonstrates that their methods have now eclipsed painting and traditional sculpture as preeminent forms of visual representation. She pays particular attention to the groundbreaking art of Krzysztof Wodiczko, who is known for his projections of historical subjects; Kara Walker, who creates powerful silhouetted images of racial violence in American history; and Rachel Whiteread, whose work centers on making casts of empty interior spaces. Each of the artists Saltzman discusses is struggling with the roles that history and memory have come to play in an age when any historical statement is subject to question and doubt. In identifying this new and powerful movement, she provides a framework for understanding the art of our time.
Drucker’s “sweet dream” is for a new and more positive approach to contemporary art. Calling for a revamping of the academic critical vocabulary used to discuss art into one more befitting current creative practices, Drucker argues that contemporary art is fully engaged with material culture—yet still struggling to escape the oppositional legacy of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation—all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism’s avant-garde. At the cutting edge of new media research, Drucker surveys a wide range of exciting contemporary artists, demonstrating their clear departure from the past and petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well. 
Jeff Wall’s ( 
The Museum of Modern Art and Creative Time, the New York-based public art organization, jointly commissioned Doug Aitken to create the artist’s first large-scale public artwork in the United States. The project (Sleepwalkers) was also the first to bring art to MoMA’s exterior walls, with continuous sequences of film scenes projected onto seven facades outside the museum, including those overlooking The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Inspired by the densely built environment of New York’s midtown, the artist will create a cinematic art experience that directly integrates with the architectural fabric of the city while simultaneously enhancing and challenging viewers’ perceptions of public space.
The book Sleepwalkers ( 
Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella
Gerhard Richter: Portraits
Heribert C. Ottersbach: Works 1995-2006
Idyll: Illusion and Delusion
Simply the most complete view to date of the work of this preeminent figure in the art of our time, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years ( 
than 80 medieval sculpted heads, half from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and half selected loans from American and European collections. Because historical events isolated these objects from their original settings, they became objects that could be collected, and objects whose lost histories curators and scholars would hope to recover. The exhibition considers several artistic and historic themes, including: the destruction of statues as an act of iconoclasm, the evolving notions of the “portrait,” the use of science in the search for provenance, and more. Created from materials as diverse as marble, limestone, polychromed wood, and silver gilt, the carved heads date from the third century A.D. through the early 1500s and represent French, German, Italian, Spanish, Byzantine, English, and other medieval sculptural traditions. The exhibition draws together science, connoisseurship, archaeology, and history to examine these stunning works from different points of reference. The Met’s webpage for this exhibition (including images and audiofiles) can be found 
The Radical Theatre of Alfred Leslie ( 
Organized by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), Vermillion Editions Limited: Prints, Multiples, Artist’s Books, 1977–1992 (
L’Odysee de Jim Dine — A Survey of Printed Works from 1985-2006 ( 
Contributors give context, analyze the national audience created by special exhibition programs, and offer case studies ranging from Canada’s printmaking program during World War I to prints of rural Southern women and the early lithographs of Yasuo Kumiyoshi. They cover precisionism in the 1920s and 1930s, the scene above and below the streets of New York, the Syracuse printmakers, and the memories of Herbert Pullinger, Abe Blashko, Mark Freeman and Charles Keller.
The Expanded Eye: Stalking the Unseen by Bice Curiger
The paintings on display were selected according to two main criteria. Firstly, the exhibition concentrates entirely on the image of human beings; secondly, it is strictly limited to contemporary production. „Young art instead of young artists” is the motto. The age of the artist was not the deciding factor in the selection process, but the dating of the piece. All the paintings in the show were produced in the 21st century.The exhibition spawns interesting discourses between the different generations that it encompasses: the most recent works of predecessors and successors, teachers and students are displayed side by side. The paintings spanning from the exhibition’s oldest artist, Maria Lassnig (born 1919), to the youngest, Johannes Tiepelmann (born 1979), form a colorful kaleidoscope of figurative painting in the 21st century.”
Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries by David Carrier
The sight of death : an experiment in art writing by T. J. Clark
Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael G. Kammen
Talking Prices : Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art by Olav Velthuis
Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America by Sarah Burns
grandest architectural undertaking of the High Renaissance—Scotti (Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938) shows how the construction fed the ambitions of 30 popes, including the indomitable Julius II, who laid the first stone in 1506; Leo X, the Medici pope whose extravagant spending fueled the resentment toward the papacy that culminated in the Protestant Reformation; Clement VII, on whose watch Rome was sacked by Emperor Charles V; and Sixtus V, who restored the ravaged city and pushed, against all odds, to have the great dome completed during his lifetime. In 1506, the great architect Donato Bramante envisioned a gigantic central crossing topped by a dome of such daring design that many believed it could not be built. Throughout the 100 years of construction, numerous architects, most of them consumed with pride, lofty ambition and professional jealousy, followed. Among them were Raphael, who died at age 37; Michelangelo, who accepted the job reluctantly at the age of 71; and Giacomo della Porta, who, in 1590, succeeded in raising the grand cupola. All are brought to life in this fascinating tale of genius, power and money. — Publishers Weekly Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This major museum exhibition, which premiered at the National Gallery of Art, is the first in the United States to focus exclusively on Dada, one of the twentieth century’s most influential avant-garde art movements. Responding to the disasters of World War I and to an emerging modern media and machine culture, Dada artists led a creative revolution that profoundly shaped the course of subsequent art. Dada was a defiantly international movement, the first to self-consciously position itself as an expansive network crossing countries and continents. Born in neutral Zurich and New York, two cities that served as independent points of origin for the movement, Dada rapidly spread to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, Paris, and beyond. This exhibition surveys the many forms of Dada artistic production as developed in the movement’s six primary city centers and features over four hundred works in a dynamic multimedia installation that includes collages, films, paintings, photographs, printed matter, sound recordings, and sculpture. Among the nearly fifty artists represented are Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Sophie Taeuber, along with a number of less familiar individuals associated with the movement.
modernization and industrialization,” was not confined to progress-embracing New York but, rather, was intrinsic to the much-mythologized western expansion. As technology in the form of the rifle, railroad, telegraph, automobile, and industrialized agricultural and mining practices bolstered the war against American Indians and transformed nature, painters and photographers responded to these epic changes in modes ranging from romantic to radical. Barry Lopez sets the historic, moral, and aesthetic markers for this beautifully mind-expanding volume in his opening essay. Neff then launches her gracefully lucid and remarkably informative running commentary, vividly profiling diverse artists and presenting fresh analysis of their interpretations of the grandeur and desolation of the West. Sharpened appreciation for Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Ansel Adams, and Georgia O’Keeffe is linked to Neff’s broadly illuminating discussions of many others, including Laura Gilpin, who photographed the West for 60 years, and the painters Arthur Wesley Dow, Marsden Hartley, and Alexandre Hogue. Neff’s inspired overview creates a new and dynamic perspective on America’s land and art. — Booklist Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
