ART 103 Observational Drawing

Charles Avery has created an extraordinary and epic piece of artistic work, in which large format drawings and sculptures connect with and complement one another within a fictional narrative structure. Published to accompany the exhibition touring in 2010/11 to Le Plateau/Frac d'lle-de-France, Paris; Kunstverein Hannover; and Ex3 Centro per l'arte contemporanea, Florence. English, German, French and Italian text.

The artistic development of Willem de Kooning is explored here through a focus on his early drawings, many of which have never before been published, and most of which have not been on public view in decades. An accompanying text and chronology provide insight into de Kooning's ideas and the exhibitions and artists that might have influenced him during the 1930s-1950s.

This book of 85 drawings by Jim Dine illustrates the range and mastery of the artist's draftsmanship over more than four decades. The variety and breadth of the selection shows the intense way Dine observes the world around him and the excitement with which he records it on paper. Dine has said that his ability to draw is both a privilege and the result of hard physical training, compelling him to move inexorably forward to capture the next idea or the next psychological insight in drawings that are extraordinarily human.

In her expressionistic drawings and paintings of the last three decades, acclaimed South African artist Marlene Dumas has focused on the human figure, probing themes of love, despair, desire and confusion in order to critique social and political attitudes towards women, children, people of colour and others who have been historically victimized. This substantial, fully illustrated volume, was published on the occasion of Dumas's first major American survey.

Arshile Gorky (c. 1904-1948) was one of the central figures in American art's shift toward abstraction during the first half of the 20th century. Accompanying the first major retrospective of his work in almost thirty years, this stunning book traces the evolution of Gorky's arresting visual style. Nearly 200 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from all phases of his career, a number of which are published here for the first time, are beautifully reproduced.

South African artist William Kentridge is one of the most important contemporary artists at work today. Born in Johannesburg in 1955, his work draws on the traditions of early European modernism to provide a unique commentary on the political life of his home country and on power relationships in the wider world. He works in many different media, making prints, books, collage, tapestry, and sculpture, and even directing and designing operas at some of the world's leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

A genration after her death, German artist Kathe Kollwitz is winning a reputation as one of the great graphic artists of the 20th Century. Concentrating on the more "democratic" media-especially etchings, lithographs, posters, and woodcuts, as well as sculpture and bronze reliefs-Kollwitz always created for the people, rather than for the upper class collector. This original paperback is generously illustrated with many striking, seldom-see reproductions from private collections, assembled in one volume for the first time.

Life has taken Julie Mehretu from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to New York the long way. Now the New York Times writes that her canvases--multilayered, futuristic visual worlds where historical and fictional landscapes meet--"make history painting important again." Each one pulls from diverse sources, noteworthy among them Japanese manga, Chinese landscape art, Ethiopian illuminated books, Baroque engraving in the style of Dürer, graffiti and the geometric abstractions of Kazimir Malevich and Vasily Kandinsky. And they are often structured on architectural drawing, which appeals to Mehretu "because there is no way that you could make architecture that doesn't work."

"Best known for recasting familiar objects in unfamiliar textures, media, and dimensions, Claes Oldenburg has long challenged his audience to rethink the everyday with works such as French Fries and Ketchup (1963) and Soft Toilet (1966). Oldenburg's masterful drawings reveal another facet of this pioneering artist, inviting viewers to enter his "fantasy' as they explore Oldenburg's relationship with the medium, from sensitive early explorations to veteran campaigns as a refined and accomplished draftsman." "Drawing is crucial to Oldenburg's art: drawings note the beginning of an idea; they develop the thought; they give birth to his sculptures.

Acclaimed in the art world for his room-size installations of paintings, sculpture, and digital projections, Matthew Ritchie's work investigates architecture and the dynamics of culture. Named by Time magazine in 2001 as one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, his rich work draws from subjects as diverse as ancient myth and medieval alchemy to cutting-edge physics and contemporary politics.

"Cy Twombly's work realizes its most personal expression in his intimately sized drawings and paintings on paper. Finding inspiration as much in the forces of nature as in ancient epics and legend, and using the simplest of media - pencils, ballpoint pens, crayons, wall paint - he creates poetic and archaic worlds, usually in series and often as collages." "The eighty-four works in this retrospective, organized by the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, in 2003 to mark Twombly's seventy-fifth birthday, were collected from the artist's studio, and many have not been previously exhibited.

In association with the High Museum exhibition, Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic takes a fresh look at the work of one of America's most beloved artists.In examining his entire oeuvre, the book celebrates the artist's ongoing love affair with everyday life-domestic, natural, and architectural. Found throughout Wyeth's work, these objects form patterns that illuminate core themes and reveal the artist wrestling with issues of memory, temporality, embodiment, and the metaphysical. Organized chronologically and thematically, the book explores how the artist's approach to these subjects was formed in his early career, and has been revisited in new and surprising ways in recent years.Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic comprises 150 tempera paintings and 50 drawings and watercolors-including his most-famous works, but also many published here for the first time.

This volume provides an overview of 12 significant and internationally successful female artists. Within the context of the broad cultural shifts that occurred in 1970s America, many art historians and curators have questioned the exclusion of women from both the pantheon of famous artists and the display floors of contemporary museums. This work describes the impact of women artists on contemporary art since the advent of the feminist movement.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art began acquiring American drawings in 1880 and has since amassed a spectacular collection of more than 1,400 works in watercolor, pastel, ink, graphite, chalk, and charcoal. This beautifully produced catalogue, the first volume in a series devoted to the museum's rich holdings, presents works by artists born before 1835, including such great American artists as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, George Inness, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

"The art of drawing flourished in the 1990s, and broke significantly from the tenets of twentieth-century modernism. Drawing Now: Eight Propositions surveys this new work, and shows drawing as no less adventurous and aesthetically satisfying than any of the more recent and seemingly more current methods of artmaking today. Carefully executed and highly finished, the drawings explored in this book - which accompanies an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art (in its temporary home in Queens, New York) in 2002-2003 - are largely representational and descriptive, sometimes with an interest in story-telling."

Examining masterworks from the Museum's collection of nearly 7,000 works on paper in three chronological volumes beginning in the 1880s and continuing through today, "Drawing from the Modern reconsider artists' repudiation of traditional drafting methods, assault on the use of the single sheet of paper, and introduction of new materials. Going to the heart of avant-garde innovation, all three volumes showcase new formal strategies, including collage, abstraction, chance, and the integration of text and image, as well as new subject matter, including the urban experience, the body, and identity. Volume I, presented here, spans the period from 1880 to 1940, and includes work by such artists as Jean Arp, Hans Bellmer, Paul Cezanne, Arshile Gorky, Georgia O'Keeffe, Odilon Redon, andKurt Schwitters.

Visual art in the period following World War II witnessed enormous transformations. In an unexpected way, drawing provides a powerful and vigorous device for reexamining the art of the period--for renewing appreciation of the extraordinary achievements of well-known artists and for discovering others. Drawing is among the most traditional of mediums, but despite the radical departures and shifts in the art of these years, it played a crucial role in the work of the great majority of the most significant artists. Drawing from the Modern, Part 2, surveys the drawing of the period through the unparalleled holdings of the drawings collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

"Drawing from the Modern, 1975-2005, the final installment in a three-volume series surveying 125 years of modern drawing, attempts to tell a provisional story of the art of the last three decades as reflected through The Museum of Modern Art's singular collection of works on paper."

This companion to a public television series on the contemporary visual arts introduces some of the most interesting artists working in America today. In four sections -- on Identity, Place, Consumption, and Spirituality -- the authors explore such provocative issues as how artists address sexual or racial identity in their work, and how creativity is affected by changing notions of place in today's era of transnationalism and cyberspace.

This comprehensive and authoritative book illustrates art from the 1940's and stresses the individuality of the artists in relation to their political, social, and cultural contexts. The book focuses on the meaning of the major works and innovations. It features nearly 600 illustrations (approximately half in color) representing art since 1940, both in Europe and America.

Combines a review of contemporary artists with a 'how to draw' guide, celebrating drawing as the process of seeing made visible. Drawing Projects profiles ten key artists, revealing their working environments and practices, including Gavin Turk, Dryden Goodwin, Keith Tyson, Cornelia Parker, William Kentridge, Claude Heath, Tim Knowles and Zoe Mendelson.

Vitamin D offers a fresh and pioneering overview of the current state and underlying significance of drawing as an artistic medium. It highlights the originality and innovation with which contemporary artists in the genre - from across the world and in a vast variety of contexts - experiment with a diversity of styles and statements. Vitamin D features the work of 109 up-and-coming artists, selected by some of the world's foremost critics and curators of today for their unique outlook.

Through the work of minimalism's five key practitioners (Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol le Witt and Robert Morris), this book examines in words and pictures the defining characteristics, and the debates, of minimalist art.