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Pati Herling

Modern modern, is a group exhibition curated by Pati Hertling featuring works by 34 contemporary artists. Modern modern points to an emotional and aesthetic sensibility among the artists in the show, who are living and working mostly between Berlin and New York. Despite strong modernist references, stylistic classifications are of no importance in this show. The works are refreshingly unconcerned with the distinctions between 'figuration', 'abstraction' and the 'conceptual' and find another way to communicate their ideas and feelings about their subjects and the world around them. With colors dirty and drab, the absence of evident political commentary or shocking visuals, and an accent on the melancholic, the show is also reflection of the times we are living in right now.

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Jay Boyer

Sidney Lumet, director of landmark motion pictures such as The Pawnbroker, Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, and Network, has proven to be one of America's most enduring and diversified film directors. His singular career as a filmmaker - spanning more than forty years - has embraced both purely commercial projects and ones of enormous complexity and challenge. Lumet has distinguished himself as visionary while tackling every imaginable type of film. In this exhaustive new study of Lumet, Jay Boyer presents the most up-to-date and inclusive analysis yet of the director's films - moving far beyond the limited analyses previously published. Boyer employs an eclectic approach in his appraisal of Lumet, with a strong emphasis toward auteur methods of criticism. An extensively detailed examination of individual films from Lumet's early, middle and recent periods incorporates discussion of technique (camera placement, mise en scene, editing, etc.) in relation to the narrative idea. This probing of the relationship between form and idea is the essence of Boyer's study. He argues convincingly that while Lumet does not see himself as an auteur he is someone who has made a significant mark on motion picture art by making films with recurring ideas and motifs, while employing a restrained cinematic style that permits itself to remain subservient to the film narrative. Boyer also astutely observes and builds a case for Lumet as a director whose finest achievements place him inside a circle of filmmakers who belong to the New York School of Filmmaking. Along with those of his contemporaries John Frankenheimer, Delbert Mann, and Martin Scorsese, Lumet's films are often marked by their gritty, urban feel and air of authenticity. Boyer's study is frank in its appraisal of both the distinguished achievements and the shortcomings of Lumet's life work. Highly readable and lucid, it belies the critical assumptions generally applied to Lumet's films to enable a fuller appreciation of his worth.

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[Ausstellung und Katalog, Guido de Werd

"The Codices Madrid drawings come from a larger group that Beuys made during 1974 for a multiple, a facsimile sketchbook to be printed in a limited edition of one thousand copies. First broached in 1972 jointly by a German art dealer and a museum director, the project was conceived as a response to the recent rediscovery, in a library in Madrid where they had long been misfiled, of two "lost" notebooks by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci. Beuys made numerous studies and sketches in anticipation of his book, which was to be closely modeled on Leonardo's in terms of its size. Its cover, however, significantly departed from that of its predecessor, for Beuys used a design replicating an American schoolbook. With the crop marks for publication readily visible on many sheets, these drawings offer a comprehensive recapitulation and re-examination of motifs, ideas, and concepts that had centrally informed his aesthetic and practice over the previous twenty-five years." -- Excerpt from Introduction on the Dia Center for the Arts website (see link). A group of drawings, part of the "raw material" for a multiple that the German artist Joseph Beuys had produced four years earlier, was purchased by Dia Center for the Arts in 1979. One of a number of major pieces in Dia's collection by this seminal postwar German artist, it forms the object of study and documentation in this publication. Also available in German.

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Bruce Altshuler

The avant-garde is a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to address a far larger audience than ever before, and it was one on whose understanding they could no longer depend. Aesthetic concerns, too, had shifted from representing visual phenomena to reconfiguring the visible world in new and complicated ways. The public was rarely amused. Indeed, as these newer forms of art were presented in now famous exhibitions, derision and anger were the customary responses of the public and the critics. Artists formed more or less cohesive groups of like-thinking individuals who styled themselves the "avant-garde," really a military term for those pathfinders who first venture into unknown or enemy territory. Through photographs of personalities, installations, and works of art, and in a lively text that recounts the artistic thinking and the gossip that surrounded each new movement, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century traces this phenomenon from its beginnings in the Fauvist Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 through such notorious events as the exhibitions of the Section d'Or (Paris) and the Blue Rider (Munich), the Armory Show (New York), the Futurist 0-10 exhibition (Petrograd), the Dada Fair (Berlin), the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich), the First Papers of Surrealism (New York), Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (New York), the Ninth Street Show (New York), the Gutai Art Association (Japan), Le Vide (Paris), Full-Up (Paris), the New Realists (New York), Primary Structures (New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern).