Modern modern

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John Szarkowski

Originally published in 1973, this marvelous collection of photographs with accompanying texts by the revered late Museum of Modern Art photography curator John Szarkowski has long been recognized as a classic. Reissued in 1999-with new digital duotones-this volume is now available to a new generation of readers. "This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide the material for simple delectation," says Szarkowski in his introduction to this first survey of The Museum of Modern Art's photography collection. A visually splendid album, the book is both a treasury of remarkable photographs and a lively introduction to the aesthetics and the historical development of photography. Since 1930, when the Museum accessioned its first photograph, it has assembled an extraordinary and wide-ranging collection of pictures for preservation, study and exhibition. Among the outstanding figures represented here are Hill and Adamson, Cameron, O'Sullivan, Atget, Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand, Weston, Kertész, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Lange, Brassaï, Ansel Adams, Shomei Tomatsu, Frank, Arbus and Friedlander.

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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).

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[Redaktion, Martin Engler

"Made in Germany offers a comprehensive survey of contemporary art in Germany. At its core are fifty-two young artists living and working in Germany, about half of whom are from abroad and all of whom are among the promising newcomers of the international art scene. In looking at questions of artistic identity, Made in Germany no longer simply considers the birthplace and biography of the artists, but also the context of where the work itself is produced. This is the first time that modern German art has been clearly examined to this great an extent as a weave of national particularities and cultural exchange." "This volume provides concise insights into the complete oeuvres of all the artists, as well as an informative comparison of the individual artists and each of their different regional and biographical contexts."--Jacket.

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preface by Josef Helfenstein

In the early 1970s, Rauschenberg moved his permanent studio from New York City to Captiva Island, off the Gulf coast of Florida (Today, this site is in use as the artists' residency program of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation). This relocation marked a shift from the gritty urban detritus that had been the basis of much of the earlier work to a rhapsodic embrace of color and geometric abstraction in a wholly new vernacular language. The Jammers series (1975-76), its title a direct reference to the Windjammer sailing vessel, is Rauschenberg?s salute to his new island life. In 1975, he also went to India to investigate textiles and papermaking, and the inspiration of this new and exotic context is evident in the use of vivid colors and nuanced textures of cotton, muslin, and silk. For the most part, the Jammers comprise stitched fabrics in pure, solid colors, affixed to rattan poles or hung directly and loosely on the wall; whereas in works such as Sprout (1975) and Caliper (1976), the unadorned poles are the principal formal element, propped against the wall. Departing from Rauschenberg's densely collaged imagery or muscular, layered materials, the Jammers are simple and light, focusing on the transparency and seductiveness of veil-like fabrics, that are lent sculptural structure by the cloth-covered poles or other found objects. In Quarterhorse (1975), segments of blue, green, tan and yellow cloth evoke sandy beaches, palm trees, and bright sunshine. In Index (1976), widths of gleaming azure and white satin drape together, a diptych of clouds and sea. The hot, saturated hues of Pimiento III (1976) and Mirage (1976) attest to more exotic influences; while Coin (1976) incorporates found tin cans, stripped of their labels, gleaming mysteriously inside a gauze bag that sags under their weight.--Gagosian website.