The felt hat

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Stefan Sharff

One of the most popular thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock's middle years, Rear Window is now also recognized as one of the most brilliant demonstrations of the director's cinematic wizardry. Starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, with Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr in memorable supporting roles, the film centers on a photographer confined to a wheelchair in his apartment who, using binoculars, spies on his courtyard neighbors and witnesses a possible murder. This was not the first time Hitchcock challenged himself to build suspense when plot limited action to a small area, but it was the only time when the director's art in creating through a lens is so dramatically reflected in the very story he tells. The voyeur-hero is there to see for us, and the images he chooses to observe become the language of the movie, which is almost thirty-five percent silent. Stefan Sharff, professor emeritus of Columbia University's film department, shows us how Hitchcock achieved the mounting excitement and fear that mark this film. The author first provides a detailed overview of the director's skill in developing the story from intriguing start to shattering climax. In the second part of the book, he goes on to a shot-by-shot analysis; using the film's continuity as his text, he describes how hitchcock's technique accomplished its magic. Illustrated throughout with stills from the film, The Art of Looking is a unique appreciation of the art of Alfred Hitchcock, made even more valuable by the first publication in any form of the full dialogue of a screen masterpiece.

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Theodora Vischer and Heidi Naef

"Jeff Wall's large color transparencies set forth an imposing and seductive pictorial world. Ranging from the gritty realism of the city street to bizarre flights of fantasy, his photographs have won him wide recognition as one of the most adventurous and accomplished artists of the past three decades. This book accompanies a major retrospective jointly organized in 2007 by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Neal Benezra, Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Between showings in New York and San Francisco, the show visits The Art Institute of Chicago." "Born in 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he lives and works, Jeff Wall has charted an ambitious and unique path through the maze of contemporary art, drawing upon such diverse resources as Conceptual art, Neorealist cinema, philosophy, literature, critical theory, modernist photography, and the venerable tradition of European painting. The exhibition includes all of his major works to date, which are reproduced here along with several very recent pictures and a generous selection of artistic sources, cousins, and echoes. The latter are illustrations to Galassi's essay, which sketches the breadth and originality of Wall's artistic and intellectual universe and challenges conventional interpretations of his development and achievement. The book also includes an interview with the artist by James Rondeau, Frances & Thomas Dittmer Chairman, Department of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago."--Jacket.

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Sally Yard

Willem de Kooning arrived in the United Sates in 1926 as a twenty-two-year-old stowaway from Holland, soon to become a leading figure in the emergence of abstract expressionist painting in New York. This volume presents over 100 illustrations of every phase of de Kooning's artistic evolution, and explains the personal and art historical background behind his groundbreaking work and its critical reception. Author Sally Yard details the progress of de Kooning's career, from his brief stint as a WPA painter, to his first one-person exhibition of abstract work in 1948. Five years later, an exhibition of women painted in aggressive, lashing gestures stunned contemporaries, not only for the vehemence of the artist's attack, but also for the reversal of direction from abstraction to figuration. The alternation and intertwining of these two genres remained fundamental to de Kooning's work over six decades.

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Jerome Silbergeld and Dora C.Y. Ching

The calligrapher and book artist Xu Bing has been called the most innovative Chinese artist of our time. As a citizen of both China and the United States and the first Asian-American artist to win the prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award," Xu Bing has fascinated and challenged audiences around the world with his imaginative textual art. From his 4,000 unreadable Chinese-looking characters, which unite Asian and Western audiences alike in an egalitarianism of induced illiteracy, to his invention of a "square words" language that makes "Chinese" readable by anyone at all, Xu Bing's use of language is at once artistically brilliant, highly entertaining, and profoundly subversive--a sharp-witted, masterly word-play that, in his own words, "strikes at the very essence of culture."In exhibitions on four continents, Xu Bing's printed art, mixed-media installations, and performance pieces--from books and calligraphic sculptures to inscribed pigs--have fascinated specialists and general audiences alike and generated a growing body of literature. This volume presents the first multidisciplinary study of Xu Bing's art and its intellectual implications. Included is an illuminating account by Xu Bing of his own work, as well as essays by leading scholars in a number of different fields.The essays address the place of this work within the long history of Chinese calligraphic practice, examine it in the context of Chinese intellectual dissidence, discuss Japanese avant-garde parallels, and judge it from a Western art-historical viewpoint.