There is no easy way to define Franz West's art: it is fundamentally sculptural in its construction, veers frequently toward the biomorphic and prosthetic, mines the intellectualism of Freud and Wittgenstein, and possesses an awkward beauty that speaks with equal fluency to the tradition of painterly abstraction and the aesthetics of trash art. West's distinctive vision has resulted in one of the most remarkable bodies of work produced since the 1960s. This book, with more than 160 color images, offers a comprehensive look at West's work from the 1970s to the present. A unique blend of illustration, essays, interviews, and artist's pages, it accompanies a major retrospective organized by The Baltimore Museum of Art, and includes a new piece created specifically for the exhibition. 
Emerging from Vienna's confrontational performance art scene led by the Actionists during the 1960s, West believed from the beginning that physical engagement is an essential function of the art experience. This is clear both in his Adaptives (Paßstück) series (begun in 1974), human-scaled sculptures made of plaster to be held and worn by museum visitors, and in his later installations incorporating cabinets, tables, and chairs. Interaction is no less a premise in West's more recent large-scale outdoor sculptures: a series of brightly painted aluminum works adorning public plazas throughout Europe and the United States. 
The book mixes intense visual content with critical commentary, an interview with the artist, a concentrated section on West's working methods, an artist's response to the work through words and images, and an extensive chronology and bibliography.

Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work 1972–2008

Arts & Photography

Alexander, Darsie

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

<div>A strikingly original exploration of the profound impact of World War II on how we understand the art that survived it By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects--including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica--their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic implications of maintaining the association between the works and their place within the brutality of the Holocaust--or, conversely, the implications of ignoring this history. &nbsp; Afterlives offers a thought-provoking investigation of the unique ability of art and artifacts to bear witness to historical events. With rarely seen archival photographs and with contributions by the contemporary artists Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim, this catalogue illuminates the study of a difficult and still-urgent subject, with many parallels to today's crises of art in war.</div>

Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art

Sackeroff, Sam

Yale University Press

Marta Minujín

Shaykin, Rebecca

Alonso, Rodrigo

Jewish Museum

Markert, Emily

Minujín, Marta

Spanning 170 years, from William Henry Fox Talbot's first negative to Jeff Wall's latest constructed tableau, Singular Images collects thought-provoking essays on individual photographs, one image per writer. The essayists consider, sometimes in highly personal ways, the artist's intention, their own response, the work's technical complexities, its historical context or its formal properties. Each text captures a sense of how challenging it is to create a perfect single piece. Art photography has been increasingly well-surveyed in recent years, but individual works have rarely been written about at length, perhaps because of lingering doubt that a single photograph can command the kind of sustained attention often given to individual paintings or sculptures. Singular Images is a lively inquiry into the value of analyzing individual photographs, and it persuasively encourages the reader to engage at length and in depth with one remarkable piece at a time. With its broad scope and diverse range of issues, it can also be read as an informal--and thoroughly entertaining--introduction to art photography. Featuring essays by some of the most brilliant critical minds in the field, including David Campany on Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, Darsie Alexander on Nan Goldin and Liz Jobey on Diane Arbus.

Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs

Marien, Mary Warner

Warburton, Nigel

Jobey, Liz

Campany, David

Batchen, Geoffrey

Wagstaff, Sheena

Willsdon, Dominic

Williams, Val.

Hargreaves; Roger

Photography & Video

Aperture

The monograph presents two hundred paintings, sculptures and works on paper, as well as performance documentation and multimedia works. This handsome volume is published on the occasion of the exhibition organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, on the work and historical context of the Argentinian artist Marta Minujín (b. 1943), a central figure in the Latin American avant-garde. This heavily illustrated, beautifully designed monograph provides a overview of her career, traces intersections with American, European and Latin American developments in postwar art, and explores her contemporary relevance to the next generation of artists. This publication includes a major critical essay, "Arte! Arte! Arte! The Immersive World of Marta Minujín," by Darsie Alexander, chief curator at the Jewish Museum, surveying Minujín's art, practice, and influence; a second essay, "Rise Up and Live!", by the Argentinian journalist and curator Rodrigo Alonso, places Minujín in the political and historical context of Argentina in the years from the dictatorship of Juan Perón to the restoration of democracy and after. The book concludes with an interview with Minujín, "Art Protects Me," focusing on the artworks she created during the Covid pandemic of 2020-21. The volume is illustrated extensively throughout with Minujín's artworks, her performance pieces and happenings, large-scale public works, and images of her at work. Initially positioned as Argentina's "answer to Pop art," Marta Minujín remains a genre-defying artist who has produced some of the most experimental work of her generation. Extraordinarily versatile, Minujín's career has traversed major developments in postwar art while maintaining a singular vision and aesthetic. Actively involved in happenings and live events in the early 1960s and heir to an era of experimentation among artists in Argentina, Minujín quickly garnered the attention of an international cadre of artists and critics. As Minujín lived through military dictatorships in her home country, her work became more socially engaged after the transition to democracy in 1983, igniting a new phase of large-scale public works; the famed Parthenon of Books (1983) was recreated to critical acclaim at Documenta 14 (2017).

Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!

Skira

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