Michael Simpson: Flat Surface Painting

Arts & Photography

Burnett, Craig

History & Criticism

Spike Island

Gregory Crewdson: In a Lonely Place

Photography & Video

Harry N. Abrams

Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913--1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him -- along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline -- an influential abstract expressionist of the "gestural" tendency. In the late 1960s, with works like T he Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing "coolness" of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for these late works a cast of cartoon-like characters to articulate a vision that was at once comic, crude, and complex. In The Studio, Guston offers a darkly comic portrait of the artist as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman, painting a self-portrait. 
In this concise and generously illustrated book, Craig Burnett examines The Studio in detail. He describes the historical and personal motivations for Guston's return to figuration and the (mostly negative) critical reaction to the work from Hilton Kramer and others. He looks closely at the structure of The Studio, and at the influence of Piero della Francesca, Manet, and Krazy Kat, among others; and he considers the importance of the column of smoke in the painting -- as a compositional device and as a ghost of abstraction and metaphysics. The Studio signals not only Guston's own artistic evolution but a broader shift, from the medium-centric and teleological claim of modernism to the discursive, carnivalesque, and mucky world of postmodernism.

Philip Guston: The Studio (Afterall Books / One Work)

Afterall Books

"I don't paint but I began as a painter. I take the term "painter" as figurative.... Painter can mean 'maker' in that sense."  -Jeff Wall in conversation with David ShapiroBorn in 1946 in British Columbia, Jeff Wall has shown internationally for the last 25 years and is one of the most intriguing and influential artists working today. His signature works are large-scale narrative photographs in the form of backlit transparencies mounted in light boxes, like bus stop advertisements. Rather than advertising products, Wall's photographs celebrate moments of everyday life, often ones he has observed while driving around the streets of his native Vancouver, and then re-created using actors. His use of the light box as a medium has been copied by many younger artists, and his theoretical writings on photography are widely admired. This book is part of a Tate Publishing series focused on living artists. Generously illustrated, accessible, and affordable, the Modern Artists series will build to become an essential reference for all those interested in contemporary visual culture.

Jeff Wall (Modern Artists)

Individual Artists

Tate Gallery

Structure and Absence

White Cube

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Books by Burnett, Craig