This handsome volume, the catalogue of an exhibition at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the Munch Museet, Oslo, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, contains beautiful reproductions of 150 paintings, drawings and rarely seen photographic self-portraits of startling originality. The curator and scholar Iris Muller-Westermann sets them in context in her incisive account of the artist's life and career, and Merete Mazzarella examines how many of Munch's preoccupations remain relevant today. Edvard Munch: By Himself sheds light for the first time on the uniquely wide range of Munch's self-portraits, enabling us to trace the visual self-reflections of one of the most influential figures in modern art.

Munch by Himself

Müller-Westermann, Iris

Reference

Royal Academy Books

The relevance of the art of Max Ernst (1891-1976) has boomed again in recent years, as a younger generation of painters takes inspiration from his hallucinated image horde and embraces his example as an artist devoted to self-renewal and the realms of the fantastical. Rock musicians and writers as diverse as Mission of Burma, Thurston Moore and J.G. Ballard have also drawn fruitfully on his achievements. Ernst's German Romantic iconography, reconceived in the Surrealist looking glass, is endlessly suggestive and generative: nighttime forests, caves and cliffs, dead moonlight, spectral faces and figures all populate his scenarios, and his ongoing relevance is further assured by his combination of this iconography with techniques such as collage, frottage, grattage and decalcomania, several of which were his own innovations. Max Ernst: Dream and Revolution assesses the entirety of this unique career.

Max Ernst: Dream and Revolution

Spies, Werner

Hatje Cantz

The career of American artist Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was brief but extraordinarily intense. Throughout the 1960s, during the transition from Pop art to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and up until her self-imposed exile in the 1970s, Lozano created a genuinely radical and frequently obscene body of work that traversed a gamut of idioms. Her early paintings were executed in a messy cartoon style, oozing with violence and sexuality. By 1967, Lozano was responding to Minimalism and Op art with her abstract Wave paintings. It was also around this time that she initiated a series of actions that tested both the limits of art and acceptable conduct in society, such as smoking pot, masturbating and, mostly notoriously of all, boycotting women. This publication accompanies a retrospective of Lozano's works at Moderna Museet in Stockholm--works which after 40 years remain as witty, acerbic and shockingly fresh as ever.

Lee Lozano

Applin, Jo

Lippard, Lucy

Anyone who has stood underneath one of Louise Bourgeois' Mamans―her sculptures of spiders, symbolizing maternal protection―understands the singularity of her artistic approach. Stylistically, her pioneering body of work is complex: she deployed a wide variety of materials and practices―drawings, etchings, installations, works made of fabric, sculptures in wood, marble, bronze, latex, plaster and hemp―to address universal questions. This extensive monograph provides an overview of Bourgeois' artistic development, and presents a large number of works, including some that have never before been reproduced. The volume is grouped into themes that characterize her oeuvre, including memory, trauma, relationships, sexuality, fear and the difficulties of being an artist and mother at the same time. Personal photographs further document the artist's childhood and family life, with several letters and documents being made available for the first time. Born in Paris, where she studied with Fernand Léger, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) moved to New York in 1938, where her first solo exhibition was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1945. She quickly developed a sculptural vocabulary that drew inventively and equally on Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Bourgeois had her first retrospective in 1982, at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She died in May 2010.

Louise Bourgeois: I Have Been to Hell and Back

Arts & Photography

Vuong, Lea

Individual Artists

Garish and chaotic, the paintings, music and performances of German-born, New York-based artist Jutta Koether (born 1958) ooze youthful energy and a punk brashness that found her well matched as a collaborator with Kim Gordon for a 2005 project at the Tate Modern. This publication features nearly 50 color plates, spanning her work from 2005 to the present day.

Jutta Koether

Graw, Isabella

Walther König, Köln