A rich study exploring the connections, creative processes, and themes shared by two world- renowned artists At a crucial point midway through his career, American painter and printmaker Jasper Johns (b. 1930) looked to the art of Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) for inspiration. Munch’s innovative working methods and defining themes of love, anxiety, illness, and death infused Johns’s work with new meaning, allowing him a broadened range of expression that propelled his return to recognizable imagery after a decade of abstraction. This groundbreaking publication is the first to describe precisely how and when Johns began to explore Munch’s imagery and ideas. At the same time, it takes a comprehensive view of each artist’s career, giving readers a deeper understanding of Johns’s connection to his predecessor. Through new scholarship and copious illustration, Ravenal makes the persuasive case that Munch should be considered one of the catalysts for the sea change that occurred in Johns’s art of the early 1980s.

Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Inspiration and Transformation

Arts & Photography

Ravenal, John B.

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

First edition bound in color pictorial wrappers with French flaps. Oblong, 11 1/2" x 10", 104 page exhibition catalog is in fine condition. Color and black & white plates through-out.

Sidney Goodman: Paintings and Drawings, 1959-95

Philadelphia Museum Of Art

Goodman, Sidney

Philadelphia Museum of Art

With references to the Bible and 17th-century Dutch still-life painting, Vanitas links the works of fourteen contemporary artists to the age-old theme of life's transience. At the same time, it presents these artists in their 20th-century context while exploring the related themes of beauty and death, pleasure and fear, love and loss. The book focuses on contemporary sculpture and installation art using non-traditional forms, materials, and processes.
 The artists included-from Warsaw, Paris, New York, London, Sao Paulo-are Miroslaw Balka, Chris Boltanski, Willie Cole, Leonardo Drew, Tony Feher, Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez, Mona Hatoum, Jim Hodges, Anish Kapoor, Jac Lairner, Zoe Leonard, Gabriel Orozco, Rachel Whiteread, and Yukinori Yanagi.

Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Borrowing from the title of Andy Warhol’s 1965 double-screen film, Outer and Inner Space, this book explores how video art addresses the interplay between external reality and internal states of mind. Three recent video installations -- by Pipilotti Rist, Shirin Seshat, and Jane and Louise Wilson -- are placed in the context of forty influential early works from the late 1960s to mid-1980s. These pairings underscore both the change and the continuity in video art, from its rough-edged experimental origins to works that use sophisticated technology to create environments of image and sound.

Outer and Inner Space: Pipilotti Rist, Shirin Neshat, Jane and Louise Wilson, and the History of Video Art

Already familiar to viewers of the 2002 Whitney Museum Biennial, Robert Lazzarini is an American sculptor whose work combines extreme realism with extreme distortion. Combining advanced digital technology with traditional sculpting methods, Lazzarini recreates familiar objects to scale out of their original materials, while deforming them in seemingly impossible ways. Appearing to expand and contract as viewers shift vantage points, the works seem to collapse upon themselves or, in the artist's words, "slip toward their own demise." His beautiful yet unsettling works address the physical, psychological, and emotional implications of this distortion.
This first publication devoted to Lazzarini's work coincides with his first solo museum exhibition, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and scheduled to open in November 2003. The book surveys his major work from 1997 to the present, including his two most widely recognized pieces: the installation of four skewed skulls in "BitStreams" (2001) at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and the warped payphone from the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
Designed by the artist, Robert Lazzarini is envisioned as an exhibition in book format, including spreads that create unique visual spaces in which to present the work. With an essay by John B. Ravenal describing Lazzarini's creative process and how his objects relate to the histories of perception and distortion in art, this publication will fascinate all who appreciate and study contemporary art.

Robert Lazzarini (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)

Virginia Museum Of Fine Arts

LAZZARINI, Robert

Univ of Virginia Pr

Containing 114 reproductions of works ranging from Jackson Pollock’s dynamic 1948 drip painting to Kehinde Wiley’s 2006 hip-hop-meets-Old-Master portrait, Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is a handsome collection that offers art enthusiasts a chance to recall old favorites and discover hidden treasures and new acquisitions. Taken from the nationally recognized collection of the same name at the VMFA, the works presented here appear chronologically within the book’s three sections―paintings; sculpture and video art; and prints, drawings, photographs, and collage. The result is an intriguing compilation of postwar art not to be missed.

Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Born in Chongqing, China, in 1955, Xu Bing is considered one of the most important artists of his generation. Between 1977 and 1987, he studied and taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. He moved to the United States in 1990 and in 1999 received a MacArthur Fellowship, the celebrated "genius grant," in recognition of his "capacity to contribute importantly to society, particularly in printmaking and calligraphy." In 2008 Xu Bing was appointed vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and he now lives mostly in Beijing. Many of Xu Bing’s print and calligraphic works have appeared on an unlikely but surprisingly receptive medium―the tobacco leaf. A comprehensive overview of Xu Bing’s tobacco projects, this volume includes reproductions of all the tobacco works, as well as several essays. Curator John Ravenal discusses the new Virginia work, its relation to the other tobacco pieces, and its place in the context of global contemporary art. Guest authors Wu Hung, Lydia Liu, and Edward Melillo address Xu Bing's work in the context of contemporary Chinese art and the history and culture of tobacco in Virginia.
Distributed for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Xu Bing: Tobacco Project, Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999–2011

Hung, Wu

Liu, Lydia

Melillo, Edward

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Books by Ravenal, John B.