From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. The Contemporary African Art Collection-which is essentially run by only two guys, Italian collector Jean Pigozzi and French curator André Magnin-has managed to make some people very angry. Is it not the worst sort of cultural colonialism, detractors ask, for two white Westerners to define what contemporary African art is, especially when their collection consists almost exclusively of self-taught artists? But, as they make clear in the interviews included here, Pigozzi and Magnin make no claim to do anything other than present artists they love, and it is their idiosyncratic tastes that make this catalog (which is being published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston) such a surprise and a pleasure. The surprise comes from the sheer scope of inventiveness and variety on display: from the spare, ominous watercolors of Barthélémy Toguo (from Cameroon) to the surrealistic allegories Cheri Samba (of Congo) paints in a slick, commercial art style. Some of the artists produce work at a polar extreme from the scruffy, homemade look one might expect from "outsider" artists: Rigobert Nimi of Congo uses scavenged materials to build gleaming, precisely rendered models of spaceships and robot factories, and Abu Bockari Mansaray of Sierra Leone draws maniacally detailed diagrams of such devices as a "Nuclear Telephone Discovered in Hell." If there is any flaw in this presentation of an explosively imaginative group of artists (33 of them in all, from 14 countries), it is that, with only two or three images for each artist, it feels far too short. Still, for open-minded readers more interested in art itself than what Pigozzi calls "intellectual art gossip," this is a book to linger over and absorb slowly, one intoxicating vision at a time.

African Art Now: Masterpieces From the Jean Pigozzi Collection

Thomas McEvilley

André Magnin

Alison De Lima Greene

Alvia J. Wardlaw

Arts & Photography

Merrell

The catalogue of an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, May 7 to July 10, 1988, and five other museums subsequently. Profusely illustrated.

Lucas Samaras--objects and subjects, 1969-1986

Donald Kuspit

Roberta Smith

Abbeville Press

From roughly 1965 to 1980, Conceptual Art and Performance Art took center stage throughout the western world, introducing new and complex ideas to the practice of contemporary art which reverberate to this day. Thomas McEvilley's The Triumph of Anti-Art not only explains the origins of these controversial and compelling art forms, but also uncovers many relatively unrecognized yet indisputably important artists, American and European. He guides the reader through a thicket of seemingly arcane meanings of these nonrepresentational art form, and brings clarity to the intentions and agendas of these artists, as well as to their real world contexts. The long-term effects of "anti-art," and the development of the pluralistic situation known as post-Modernism, are described in vivid detail. From the Greek philosopher Diogenes, through the 19th-century German romantic tradition, to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg, McEvilley traces philosophical ideas and political impulses that temporarily led to a toppling of painting and sculpture in the decades right after World War II. Following an overview of Modernism and Marcel Duchamp's influence, a chapter on Yves Klein sets the state for surveys of Conceptual Art and its practitioners, including Bernar Venet, John Baldessari, and Francis Alys. McEvilley then gives equal focus to Performance Art with chapters on Andy Warhol, Brian O'Doherty, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay, among others. At the end of the volume the "triumph" of "anti-art" is explored in depth, as are the origins of the terms, practices, and politics of global art history.

Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism

History & Criticism

McPherson

For seven years, from 1956 to 1962, a young French artist electrified the European art world with visual, conceptual and performance art works far ahead of their time. His rise was wildly celebrated by some as the appearance of a prophetic genius, and derisively dismissed by others as scandalous nonsense. His monochrome paintings, body art works, fire paintings, conceptual exhibitions and music, and monumental public space works threatened to upend the very categories of art, in both Europe and America. Indeed, after his tragically premature death in 1962, some of the most far-reaching transformations in contemporary art would follow directly in his wake. But by the 1970s his reputation seemed headed for oblivion, until in 1977 a young classics scholar at Rice University, Thomas McEvilley, proposed Klein for a retrospective show to Dominique deMenil, then director of the Rice gallery, and wrote several texts about Klein that would transform our understanding of Yves Klein's aesthetics. The project grew to involve major institutions, resulting in 1982 with exhibitions in Houston, New York, Paris and Chicago. Virtually overnight Yves Klein's art reentered the art canon. Coincidentally, the career of an important critic was launched. Yves the Provocateur provides the "skeleton key" to clearly examine the full dimensions of Klein's accomplishment. In two opening essays, McEvilley briefly surveys and places Klein's art into context. Then, in the centerpiece essay -- which amounts to a miniature critical biography bearing all the best features of a novella -- he traces the formative and crucial events in Klein's life. Finally, he describes Klein's intellectual development, demonstrating how Klein embedded and parodied in his work the philosophical system of a particular form of Rosicrucianism. An extensive chronology is appended at the end. Yves the Provocateur collects Thomas McEvilley's writings on Klein which rejuvenated Klein's stature and hitherto have only been available in journals and hard-to-find exhibition catalogues. Together they constitute an important document in contemporary art history. The publication of this book is timed to coincide with the major Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn Gallery in Washington, DC on May 16, 2010, and later at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, on October 23.

Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth-Century Art

Individual Artists

From roughly 1965 to 1980, Conceptual Art and Performance Art took center stage throughout the western world, introducing new and complex ideas to the practice of contemporary art which reverberate to this day. Thomas McEvilley's The Triumph of Anti-Art not only explains the origins of these controversial and compelling art forms, but also uncovers many relatively unrecognized yet indisputably important artists, American and European. He guides the reader through a thicket of seemingly arcane meanings of these nonrepresentational art form, and brings clarity to the intentions and agendas of these artists, as well as to their real world contexts. The long-term effects of anti-art and the development of the pluralistic situation known as post-Modernism, are described in vivid detail. From the Greek philosopher Diogenes, through the 19th-century German romantic tradition, to the modern art critic Clement Greenberg, McEvilley traces philosophical ideas and political impulses that temporarily led to a toppling of painting and sculpture in the decades right after World War II. Following an overview of Modernism and Marcel Duchamp's influence, a chapter on Yves Klein sets the state for surveys of Conceptual Art and its practitioners, including Bernar Venet, John Baldessari, and Francis Alys. McEvilley then gives equal focus to Performance Art with chapters on Andy Warhol, Brian O'Doherty, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay, among others. At the end of the volume the triumph of anti-art is explored in depth, as are the origins of the terms, practices, and politics of global art history.

The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism

McPherson & Company

In 1975 Marina Abramovic and Uwe Laysiepen met in Amsterdam, fell in love, and began to collaborate as performance artists. By the time their personal relationship ended twelve years later they had become two of the most famous performance artists in the world. Thomas McEvilley met them in 1983; they became close friends, and ever since he has been able to follow the development of their career together, and their careers apart, over the past twenty-seven years. Art, Love Friendship is divided into three sections. The first documents Marina Abramovic and Ulay together, including their three-month-long Great Wall Walk in 1988. The second section features Ulay's career before meeting Marina -- when, for example, he briefly "stole" Germany's most famous painting in broad daylight -- as well as his later work as a conceptual photographer. The final section features a long interview with Marina and essays about her work of the 1990s and the 2000s. The book includes 65 photographs presented throughout the text, and features a dramatic opening section of "Relation Works." The book coincides with Marina Abramovic's major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Together & Apart

Performing Arts

Slim volume, 25 pages with two black and white illustrations. Published on the occasion of the exhibition from the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London 3 November-12 December 2000. Notes.

Anselm Kiefer

Anthony D'Offay Gallery

By Mehretu, Julie Huma Bhabha Hardcover - March 2011

Blum (Peter) Edition,U.S.

Brian Maguire The Message

Ed Vulliamy

Gavin Delahunty

Donald Burton Kuspit

Fergus McCaffrey

Capacity The History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism

Routledge

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Books by Thomas McEvilley