Frank Auerbach, Francisco Goya, Avery & Delacroix

Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information

For more than a year David Byrne has been employing the ubiquitous sales and presentation program PowerPoint as an art medium. E.E.E.I (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) is a book of images and essays, plus a DVD which plays 5 of his PowerPoint presentations accompanied by original music. The book component contains a dozen new exploratory texts and a whole lot of bold, graphic images created with the help of PowerPoint's built-in tools and visuals--not to mention the fun of plastic overlays and nifty foldout pages. And you may ask yourself, what is the meaning of this? And you may ask yourself, what is this about? It is about taking subjective, even emotional, information and presenting it in a familiar audiovisual form--using a medium in a way that is different, and possibly better, than what was intended. It is about appropriating a contemporary, corporate staple and making something critical, beautiful and humorous with it.
David Byrne: E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information)
Steidl, 2003, ISBN: 3882439076

Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001

One of Britain's pre-eminent artists, Frank Auerbach has spent all of his adult life in London, and delights in the city's colours and forms. Both oil paintings and drawings of Frank Auerbach reveal the intense observation and furious mark-making that he employs to arrive at the essence of his subjects. This book is published to accompany a major retrospective held at the Royal Academy of Arts to mark Frank Auerbach's seventieth birthday. Norman Rosenthal, the Royal Academy's Exhibitions Secretary, considers Auerbach's paintings in the contexts of London and of Western art. Catherine Lampert, curator of the exhibition, contributes an essay on the painter and his sitters, and Isabel Carlisle, Exhibitions Curator, introduces each of the catalogue's four sections: Early Works (1954-70); People; Landscapes; and Drawings. All the works in the exhibition - some ninety paintings and ten drawings, borrowed mainly from private collections - are illustrated in full colour.
Frank Auerbach: Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001 by Catherine Lampert, Norman Rosenthal and Isabel Carlisle
ISBN: 0900946997

Francisco Goya by Robert Hughes

Robert Hughes turns his critical eye to one of art history's most compelling, enigmatic, and important figures, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes. With characteristic critical fervor and sure-eyed insight, Hughes brings us the story of an artist whose life and work bridged the transition from the eighteenth-century reign of the old masters to the early days of the nineteenth-century moderns.
With his salient passion for the artist and art, Hughes brings Francisco Goya vividly to life through analysis of a vast breadth of his work. Building upon the historical evidence that exists, Hughes tracks Goya's development, as man and artist, without missing a beat, from the early works commissioned by the Church, through his long, productive, and tempestuous career at court, to the darkly sinister and cryptic work he did at the end of his life.
In a work that is at once interpretive biography and cultural epic, Hughes grounds Goya firmly in the context of his time, taking us on a wild romp through Spanish history; from the brutality and easy violence of street life to the fiery terrors of the Holy Inquisition to the grave realities of war, Hughes shows us in vibrant detail the cultural forces that shaped Goya's work.
Underlying the exhaustive, critical analysis and the rich historical background is Hughes's own intimately personal relationship to his subject. This is a book informed not only by lifelong love and study, but by his own recent experiences of mortality and death. As such this is a uniquely moving and human book; with the same relentless and fearless intelligence he has brought to every subject he has ever tackled, Hughes here transcends biography to bring us a rich and fiercelybrave book about art and life, love and rage, impotence and death.
Knopf Publishing Group, 2003
Francisco Goya: Black Paintings
Francisco Goya: Old Man

Milton Avery: The Late Paintings

Milton Avery's late paintings, created between 1947 and 1963, stand at the nexus of figurative modernism and Abstract Expressionism. Frequently viewed as the last of the great American figurative painters, Milton Avery, as this book argues, provides a key to understanding the artists of the second half of the American century.
This volume accompanies the first exhibition of Avery's art since the popular 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art; it is the first book on Avery in over a decade. A 1958 essay by the seminal critic Clement Greenberg provides a valuable period context, while the new text by Robert Hobbs includes an insightful connection between Milton Avery's painting and the lyrical modernism of Wallace Stevens's poetry, which will intrigue lovers of American poetry as well as American art. This book and the exhibition that it accompanies, were organized by the American Federation of Arts.
Milton Avery: The Late Paintings by Robert Hobbs
ISBN: 0810942747

Eugene Delacroix: The journal

The Journal of Eugene Delacroix is one of the most important works in the literature of art history. It is the record of a life at once public and private, the journal is also one of the richest and most fascinating aesthetic documents of the nineteenth century, as Eugene Delacroix reflects throughout on the relations between the arts, especially painting and writing. Indeed, he approaches the question from a unique perspective, that of a painter who wrote extensively and theorized his own writing in the Journal, a painter who had a passion for literature and a powerful literary imagination, a narrative painter whose work is rooted in literature and the literary. This book is the first to explore the crucial importance of this relation for Eugene Delacroix's aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Countering the long critical tradition which sees his writing as the inverse of his painting, it argues that, through his diary and art criticism, he sought to develop a painter's writing, proper to painting itself, and that such a writing is closely related to his conception of pictorial art. This approach has significant implications for interpreting the narratives of his public decorations, four of which are analyzed here: the library schemes of the Senate and the Assemble National, the Apollo Gallery in the Louvre, and the Chapel of the Holy Angels at the church of Saint-Sulpice. Delacroix's ideas on the theoretical and practical relations between writing and painting, narrative and the image, are shown to be central not only to his aesthetic, but also to his views on civilization, history, and culture, and on the role of the artist in the modern world.
Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacroix by Michele Hannoosh
Princeton Univ. Press, 1995

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