Jean-Claude Lebensztejn

Jeff Nagy

ekphrasis

By Jean-Claude Lebensztejn. Translated by Jeff Nagy

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s history of the urinating figure in art, 

, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and limits in works of art in general. Lebensztejn is one of France’s best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of cognoscenti.

—the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for a Belgian beer company—the author takes the reader through a semi-scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a fresco scene located directly above Cimabue’s 

 from around 1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn’s careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar who looks like he is about to urinate through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate expertly through cultural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film 

, for example, and Marlene Dumas’s 1996–1997 homage to Rembrandt’s pissing woman. At every moment, Lebensztejn’s prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject matter entertaining.

In this short and poignant cultural history, readers not only find the care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one of the most interesting intellectuals of our time. The first widely distributed book of Lebensztejn’s in English, 

 is simultaneously published in France by Éditions Macula.

Pissing Figures 1280–2014

Brenda Danilowitz

A superb facsimile of the only known notebook of legendary artist Anni Albers, this publication offers insight into the methodology of a modern master.

Beginning in 1970, Anni Albers filled her graph-paper notebook regularly until 1980. This rare and previously unpublished document of her working process contains intricate drawings for her large body of graphic work, as well as studies for her late knot drawings. The notebook follows Albers's deliberations and progression as a draftsman in their original form. It reveals the way she went about making complex patterns, exploring them piece by piece, line by line in a visually dramatic and mysteriously beautiful series of geometric arrangements.

An afterword by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, contextualizes the notebook and explores the role studies played in the development of her work.

Anni Albers: Notebook 1970–1980

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Doro Globus

Karsten Schubert

Edited by Doro Globus and Karsten Schubert

The present volume includes the vast majority of significant essays on Bridget Riley written since 1999. This was a particularly fruitful period in the reception of her work, as the discourse broadened and her reputation as one of the most important painters of her generation solidified.

The essays range from biographical and career overviews to detailed analysis of specific aspects or themes that occur throughout Riley’s career. The selection reflects a rich body of work, which sustains the interest of important authors, as evidenced by multiple pieces by Éric de Chassey, Lynne Cooke, Robert Kudielka, Paul Moorhouse, and Richard Shiff. Together, this volume of essays tells the story of an artist whose art has continuously evolved over nearly six decades.

Most of the critical texts have been written in close consultation with the artist, the result of long conversations, studio visits and archive access. Largely commissioned on the occasion of particular exhibitions, these essays track and trace Riley’s focus and influences at different moments in time. Each essay builds upon the next, with more recent authors clearly responding and referencing earlier discourse. The result is a collection of great breadth and cohesion.

 represents a monumental body of research and analysis by some of the most important art historians of today. It also offers the opportunity for the reader and the viewer to approach Riley from a plethora of perspectives to form their own view, much reflecting Riley’s own particular approach to art history. As John Elderfield puts it: "Effectively, Riley makes a pact with the viewer, through the medium of the painting, that they will collaborate in eliciting from a particular painting a particular sort of mobile visual array. And, when the viewer stops looking at the painting, it will therefore be as if leaving something that continues to go on."

 Michael Bracewell, Nadia Chalbi, Eric de Chassey, Lynne Cooke, Jonathan Crary, John Elderfield, Lucius Grisebach, Martin Hentschel, Dave Hickey, Robert Kudielka, Anne Montfort, Paul Moorhouse, Marla Prather, Karen Serres, Richard Shiff, Frances Spalding, Barnaby Wright and Semir Zeki

About Bridget Riley: Selected Writings 1999–2016

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Yayoi Kusama

Akira Tatehata

Text by Akira Tatehata. Poem by Yayoi Kusama

Widely recognized as one of the most popular artists in the world, Yayoi Kusama has shaped her own narrative of postwar and contemporary art. Minimalism and Pop art, abstraction and conceptualism coincide in her practice, which spans painting, sculpture, performance, room-sized and outdoor installation, the written word, films, fashion, design, and architectural interventions. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama briefly studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking happenings, events, and exhibitions. Now in her late 80s, Kusama is entering one of the richest creative periods of her life. Immersed in her studio six days a week, Kusama has spoken of her renewed dedication to creating art over the past years: “[N]ew ideas come welling up every day….Now I am more keenly aware of the time that remains and more in awe of the vast scope of art.”

 documents the artist's most recent exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which marked the US debut of 

, an all-white, domestic interior that viewers are invited to cover with dot stickers of various sizes and colors. Taking 

 as its centerpiece, this catalogue reveals, in vivid large-scale plates, the transformation of the space from a clean white interior to a stunningly saturated room, with ceilings, walls, and furniture covered in myriad multicolored stickers put there by viewers over the course of the exhibition. The catalogue also includes beautiful reproductions of Kusama's new large-format paintings from 

 series. Ranging from bright and densely pixelated forms, to umber figures with darker blues and muted oranges, these paintings demonstrate the artist's striking command of color, and her exceptional control over balance and contrast. Bold brushstrokes hover between figuration and abstraction; vibrant, animated, and intense, these paintings introduce their own powerful pictorial logic, at once contemporary and universal. The catalogue continues with a selection of new, large 

 sculptures, a form that Kusama has been exploring since her studies in Japan in the 1950s, and which gained prominence in the 1980s, continuing to remain an essential part of her practice. Made of shiny stainless steel and featuring painted dots or dot-shaped perforations that recall 

, these immersive works seem created on human scale, with the tallest measuring 70 inches (178 cm). Vibrant plates capture how color, shape, size, and surface merge in these sculptures and mesmerize the viewer. Texts include a "Hymn to Yayoi Kusama" by art critic and poet Akira Tatehata and a poem by the artist herself.

Yayoi Kusama: Give Me Love

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Tom McDonough

 has been a fixed component of his exhibitions since he first showed a version of the multi-part tabletop installation in 2005. Often arising from local circumstances and current issues at the time of their creation, the 

 works mark an endeavor to establish a clear perspective in confusing times. The scope and complexity of this project become apparent for the first time through this book—the second, following 

Over the span of 320 pages (printed using a high-resolution technique), Tillmans presents an alternative chronology of the present. Far exceeding his original and main medium of photography, he juxtaposes a variety of contrary opinions, statements, and comparisons on recurring table formats. The dimensions of the wooden tables, which he designed himself, are not arbitrary: they are built using standard British door panels, 78 inches long, and with one of four different standard widths.

This book gives an overview, through lavish reproductions, of this new form of collage in which picture, text, and object “are only kept in place by their own weight,” as the photographer puts it. An essay by Tom McDonough, Professor for Art History at Birmingham University, New York, places Tillmans’s project within the context of 20th-century collage, from Hannah Höch to Robert Rauschenberg. This artist’s book, produced in Tillmans’s Berlin atelier, includes a Fresnel magnifying glass, making it possible to zoom in on the contents and read even the smallest of printed texts.

Wolfgang Tillmans: What's wrong with redistribution?

A1 That's Desire (featuring Ash B.)
A2 Fast Lane
A3 Anderes Osterlied

Wolfgang Tillmans: That's Desire / Here We Are EP 

A1 Device Control
A2 Angered Son (live with Kyle Combs)
A3 Angered Son (W solo)

AA1 Make It Up As You Go Along SALEM Remix
AA2 Make It Up As You Go Along DANIEL WANG & J.E.E.P. Remix
AA3 Make It Up As You Go Along DANIEL WANG & J.E.E.P. Dub

Wolfgang Tillmans: Device Control EP

Alex Needham

, Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) chronicles East London’s art scene and nightlife of the early 2000s, as well as his friendship with collaborator and artist Conor Donlon. The book sees Donlon’s appearance and style changing, as well as his backdrops: a 2003 demonstration against George W. Bush’s state visit; a picnic at the park after an opening at Tillmans’s exhibition space Between Bridges; the bright yellow walls of Tillmans and Donlon’s home; long-gone LGBT clubs The Ghetto and The Joiners’ Arm; and quieter moments spent talking in the studio and around town.

Tillmans’s photographs are at once intimate and emblematic of a flourishing arts era, where both artists’ work gained momentum. 

 culture editor Alex Needham introduces the work with an essay about Donlon’s initial role as Tillmans’s assistant, contextualizing the artists’ collaboration and the inception of London independent bookstore Donlon Books in 2008.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Conor Donlon

Tracklist:
A1 Make It Up As You Go Along
A2 Triangle / Gong / What
B1 Fascinating This Time
B2 Stranger
B3 Time Flows All Over

How to introduce the first record by Wolfgang Tillmans? Now considered one of the most significant visual artists working today, his very first passion in life lay with music. This record features on its B-side three songs recorded in 1986 in his home town of Remscheid. The A-side features two pieces recorded in 2015/2016. The 29-year gap in between were marked by Tillmans exploring music, pop, and club culture from many different angles.

‘Make It Up As You Go Along’ is a pulsing dance track based on the recordings of a book printing press in a factory in Stuttgart. Morphed through various production stages, the press’s syncopations and Tillmans’s serendipitouspenditous vocals merge into an intoxicating track that could become a summer festival early a.m. favorite. ‘Triangle / Gong / What’ is an experimental offering, which combines the sounds of playing a special alloy triangle, a 999 fine gold gong, and a vocal, fused through a particular gain manipulation during the recording process.

The 1986 side features three songs which Tillmans wrote and recorded with collaborator Bert Leßmann. A single channel recording from the rehearsal room was all he had from back in the day. With the help of Tim and Klaus Knapp the recordings were filtered and equalized, and then supported with precise reconstructions of the original instruments. Out of this production process spanning 30 years, a unique time capsule emerged, which portrays a small-town teenager with some ambition. ‘Time Flows All Over’ is a haunting reminiscence of the angst and energy of the mid-1980s, infused with surprising contemporary relevance.

Wolfgang Tillmans: 2016 / 1986 EP

Alexander Nemerov

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston—often referred to as the “father of color photography”—has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition.

Eggleston has said, “I am at war with the obvious.” His photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. Though criticized at the time, his now legendary 1976 solo exhibition, organized by the visionary curator John Szarkowski at The Museum of Modern Art, New York—the first presentation of color photography at the museum—heralded an important moment in the medium's acceptance within the art-historical canon and solidified Eggleston's position in the pantheon of the greats alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.

Published on the occasion of David Zwirner's New York exhibition of selections from 

 in the fall of 2016, this new catalogue highlights over sixty exceptional images from Eggleston's epic project. His photography is “democratic” in its resistance to hierarchy where, as noted by the artist, “no particular subject is more or less important than another.”

Featuring original scholarship by Alexander Nemerov, this notable presentation of 

 provides historical context for a monumental body of work, while offering newcomers a foothold in Eggleston\s photographic practice.

Selected Works

William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest

Phillip Prodger

The eminent American photographer William Eggleston (b. 1939) was a pioneer in exploring the artistic potential of color photography. Eggleston made a name for himself with his eccentric, unexpected compositions of everyday life that were nonetheless rife with implied narrative, elevating the commonplace to art. This sumptuously illustrated book features Eggleston’s masterful portraits, including many familiar and beloved images as well as some previously unseen photographs from his long and productive career.

Many of Eggleston’s poetic photographs portray life in his home state of Tennessee, and the people he encountered there. Eggleston frequented the 1970s Memphis club scene, where he met, befriended, and photographed musicians such as fellow Southerners Alex Chilton and Ike Turner. He also photographed celebrities including Dennis Hopper, Walter Hopps, and Eudora Welty, and became a fixture of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, dating the Warhol protégé Viva. Over the past half century, he has created a powerful and enduring body of work featuring friends and family, musicians, artists, and strangers. In addition to the lavish reproductions of Eggleston’s portraits, this volume includes an essay and chronology, plus an interview with Eggleston and his close family members that gives new insights into his images and artistic process.

William Eggleston: Portraits

Portrait of Toba Khedoori, 1995. Photo by Rachel Khedoori.

Aruna D'souza

Ann Goldstein

Brenda Shaughnessy

Franklin Sirmans

Lucas Zwirner

Texts by Aruna D'souza, Ann Goldstein, Brenda Shaughnessy, Franklin Sirmans, and Lucas Zwirner

This book documents the artistic development of Toba Khedoori, a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient who skillfully combines precise draftsmanship with a meditative quality, and who manages to invite viewers inside her works, despite their two-dimensionality. Whether drawing on sheets of paper primed with wax and stapled directly onto the wall or using canvas as physical support, Khedoori creates delicate compositions that are at once intimate and expansive. Over the past decade, she has shifted toward smaller-scale works while continuing to engage elements of drawing, painting, and installation.

Toba Khedoori

The Legendary Tigerman

Filipe Costa

Composed by The Legendary Tigerman and Filipe Costa

A 12-inch LP: Theme & Five Variations
Recorded live at Clube Recreativo dos Anjos, March 2015
Mixed at Bandido Sessions Studio

 is Douglas’s adaption of the 1907 political novel of the same title by Joseph Conrad. Set in London in 1886, the book recounts an anarchist’s failed plot to bomb the Greenwich Observatory and is considered among the first literary portrayals of modern-day terrorism. Consistent with Douglas’s nonlinear treatment of historical events within his practice, his version sets the action within the context of Portugal’s so-called “Hot Summer” of 1975, which ended the turbulent period between the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974 (a bloodless coup to end Europe’s longest dictatorship) and the ratification of a new constitution. During the transition to democracy, which hastened the decolonization of Portuguese colonies, numerous terrorist acts by extreme right- and left-wing groups rocked the country.

The Secret Agent: Music for a Film by Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas

Noam M. Elcott

Roxana Marcoci

Dragana Vujanovic

Louise Wolthers

Foreword by Louise Wolthers and Dragana Vujanovic. Text by Noam M. Elcott. Conversation between the artist and Roxana Marcoci

“Often people confuse photography with human vision but they’re very different things”, says Stan Douglas, winner of the 2016 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. “[What] happens to our sense of our selves, our sense of time when so much of our knowledge about the world comes through these mechanical media, these inhuman media?” Attending to such questions, The Hasselblad Award 2016, which presents three series entitled 

 (2016), accompanied by two texts, offer intricate meditations on the function, construction and consumption of contemporary forms of photography. From HD cinematic images to abstract manifestations of data, each series probes the relationship between human and mechanical memory, each employing a particular synthetic process supported, if not entirely constructed, by computer software.

In one of the neo-noir mise-en-scènes of 

, two single vehicles drive through the darkness over Vancouver’s Georgia Viaduct, their headlights glowing like the road lamps punctuating the panorama. Underneath the flyover in the southwestern corner of Strathcona, lived a predominantly African Canadian community for the better half of the 20th century, until the area was bulldozed in the early 70s to make way for the so-called inner-city freeway. Using 3D modelling software, Douglas reconstructs the neighborhood from the vantage point of a drone: in 

 (2014) we see multiple rooftops and luminous windows – an inhabited environment with no people in sight. Clouding the lines between real, imagined and remembered, the series attends to the shadows of history as it materializes the memory of a marginalized community.

 radically depart from the realm of representation. 

 is a collection of digital images composed of densely packed multi-colored streaks – each streak vying for our attention. Douglas built the series from files that were corrupted in the process of shooting his well-known projects 

, on the other hand, emerged from a rigorous attempt to ‘write’ images using tailor-made software that reverse engineers what happens in a JPEG encoding, producing hypnotic shapes and colors. In his interview with Roxana Marcoci published in the book, the artist places the series in the context of his recent photographic works. Noam M. Elcott’s thorough, art historical analysis of Douglas’ approaches to photography, further offers an illuminating reading of the artist’s practice. Pushing the limits of what we know and understand to be photography, the Hasselblad Foundation recognizes Douglas as an artist who has made pioneering achievements in photographic art.

Stan Douglas: Hasselblad Award 2016

Sigmar Polke, Magnetische Landschaft (Magnetic Landscape), 1982

Elena Geuna

Guy Tosatto

The artist who dared put into question the parameters of ordinary vision. One of the main exponents of Capitalist Realism—a current that arose in the 1970s in opposition to both the Socialist Realism widespread in the countries of Eastern Europe and Western pop art—Sigmar Polke was a tireless experimenter of techniques, art materials, and chemical-alchemical processes. He created figurative paintings that drew on a vast iconographic repertoire, often inspired by everyday life, and abstract works with a powerful symbolic value, sometimes created by chance through reactions between paint and other products. The book reproduces over eighty-five of his works (including photographs and sculptures, along with numerous paintings), giving a full account of Polke’s reflections and studies made over his fifty-year career.

Sigmar Polke

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

Kay Heymer

Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans

 continues the artist’s questioning of traditional ideas of originality and authorship, developed over four decades, and her interest in the deconstruction of images and objects from the past in order to create new relationships with contemporary audiences today. Through repetition, duplication and restatement, this series not only re-examines the central and ongoing concerns of Levine’s artistic practice but also revisits one of the most prominent subjects of her oeuvre – the work of Walker Evans.

I–XXIV 

Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans

This series of new double-sided posters by Oscar Murillo, in collaboration with Mandy El-Sayegh and Yutaka Sone, is produced on the occasion of 

, a live multi-day drawing and printing performance specially organized for Printed Matter’s 2016 New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1.

 are workstations, where the three artists generate new collaborative graphic works based on unbound book materials fabricated at GHP Media, a printer located in Connecticut. Delivered on pallets, this “raw material” is assembled on-site by Murillo, El-Sayegh, and Sone, as they continue to work with the printed sheets. Through the act of structuring Room Services, an operational assembly and book-production site, the artists will explore the boundaries of collaborative action, the distinct expressive potential of drawing, and the potency of the printed form.

A special edition of unique artist's books, produced on site by the three artists, will be available exclusively in the DUPLEX space at the New York Art Book Fair.

Special thanks to GHP Media, West Haven, Connecticut.

Room Services Poster

Richard Shiff

Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists working today, Richard Serra is known in particular for his large steel sculptural forms, which deal primarily with investigations of weight, balance, density, and scale, as well as their effect on the viewer and his/her sense of space. Serra’s relentless pursuit of these questions over the course of his celebrated career has deepened our understanding of the effects of sculpture on space and perception, and broadened the scope of what we allow the genre to address.

Published on the occasion of Serra’s exhibition 

 at David Zwirner, New York called one of “the year’s best shows” by 

this catalogue is the first in-depth overview of the artist’s works in forged steel. While he had already become known for his works in vulcanized rubber, lead, and steel, Serra first began using forged steel after encountering a large-scale forge at a steel mill in Germany in 1977. Unlike casting, wherein steel is heated until molten and poured into a mold, forging is the process of changing metal’s shape while in a solid state, through extreme heat and pressure. Serra’s first forged sculpture was 

 (1977), installed outside of the Mies van der Rohe–designed Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Since then, he has continued to use this material in different configurations and formats to create works that use forged blocks, rounds, or lintels. Designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist, 

 presents a survey of Serra’s forged sculpture since 1977, featuring new scholarship by Richard Shiff and two texts by Serra, along with dramatic photographs of the forging process. Bringing together over sixty detailed plates of forged sculptures, this unique publication not only introduces readers to an important aspect of Serra’s work, but uses these works to return to the eternal questions of weight, balance, and perception in his practice.

Richard Serra: Forged Steel

Ulrich Loock

Raymond Pettibon

Foreword by Dirk Luckow and Sabine Breitwieser. Introduction by Ulrich Loock and Harald Falckenberg. Texts by Ulrich Loock, Raymond Pettibon, and Lucas Zwirner

Philosophically profound, deeply literary and biting in his satire, Raymond Pettibon is the foremost draftsman of his generation, and one of America’s most important contemporary artists. Approaching “high” and “low” subject matter with equal appetite and comfort, Pettibon plumbs the depths of American sexuality, politics, subcultures, mores, and intellectual histories through themes ranging from Shakespeare to Gumby, surfers to the Bible, baseball to German Romanticism.

Published on the occasion of his major European traveling retrospective at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg – Sammlung Falckenberg, 

 presents over six hundred works from every part of the artist’s career, the majority of which have never been shown before. Arranged thematically in thirty-two chapters, this unique catalogue charts the appearance and development of the themes that have come to define Pettibon’s expansive oeuvre. Different sections are introduced with excerpts from interviews conducted with the artist, and are further discussed in a detailed appendix by curator Ulrich Loock. Beyond shedding valuable light on the genesis and cross-pollination of Pettibon’s thematic interests, this catalogue is the first to tackle the artist’s work as a whole—as a kind of hive mind of American culture whose various branches constantly address and reinterpret one another. Of particular interest are Pettibon’s own readings of individual works in the book. In excerpts paired with corresponding images, Pettibon guides readers through his complex, often meandering turns of thought; never condescending, they invite readers to enter more deeply into his thinking without sacrificing the intellectual rigor and sense of mystery that makes Pettibon’s work so compelling and challenging. The book includes a complete facsimile of his first artists’ book, 

—almost entirely unavailable for decades—in addition to numerous early drawings completed with his nephew, record covers, flyers, and sections dedicated to collages and drawings from the 1980s to today. Also featured are biographical notes compiled by Lucas Zwirner, offering a nuanced, insightful reading of Pettibon’s history, whose early life and work is often simplified and categorically tied to punk rock, and instead underscores the complexities surrounding the artist’s long-standing relationship with art, literature, and American culture. This unparalleled selection of Pettibon’s work is the definitive single volume for novices and experts alike.

Collected Works

Raymond Pettibon: Homo Americanus

Byron Coley

Jonathan Lethem

Kitty Scott

Robert Storr

Texts by Byron Coley, Jonathan Lethem, Kitty Scott, and Robert Storr

Produced in close collaboration with the artist, this comprehensive collection of Raymond Pettibon’s work spans his early flyers for the influential band Black Flag through his most recent political work, and includes previously unpublished material, as well as zines, posters, and excerpts from screenplays. Perhaps unlike any artist of his generation, Pettibon best captured the discontent and counterculture spirit of the late 1970s and early 80s in America.

Immersed in the punk scene in Southern California, he devoted his earliest work to flyers for Black Flag and zines that he created and sold in local record stores. His distinctive style took shape in those early days: slyly sophisticated pen-and-ink drawings with cartoonlike flourishes. With biting irony and a searing wit, Pettibon let loose on the hypocrisies and greed of the capitalist political machine. His work captured the attention of the Los Angeles art scene and, eventually, the international art world.

Also included is a collaboration between Jonathan Lethem and the artist, commissioned specifically for the book.

 surveys the splenetic drawings of another disaffected son of Southern California.” –Bookforum

“Pettibon’s drawings are a world unto themselves, or rather a reflection of and reaction to the world as he sees it…It’s an impressive tome, heavy, beautifully printed, and slipcased.”

Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken

Often understated, the emotional force of Raoul De Keyser’s cryptic and highly lyrical paintings is undeniable. Composed of very basic geometric shapes that hover between abstraction and figuration, many of De Keyser’s works seem to hint at forms just out of focus, spaces impossible to inhabit. Their power lies in their ability to suggest through simple gestures, and to compel intense contemplation. Since his death in 2012, De Keyser’s stature as a painter has only continued to grow, as has his influence on a younger generation of European painters.

 is published on the occasion of the eponymous show at David Zwirner, first presented at the London gallery in November 2015 and traveling to New York in 2016. Curated by Ulrich Loock, who contributes the catalogue’s text, the exhibition is organized around a group of twenty-two paintings that the artist completed shortly before his death. Collectively, these works have become known as 

. Imposing stark material and formal limitations, De Keyser was able to revisit in this body of work many of the major subjects and themes that occupied him throughout his nearly fifty-year career: the inconspicuous things close at hand, the landscape of the low lands where he grew up and lived all his life, and the partition of the picture plane. This elegant catalogue presents plates and details of a careful selection of paintings, beginning in the 1970s, that emphasizes the tentative way De Keyser chose to explore his themes—never approaching anything directly, hinting rather than demonstrating. Taken together, 

 reveals an uncompromising artist who continued to pose new aesthetic problems for himself—even at the end of his life—and managed to come up with original and deeply moving solutions.

Raoul De Keyser: Drift

Paul Gauguin

Donatien Grau

By Paul Gauguin. Translated with an introduction by Donatien Grau

“Criticism is our censorship . . .” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote “Racontars de rapin” only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his contemporaries and predecessors, Gauguin unpacks what he viewed as the mistakes and misjudgments behind much of art criticism, revealing not only how wrong critics’ interpretations have been, but also what it would mean to approach art properly—to really look.

Long out of print, this new translation by Donatien Grau includes an introduction that situates the essay within Gauguin’s written oeuvre, as well as explanatory notes. This text sheds light on Gauguin’s conception of art—widely considered a predecessor to Duchamp—and engages with many issues still relevant today: history, novelty, criticism, and the market. His voice feels as fresh, lively, sharp in English now as it did in French over one hundred years ago. Through Gauguin’s final piece of writing, we see the artist in the full throes of passion—for his work, for his art, for the art of others, and against anyone who would stand in his way.

As the inaugural publication in David Zwirner Books’s new 

 sets a perfect tone for the books to come. Poised between writing, art, and criticism, Gauguin brings together many different worlds, all of which should have a seat at the table during any meaningful discussion of art. With the express hope of encouraging open exchange between the world of writing and that of the visual arts, David Zwirner Books is proud to present this new edition of a lost masterpiece.

Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter

Michael Fried

Poems by Michael Fried. Photographs by James Welling

Michael Fried is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and luminaries of the art world have resulted in a canonized body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, 

Fried’s passion, lyricism, and humor, which have been lauded by Allen Grossman and J. M. Coetzee, are on display as he explores the people and the objects that have moved him—great minds and great works of art. Along the way, Fried begins to reveal himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself; a young man, ambitious and in love; a committed champion of artists; a world-class intellectual among intellectual peers; and a poet, transmuting the world around him. Here we find the poet-critic at his most complete.

 breaks ground for Fried by combining the eighty poems—a mix of lyrical and prose poetry—with over thirty photographs, most of them made, all of them selected, by renowned American photographer James Welling. More often than not, the photographs stand in oblique relation to the poems, as complementary pieces of a mesmerizing whole.

Written under the epigraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s urging in “Self-Reliance”—“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events”—the poems engage diverse subjects: from the high modernist art world of the 1960s to a major poet’s tragic loss of memory, from exemplary works such as Edgar Degas’s 

, and Adolf Menzel’s drawings, from the lives of figures such as Edouard Manet, Anna Akhmatova, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Ian Hamilton, and John Harbison, to erotic love, late fatherhood, the death of parents and friends, and the onset of age. 

is a uniquely vivid and compelling volume, at once a collection of wide-ranging yet intimately related poems and a brilliant photobook, that aims to hold the reader/viewer in its spell from first page to last.

“Ever alert within the shifting frames of his forms, Michael Fried\s poems persistently surprise the real, which he rides for all it’s worth. His poetry takes shape along the fault lines of experience, as raw material in the margins of our idea of the major. Candor and calamity, tenderness and intelligent irreverence—that’s the 

—Peter Cole, 2007 MacArthur Fellow, has published several books of poems and many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic, both medieval and modern. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He is the author of 

Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

Promesse du Bonheur

Texts by Angela Lampe, Michael Baumgartner, Charles W. Haxthausen, Christine Hopfengart, Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy

Known for its whimsy and levity, Paul Klee’s art is often considered gleefully childlike. This groundbreaking volume argues that Klee’s style emerged from a philosophical school that originated with early German Romanticism and consisted of perpetual shifts between satire and affirmation of the absolute, finite and infinite, and real and ideal. Featuring approximately 250 works, this careful appreciation of Klee connects each stage of his career to the larger philosophical context.

Exploring the satires and caricatures of Klee’s youth, his experimentations in Cubism and “mechanical theater,”and the constructivist approach of the Bauhaus school, this book follows the trajectory of Klee’s oeuvre as a reflection of prevailing styles. It closes with the artist’s final years, in which he was labeled a “degenerate artist” by the Nazi regime and struggled with illness. Viewed through the many facets of irony as a complex theme, and against the backdrop of Europe’s seismic political and artistic movements, Klee’s body of work takes on a renewed significance as one of the most critical of its generation.

Paul Klee: Irony at Work

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David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.