This publication is the result of one of those relatively rare but exciting discoveries in the depths of a large museum’s store rooms–an album of drawings by one of the great illustrators and print designers, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Moreover, it likely corresponds to the original drawings for one of his announced, but never-printed, best-selling books of illustrations. It was billed as Master Iitsu’s Chicken-Rib Picture Book; Iitsu was one of Hokusai’s more than thirty aliases, and the term “chicken-rib” refers to a Chinese literary term for something trivial but worthwhile–like the bits of chicken left on the rib bones.
Read MoreThis stunning, indeed mind-boggling, monograph is the ultimate resource on the art of Paul Laffoley, whose works function as charts and diagrams of the Boston artist’s highly individual understanding of the physical, psychic, and spiritual world. They could be illustrations to a cosmology textbook written by a multi-authored committee which included Plato, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, P.D. Ouspensky, H.P. Lovecraft, and the physicist who named “black holes,” John Wheeler.
Read MoreJudith Stein’s 20-year labor of love, the book “Eye of the Sixties,” came out this summer and it’s great. The biography follows the life of enigmatic gallerist, Richard Bellamy, from his rise from college dropout/lost boy/self-taught poet and art lover in the 1950s to the global tastemaker he had become in the 1960s and 70s to his death in 1998 at age 70.
Read MoreWu Hung’s Contemporary Chinese Art will be required reading for anyone wanting an introduction to the subject, and will also be useful to readers who want to understand the history of international art of the period, since Wu presents Western movements with as much clarity as he charts the uses Chinese artists made of them. It is a more nuanced and complete picture of a recent art culture than any other I know. The essays in The Dynamic Library present a variety of historical and theoretical approaches in clear language that are likely to interest scholars in the humanities, artists interested in classification, and anyone who owns enough books to be concerned with how to sort them.
Read MoreThis beautifully produced and spectacularly illustrated book offers a six-continent tour of twenty-
five sculpture parks; readers are unlikely to know of most of the collections, which can be visited only with considerable planning, if at all. Three are exclusively private, one is open on a single day every year, and another is best viewed from a hotair balloon.
Photographers have always turned to natural (or unnatural) environments for inspiration and probably always will, often when they become overwhelmed or discouraged by the anxious hum of the city.
Read More