Breton's late treatise on magic and art appears for the first time in English, complete with citations, commentaries and a bibliography

What is Magic Art? In 1953, André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement, was invited by a prestigious French publisher to explore answers to this question. His resulting analysis is wide-ranging and evocative. Beginning with a literary review of magic and art, Breton draws upon Novalis and Baudelaire before considering the prehistoric rock art of Spain and France, the native art of the Pacific Northwest, the magical grimoires and alchemical symbolism of the Middle Ages, and the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Antoine Caron, Paolo Uccello, Gustav Moreau, Paul Gauguin and the Surrealists. Through these and other diverse sources, Breton traces a mystery that lies at the heart of our timeless fascination with otherness and seeks to place Surrealism as a successor to a magical sensibility that began with art itself.
First published in 1957 as L'Art magique, this important text is offered here as an English translation for the first time. Working from manuscript notes for the original project, this edition presents the iconographic content as Breton intended, together with more than 300 new citations and a comprehensive bibliography that emphasizes sources found in Breton's own library.
André Breton (1896-1966) was one of the founders and most controversial exponents of Surrealism, defining the movement in his first Surrealist Manifesto as pure psychic automatism. Fleeing from Europe during World War II, Breton traveled throughout North America staging Surrealist exhibitions and lending his voice to several political movements.

Sillman is in a thin crowd (with, let's say, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Matias Faldbakken, David Salle) of artists who can really write. The evidence is in Faux Pas ... her writings display the same good humor and intelligence of her best paintings. -Jason Farago, New York Times

This new edition of Faux Pas, the acclaimed collection of writings by Amy Sillman, comes as an expanded edition, with the addition of new essays, including recent texts on Paul Cézanne, Carolee Schneemann, Elizabeth Murray and Louise Fishman. The previously unpublished text from a lecture on drawing complements Sillman's views on color and shape. New drawings from 2020-22 include a selection of works on paper that were part of the artist's installation at the 59th International Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022.
Since the 1970s, Sillman--a beloved and key figure of the New York art scene--has developed a singular body of work that includes large-scale gestural paintings blending abstraction with representation, as well as zines and iPad animations.
Over the past decade, Sillman has also produced stimulating essays on the practice of art or the work of other artists: for example, reevaluating the work of the abstract expressionists with a queer eye; elaborating on the role of awkwardness and the body in the artistic process; and discussing in depth the role and meanings of color and shape. Featuring a foreword by Lynne Tillman, Faux Pas gathers a significant selection of Sillman's essays, reviews and lectures, accompanied by drawings, most of them made specially for the book.
Faux Pas aims at revealing the coherence and originality of Sillman's reflection, as she addresses the possibilities of art today, favoring excess over good taste, wrestling over dandyism, forms over symbols, with as much critical sense as humor.
Based in New York City, Amy Sillman (born 1955) is an artist whose work consistently combines the visceral with the intellectual. She began to study painting in the 1970s at the School of Visual Arts and she received her MFA from Bard College in 1995. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Biennial in 2014 and the Venice Biennale in 2022; her writing has appeared in Bookforum and Artforum, among other publications. She is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York.

An updated, expanded edition of Remedios Varo's translated writings, including pieces never before published in any language

With the 2018 publication of Letters, Dreams, and Other Writings, Wakefield Press introduced the writings of Surrealist painter Remedios Varo into English for the first time. These texts, never published during her lifetime, present something of a missing chapter, and offer the same qualities to be found in her visual work: an engagement with mysticism and magic, a breakdown of the border between the everyday and the marvelous, a love of mischief and an ongoing meditation on escape in all its forms. This new, expanded volume brings together the painter's collected writings, an unpublished interview, letters to friends and acquaintances, dream accounts, notes for unrealized projects, a project for a theater piece, whimsical recipes for controlled dreaming, exercises in Surrealist automatic writing and prose-poem commentaries on her paintings. It also includes her longest manuscript, the pseudoscientific On Homo rodans an absurdist study of the wheeled predecessor to Homo sapiens (the skeleton of which Varo had built out of chicken bones). Written by the invented anthropologist Hälikcio von Fuhrängschmidt, the essay utilizes eccentric Latin and a tongue-in-cheek pompous discourse to explain the origins of the first umbrella and in what ways Myths are merely corrupted Myrtles. Also included are newly discovered writings, including three short stories, never before published in any language.
Remedios Varo (1908-63) was a Surrealist painter who worked in Spain, France and Mexico. Her paintings were influenced by Old Masters such as Bosch and El Greco, as well as Jungian philosophy and occult writings. While living in Mexico she became close friends with fellow Surrealist Leonora Carrington.

BLOOM is a call to action for those individuals-not only in a later phase of life, but at any age-who feel the call to pursue a creative path in their lives.

The pressures of the modern world force many into utilitarian careers early on. Artistic impulses lie unfulfilled, dormant. For some, at a certain point, there comes an ache in the bones, a deep longing for creative expression-a simultaneous sense of emptiness and overflowing feeling.

This was the case for the author, Janice Mason Steeves, who left a career in psychology to pursue art in her forties. She went back to school, graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and went on to develop an international art career, an art consulting practice, and a highly sought after travel workshop business. Weaving together insights from her own art experience with the stories of 128 artists over the age of sixty, whom Janice surveyed for the book, Bloom offers guidance, inspiration, and support for the often difficult and misunderstood desire to change trajectory and take up a path of creativity and meaning.

Mason Steeves then takes these observations a step further, suggesting that not only is it possible to come to art later in life and be successful as an artist, but that the distillation of life experience and self-knowledge gleaned from the artist's path may enable older artists to step into an even larger role: that of a community elder. The elder role-acquired, in this case, through art but existing beyond art-is essential in our society, providing stability and depth, wisdom-keeping, space-holding, and care-taking, in Bill Plotkin's words, for the very soul of the world.

A classic collection of Whitten's writings and process notes, updated to include additional transcriptions and a new afterword

A Black man who grew up in the Jim Crow South, Jack Whitten arrived in New York in 1959 and began a wide-ranging exploration into the nature of painting and artmaking that would sustain more than five decades of work. Early in his career, in 1970, Whitten experienced his breakthrough moment: when he lifted a thick slab of paint off its support, he realized he could experiment within the physical, dimensional space of the paint itself. Approaching abstraction as scientist and mystic, Whitten probed the expressive and material possibilities of painting. He constantly changed styles, developed new methods and took up new subject matter, but it is precisely this spirit of curious inquiry that unites his relentlessly experimental career.
Notes from the Woodshed collects the artist's notes from his work in the studio alongside selected interviews and texts. Edited by Katy Siegel, one of Whitten's long-standing champions, this volume offers an intimate look at the artist in his element: the studio. Now in its second edition, this publication is the definitive resource on Whitten's writings, presenting a fully transcribed collection of the artist's handwritten logs. Selections from these writings are illustrated with facsimiles of the originals, giving us a feel for the studio and for Whitten's hand, animating his remarkable line of thought. This edition also features a new afterword in the form of a conversation on Whitten between curators Matilde Guidelli-Guidi and Zoé Whitley and artist Glenn Ligon that sketches out the different forms a deep engagement with his writings might take.
Jack Whitten (1939-2018) was born in Bessemer, Alabama, and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. The Whitney mounted a solo exhibition of his paintings in 1974; in 1983 the Studio Museum in Harlem held a 10-year retrospective. In 2014, a retrospective exhibition was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2015 and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2015 and 2016. Whitten lived in Queens, New York, until his death.

An expansive volume featuring over two decades of incisive reflections on race, art and pop culture by one of the greatest artists working today

This long-awaited and essential volume collects writings and interviews by Glenn Ligon, whose canonical paintings, neons and installations have been delivering a cutting examination of race, history, sexuality and culture in America since his emergence in the late 1980s. No stranger to text, the artist has routinely utilized writings from James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Pryor, Gertrude Stein and others to construct work that centers Blackness within the historically white backdrop of the art world and culture writ large. Ligon began writing in the early 2000s, engaging deeply with the work of peers such as Julie Mehretu, Chris Ofili and Lorna Simpson, as well as with artists who came before him, among them Philip Guston, David Hammons and Andy Warhol. Interweaving a singular voice and a magical knack for storytelling with an astute view of art history and broader cultural shifts, this collection cements Ligon's status as one of the great chroniclers of our time.
Glenn Ligon was born in the Bronx in 1960. He began as an abstract painter but shifted to text-based works which often incorporate quotes from Black authors. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

From Yves Klein's spotless tailoring to the kaleidoscopic costumes of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman, from Andy Warhol's denim to Martine Syms's joy in dressing, the clothes worn by artists are tools of expression, storytelling, resistance, and creativity.

In What Artists Wear, fashion critic and art curator Charlie Porter guides us through the wardrobes of modern artists: in the studio, in performance, at work or at play. For Porter, clothing is a way in: the wild paint-splatters on Jean-Michel Basquiat's designer clothing, Joseph Beuys's shamanistic felt hat, or the functional workwear that defined Agnes Martin's life of spiritua labor. As Porter roams widely from Georgia O'Keeffe's tailoring to David Hockney's bold color blocking to Sondra Perry's intentional casual wear, he weaves his own perceptive analyses with original interviews and contributions from artists and their families and friends.

Part love letter, part guide to chic, with more than 300 images, What Artists Wear offers a new way of understanding art, combined with a dynamic approach to the clothes we all wear. The result is a radical, gleeful inspiration to see each outfit as a canvas on which to convey an identity or challenge the status quo.

A comprehensive and inspiring collection of essays by Larry Neal, a founder of the seminal Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.
--Larry Neal, The Drama Review, 1968

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to produce work that was politically oriented, rooted in the Black experience, and written for the Black community. Engaging with fiction, music, drama, and poetry in his texts, he challenged the dominance of the Western art-historical canon and charged Black artists and writers with reshaping artistic traditions according to their own history. As he proclaimed in his essay The Black Writer's Role, written in 1966, Black writers must listen to the world with their whole selves--their entire bodies. Must make literature move people. Must want to make our people feel, the way our music makes them feel.

The writer Allie Biswas, who selected the texts Neal wrote from 1964 to 1978 included here, introduces the volume, illuminating the rich and varied context in which he produced his work.

The classic, scandalous, and bestselling tell-all-and-then-some from Andy Warhol--now a Netflix series produced by Ryan Murphy.

This international literary sensation turns the spotlight on one of the most influential and controversial figures in American culture. Filled with shocking observations about the lives, loves, and careers of the rich, famous, and fabulous, Warhol's journal is endlessly fun and fascinating.

Spanning the mid-1970s until just a few days before his death in 1987, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES is a compendium of the more than twenty thousand pages of the artist's diary that he dictated daily to Pat Hackett. In it, Warhol gives us the ultimate backstage pass to practically everything that went on in the world-both high and low. He hangs out with everybody Jackie O (thinks she's so grand she doesn't even owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big), Yoko Ono (We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U to see what happened, we had so much fun), and Princess Marina of, I guess, Greece, along with art-world rock stars Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, and Keith Haring.

Warhol had something to say about everyone who crossed his path, whether it was Lou Reed or Liberace, Patti Smith or Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson. A true cultural artifact, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES amounts to a portrait of an artist-and an era-unlike any other.

This book explores the world of contemporary American Indian Art in the Southwest, a subject that has long been overlooked-until now. At the heart of the book is how these artists are trapped in a world over which they have little control. If they paint what the tourists expect them to paint, such as Indians on horseback hunting buffalo, then they're going to find gallery representation and sell work. Conversely, if they paint the subject of their choice (like Anglo artists do), they have a hard time finding a gallery and making sales. Native Genius tells the compelling stories of some of these indigenous artists and how they've found a way to flourish and create works of great substance.

'Molesworth remains a rare breed: a curator who can actually write.' - Art in America

An illustrated reader featuring a collection of essays from trailblazing curator and writer Helen Molesworth - the first book of her collected writings

Over the past three decades, Helen Molesworth's singular voice and lively curatorial vision has established her as one of the most dynamic and influential voices in the art world. This generously illustrated reader - the first ever collection of her writings - presents 24 essays from the past 30 years, gathered from exhibition catalogs and art publications such as Artforum, Documents, frieze, and October.

The volume opens with a new essay that lays out Molesworth's belief in art's unique capacity for merging knowledge and feeling. It also includes new critical and reflective commentary on her past writing, an innovative approach that will position Open Questions as an indispensable volume for viewing and thinking about contemporary art for generations to come.

Going for a big dream is a long journey, and sometimes it can be painful. How do you know when to keep going and when to pivot? How do you endure rejection and failure and tragedy? How do you find the courage to keep going when you feel weary or stuck?

The perfect antidote to the toxicity of the current productivity narrative, this collection of essays on creativity features 21 Canadian and international writers, providing warmth, support, camaraderie, and empathy.

In a world that worships productivity, creating for art's sake is seen as romantic and nearly indefensible. For anyone who has ever struggled to honour their artistic impulses, Bad Artist offers an antidote to this toxic productivity narrative. This collection of essays features 21 Canadian and international writers from a breadth of backgrounds and experiences whose lives are not always proscribed by predictable work schedules or reliable support systems. They fit creating into the cracks of their lives, and through their stories show us all how to keep creating--not producing.

As artists, many of whom have faced systemic barriers, the collection's contributors offer pragmatic reflections on resisting the culture of productivity, reminding us that creativity can take many forms. Taken together, the essays present a comprehensive rumination on creativity in late capitalism, providing warmth, support, camaraderie, and empathy. It's The Paris Review meets the Billfold's Doing Money with a generous dash of the friend who knows you're an artist even on the days when you're not so sure.

An intimate testament to the power of friendship between two creative forces

I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but I still don't invent the whole of painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made--but to be untangled--in the real world. --Vincent van Gogh to Émile Bernard

The painter and poet Émile Bernard's firsthand account of the beloved painter Vincent van Gogh's life offers deep perspective into the Dutch artist's process, artistic preoccupations, and difficulties. In the 1890s, Bernard penned prefaces for collections of letters from Van Gogh, some of which were published while others were not. In 1911, Bernard gathered together these prefaces for a new publication, to which he also contributed a new introductory text, of the artist's letters and sketches which he enclosed in his correspondence. This volume comprises these prefaces, published in English for the first time, as well as a selection of letters from Van Gogh to Bernard. In addition to including biographical details and reflections on art and friendship, Bernard chronicles his attempts to have Van Gogh's work recognized after his death. Shedding light on the artistic community they inhabited, he also discusses notable figures such as Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.

Letters written by Van Gogh to a young Bernard further highlight the significance of the friendship between the two men. Van Gogh's words of advice to Bernard as well as ruminations on his own practice, inspirations, and creative struggles are revealed in these pages.

Introduced by Van Gogh specialist Martin Bailey, these texts present a sensitive and discerning portrait of the artist that goes beyond his reputation as a troubled genius.

The classic, scandalous, and bestselling tell-all-and-then-some from Andy Warhol--now a Netflix series produced by Ryan Murphy.

This international literary sensation turns the spotlight on one of the most influential and controversial figures in American culture. Filled with shocking observations about the lives, loves, and careers of the rich, famous, and fabulous, Warhol's journal is endlessly fun and fascinating.

Spanning the mid-1970s until just a few days before his death in 1987, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES is a compendium of the more than twenty thousand pages of the artist's diary that he dictated daily to Pat Hackett. In it, Warhol gives us the ultimate backstage pass to practically everything that went on in the world-both high and low. He hangs out with everybody Jackie O (thinks she's so grand she doesn't even owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big), Yoko Ono (We dialed F-U-C-K-Y-O-U and L-O-V-E-Y-O-U to see what happened, we had so much fun), and Princess Marina of, I guess, Greece, along with art-world rock stars Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, and Keith Haring.

Warhol had something to say about everyone who crossed his path, whether it was Lou Reed or Liberace, Patti Smith or Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson. A true cultural artifact, THE ANDY WARHOL DIARIES amounts to a portrait of an artist-and an era-unlike any other.

As the creator of the 67-foot-tall Big Sam statue of Sam Houston that overlooks Interstate 45 just south of Huntsville, Texas, David Adickes is a pivotal, if sometimes enigmatic, figure in Texas art. Though he made many contributions to the early development of the Houston art scene and to Texas Modernism, which has experienced an upsurge in interest of late, Adickes's life and work have had no thorough examination.

Monumental: The Art of David Adickes tells the story of how a young artist from rural Texas studied with Fernand Léger in Paris, traveled the world, and returned to Texas to become one of the founders of a thriving art scene. Consideration of his monumental sculptures of Sam Houston, the Beatles, and various US presidents affords readers the opportunity to reflect on the challenges of making public art and navigating its political, cultural, and bureaucratic restrictions.

Monumental considers the artistic implications of history, popular culture, kitsch, and even social media while exploring the dichotomy between the frequent academic skepticism and the ongoing mass appeal of Adickes's oeuvre. Scholars and students of contemporary Texas art, as well as general readers interested in Adickes's well-known public works, will enjoy this first-ever comprehensive look at a popular Texas artist.

An entirely new exploration of the life and career of the expat American artist Julius LeBlanc Stewart (1855-1919), who spent nearly all his life in Paris, and whose oil paintings feature in private collections and those of many major museums on both sides of the Atlantic.

Stewart's paintings are highly engaging and attractive, covering a broad cross-section of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American Expat Parisian high society, its genteel past-times, and travel, in a style of painting that was uniquely his own, and that was lauded in both Europe and America. This new volume presents over seventy major paintings, pastels and drawings across thematic sections, with a new introduction to Stewart's life, career, and world through essays by major specialists on nineteenth and early twentieth century American art and history.

The authors look variously at Stewart's early career and training at the École des Beaux-Arts, his later tutelage under French and Spanish masters, Eduardo Zamacoïs, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Raimundo Madrazo, his family's involvement in the production of sugar; then the world of the American Expat society in which Stewart circulated, and the evolution Stewart's later style, in the mid 1880s towards multi-figured, narrative scenes of his family, friends and meticulous depictions of their costumes; then for a brief period later the sensuous Arcadian nudes bathed in sunlight, celebrating the attributes of Diana and the Bachenates. Collectively these provide the first major exploration of Stewart's world and work with, new contribution to our understanding of the importance and legacy of his art, and his advocation for his community of fellow American artists in France.

Jonas Mekas' diaries have an aching honesty, puckish humor and quiet nobility of character. Many readers curious about the early years of this seminal avant-garde filmmaker will discover here a much more universal story: that of the emigrant who can never go back, and whose solitariness in the New World is emblematic of the human condition. -Phillip Lopate

I was enormously moved by it. -Allen Ginsberg

Legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas actually came to filmmaking relatively late in life, and his path to New York was a difficult one. In 1944, Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee Lithuania. They were interned for eight months in a labor camp in Elmshorn. Even after the war ended, Mekas was prevented from returning to his native Lithuania by the Soviet occupation. Classed as a displaced person, he lived in DP camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel for years. It was only at the end of 1949 that Jonas and Aldolfas Mekas finally found their way to New York City.

A new edition of Mekas' acclaimed memoir, first published by Black Thistle Press in 1991, I Had Nowhere to Go tells the story of the artist's survival in the camps and his first years as a young Lithuanian immigrant in New York City. Mekas' memoir--the inspiration for a 2016 biopic by Douglas Gordon--tells the story of how an individual life can move through the larger 20th-century narratives of war and exile and tentatively put down new roots. In the words of Phillip Lopate, This is a lyrical, essential spiritual anthropology.

Jonas Mekas (born 1922) lives and works in New York. Filmmaker, writer and poet, he is a cofounder of Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. An influential figure in New American Cinema and New York underground culture, he worked with Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon and many others. Mekas' work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West is a fount of major collections of art from some of the most renowned painters and sculptors of the American West. Holdings of artworks by titans such as Frederic Remington and Charles Russell number in the hundreds. The painter Joseph Henry Sharp, while claiming less space on the walls of the Center's Whitney Western Art Museum, is represented by a substantial number of works that reveal his joy and devotion to the West and to its indigenous people. The Center also owns a set of Sharp's papers, an extensive archive gifted by the artist's primary chronicler, Forrest Fenn of Santa Fe. Fenn also donated Sharp's Montana cabin, the Absarokee Hut, to the Center, thus collectively making the museum a focal point for Sharp studies.

This volume marks a fresh inspection of who Sharp was, how and where he was trained as a painter, why he selected the nation's western Native population as a primary subject, what impact his imagery had on audiences across the continent, and how his production as a painter of what he referred to as the real Americans differed from that of his contemporary peers.

Beyond the pages of this book, and in conjunction with its findings and insights about Sharp, the Center has produced an online catalogue of some 700 examples of the artist's paintings held in public collections. The repositories of these works span the country from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles with an obvious wellspring held by institutions in the West and Midwest. Readers who avail themselves of this volume's additional, electronic chapter will be rewarded with a vast and compelling compendium of Sharp's treasured paintings from over fifty museums, foundations, and libraries around the country.

A major new volume celebrating the lithographs of George Wesley Bellows, regarded as one of America's greatest artists.

George Bellows (1882-1925) was a painter, illustrator, and printmaker. His career established, in late 1915 he turned to lithography. Over the next nine years he almost single-handedly elevated lithography in America to a fine art. The inherent flexibility of the process, its potential for drawing in vigorous strokes and its richness of tone were well suited to his style. The subjects that fascinated him range from intimate studies of his family and friends to snap shots of American life, the atrocities of World War I, and what first caught the public's attention, Boxing. All were new and undeniably American. George Bellows; American Life in Print features two essays: Bellows, Advocate for Lithography with in depth examination of sixty-six lithographs and drawings. A second essay explores the artist's rise to fame in Bellows and the 'Art Palace of the West, ' focusing on his long term relationship with the Cincinnati Art Museum and it's Annual Exhibition of American Art.