Hilma af Klint's daring abstractions exert a mystical magnetism
When Swedish artist Hilma af Klint died in 1944 at the age of 81, she left behind more than 1,000 paintings and works on paper that she had kept largely private during her lifetime. Believing the world was not yet ready for her art, she stipulated that it should remain unseen for another 20 years. But only in recent decades has the public had a chance to reckon with af Klint's radically abstract painting practice--one which predates the work of Vasily Kandinsky and other artists widely considered trailblazers of modernist abstraction. Her boldly colorful works, many of them large-scale, reflect an ambitious, spiritually informed attempt to chart an invisible, totalizing world order through a synthesis of natural and geometric forms, textual elements and esoteric symbolism.
Accompanying the first major survey exhibition of the artist's work in the United States, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future represents her groundbreaking painting series while expanding recent scholarship to present the fullest picture yet of her life and art. Essays explore the social, intellectual and artistic context of af Klint's 1906 break with figuration and her subsequent development, placing her in the context of Swedish modernism and folk art traditions, contemporary scientific discoveries, and spiritualist and occult movements. A roundtable discussion among contemporary artists, scholars and curators considers af Klint's sources and relevance to art in the 21st century. The volume also delves into her unrealized plans for a spiral-shaped temple in which to display her art--a wish that finds a fortuitous answer in the Guggenheim Museum's rotunda, the site of the exhibition.
Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is now regarded as a pioneer of abstract art. Though her paintings were not seen publicly until 1987, her work from the early 20th century predates the first purely abstract paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich.
The first publication of its kind, connecting a constellation of artists working at the forefront of abstraction in the early 20th century
Orphism emerged among a cosmopolitan group of artists active in Paris in the early 1910s, as the innovations of modern life radically altered conceptions of time and space. Engaged with ideas of simultaneity in kaleidoscopic compositions, these artists investigated the transformative possibilities of color, form and motion. Often featuring disks of brilliant color, their work evoked multisensory experiences. When pushed to its limits, Orphism signaled total abstraction. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a contemporary, coined the term Orphism to describe this move away from Cubism, toward a physically and spiritually transcendent art. His concept referred back to the Greek mythological poet and lyre player Orpheus, whose music thwarted death.
The first in-depth examination of the Orphist avant-garde, this revelatory exhibition catalog contextualizes Orphism, tracing its roots, exploring its cross-disciplinary reach and considering its transnational reverberations across 16 illustrated texts by a multigenerational group of authors from different fields. Incisive essays offer new perspectives, delineating Orphism's connection to music, dance and poetry, and investigating the historical and cultural circumstances that shaped its ethos. More than 90 artworks in multiple mediums are punctuated by micro-narratives that view select artists through the Orphist lens, presenting original scholarship on well-known figures such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Frantisek Kupka and Francis Picabia while also illuminating lesser-known ones such as Mainie Jellett, Morgan Russell and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.
Albers in the promised land of abstract art the little-known influence of Mexico
Mexico is truly the promised land of abstract art, Josef Albers wrote to his former Bauhaus colleague Vasily Kandinsky in 1936. Josef Albers in Mexico reveals the profound link between the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica and Albers' abstract works on canvas and paper. With his wife, the artist Anni Albers, Albers toured pre-Columbian archeological sites and monuments during his 12 or more trips to Mexico and other Latin American countries between 1935 and 1968. On each visit, Albers took black-and-white photographs of pyramids, shrines, sanctuaries and landscapes, which he later assembled into rarely seen photo collages. The resulting works demonstrate Albers' continued formal experimentation with geometry, this time accentuating a pre-Columbian aesthetic.
Josef Albers in Mexico brings together photographs, photo collages, prints and significant paintings from the Variants/Adobe (1946-66) and Homage to the Square (1950-76) series from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation. Two scholarly essays, an illustrated map and vivid color reproductions of paintings and works on paper illuminate this little-known period in the influential artist's practice.
A collection of Jenny Holzer's texts, presented as layout drawings for stone benches, that trace and illuminate our complex world
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jenny Holzer: Light Line, a reimagining of the artist's landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, this artist's book will provoke and inspire. Each page features a phrase chosen by Holzer from three of her text series--Truisms, Living and Survival--in the form of drawings she has used for many years to create her iconic stone benches. All interior pages are vellum, a physical and conceptual layering that invites novel readings of Holzer's work. This unique volume extends her practice with a material presentation of real and imagined works that weaves new connections through its pages.
Holzer harnesses the power of words to convey joy, sorrow, contemplation, rage and everything in between. Her work presents writing--both her own and that of others--in an array of mediums, including electronic signs, plaques, paintings and stonework. Starting in the 1970s with her New York City street posters, and continuing through her more recent light projections, mobile LED signs and experiments with artificial intelligence, her practice rivals ignorance and violence with humor, kindness and courage. The public dimension is integral, and the surprising sites where her work appears range from city streets to stadium scoreboards, memorials, T-shirts and condom wrappers. The thought-provoking and indelible words she chooses highlight the pressing issues of our time.
For over 40 years, Jenny Holzer (born 1950) has presented her work in public places and international exhibitions, including Times Square, the Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim Museums. She received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the US State Department's International Medal of Arts in 2017 and the Wall Street Journal's Art Innovator Award in 2022. She lives and works in New York.
The evolution of Alex Katz: nearly 80 years of restless innovation in portraiture and landscape across painting, works on paper and sculpture
Across decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz has sought to capture a state of absolute awareness in paint. Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of quick things passing, compressing the flux of everyday life into a condensed burst of optical perception. Published on the occasion of the artist's first US career retrospective in more than 30 years, Alex Katz: Gathering offers a definitive account of Katz's artistic project, demonstrating both its marked coherence and restless evolution. Generously illustrated, the book features the full breadth of the artist's work across mediums and formats, from intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway in the late 1940s to the rapturous, monumentally scaled landscapes that have dominated his recent production.
Essays by artists, writers and art historians offer fresh, authoritative overviews of the artist's practice alongside more focused considerations of specific facets of his art, including his flower paintings, collages, prints, freestanding cutouts and set design collaborations with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. A sourcebook of historical reviews, essays and poems rounds out the volume, which offers an overdue reassessment of the artist's oeuvre.
Alex Katz (born 1927) is one of America's most iconic and prolific artists. His work has been the subject of more than 250 solo exhibitions and 500 group exhibitions since 1951 and can be found in over 100 public collections worldwide.
Documenting Sze's monumental Guggenheim installation--a reflection on the continual reshaping of experience by digital and material saturation
Over three decades, Sarah Sze has developed a remarkable practice that boldly traverses sculpture, video, installation, painting, printmaking, drawing and sound. Her work, sometimes compared to scientific models, is distinguished by her intricate constructions using myriad ordinary objects and images that evidence the imprints of contemporary life. Sze's Guggenheim exhibition, which centers on Timekeeper (2016)--one of the first in the artist's eponymous series of multimedia installations--is a reflection on how our experience of time and place is continuously reshaped in a digitally and materially saturated world. The show represents the New York premiere of Timekeeper.
Published after the show's opening, this book is a rich, immersive document of the singular relationship Sze cultivated with the building over the five years she spent developing this site-specific presentation. The majority of the volume is given over to expansive installation photographs, as well as sketches by the artist. An illustrated essay by curator Kyung An probes the depths of the exhibition's thread of serendipitous encounters, while contributions by Hilton Als and Molly Nesbit offer explorations of the origins and resonances of Sze's practice of timekeeping.
Sarah Sze (born 1969) received a BA from Yale University in Connecticut in 1991 and an MFA from New York's School of Visual Arts in 1997. Her previous monographs include Timekeeper (2018), Night into Day (2021) and Fallen Sky (2022). Born in Boston, Sze presently lives and works in New York.
Paperback edition of the authoritative Guggenheim catalog on the Italian avant-garde movement
Italian Futurism was officially launched in 1909 when F.T. Marinetti published his The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. This catalog considerably advances the scholarship and understanding of an influential 20th-century artistic movement. As part of the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States, this publication examines the historical sweep of Futurism from its inception with Marinetti's manifesto through the rise of Italian fascism and the movement's demise at the end of World War II. Presenting over 300 works created between 1909 and 1944 by artists, writers, designers and composers such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Marinetti, Ivo Pannaggi, Rosa Rosà, Luigi Russolo, Tato and many others, this publication encompasses not only painting and sculpture but also architecture, design, ceramics, fashion, film, photography, advertising, poetry, publications, music, theater and performance.
An updated edition of the definitive monograph on Maurizio Cattelan--provocateur, prankster and tragic poet of our times
The Guggenheim Museum's sold-out publication Maurizio Cattelan: All is returning to print. Hailed as a provocateur, prankster and tragic poet of our times, Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960) has created some of the most unforgettable images in contemporary art--most notoriously The Ninth Hour (1999), a sculpture of Pope John Paul II struck by a meteorite. Derived from popular culture, history and organized religion, Cattelan's subjects range widely, and his work, while bold and irreverent, is deadly serious in its scathing cultural critiques.
The second edition of All updates the catalogue that accompanied the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 2011-12 retrospective survey of the artist. For this exhibition, Cattelan sidestepped the totalizing effect of a retrospective by devising a site-specific installation in which his entire oeuvre was suspended from the oculus of the museum's iconic rotunda. This book offers an equally unique response to the conventions of the catalogue. It is a faux-leatherbound hardcover with gold stamping and thin paper that is designed to resemble an old textbook or bible. The volume details almost every work of Cattelan's from the late '80s to the present within a double-column page format, featuring full-color reproductions and accompanying entries.
The revised edition describes the artist's return to art making after a five-year retirement with a special, ongoing project opening at the Guggenheim in May 2016. It also features a redesigned cover and installation images of the exhibition All. Nancy Spector has augmented her critical overview of Cattelan--which documents not only his artistic output but also his ongoing activities as a curator, editor and publisher--with a new coda. Since its original publication, All has become the Cattelan bible, and this revised edition exploring the latest chapter of the artist's influential career ensures it will remain the definitive source on his work for years to come.
A fresh appraisal of Giacometti's output, from painting to sculpture
This comprehensive survey of the work of the Swiss-born modern master Alberto Giacometti offers a fresh and incisive account of his creative output. Published on the occasion of Giacometti's first major museum presentation in the US in over a decade, the volume brings together nearly 200 sculptures, paintings and drawings to trace the artist's wide-ranging and hugely innovative engagement with the human form across various mediums.
While Giacometti may be best known for his distinct figurative sculptures that emerged after World War II, including a series of elongated standing women, striding men and expressive busts, this volume devotes equal attention to the artist's early and midcareer development. It explores his lesser-known engagement with Cubism and Surrealism as well as African, Oceanic and Cycladic art, while also highlighting his remarkable talents as a draftsman and painter alongside his sculptural oeuvre. Of particular focus is Giacometti's studio practice, which is examined through rarely seen plaster sculptures that highlight the artist's working process, in addition to historical photographs documenting his relationship with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum--which hosted the artist's first US museum exhibition, in 1955--and with New York City.
Alberto Giacometti was born in Borgonovo, Switzerland, in 1901. In 1922, Giacometti settled in Paris, and began to exhibit his sculptures. By 1930 he was a participant in the Surrealist circle, up until 1934--also the year that he first exhibited in the US, at the legendary Julien Levy Gallery in New York. From 1942, Giacometti lived in Geneva, where he associated with the publisher Albert Skira. In 1948, he was given a solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York. In 1955, he received retrospectives at the Arts Council Gallery, London, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He received the Sculpture Prize at the 1961 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. In 1965, retrospective exhibitions were organized by the Tate Gallery, London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Giacometti died in 1966.
From his early self-portraits to his site-specific installations, this volume underscores Rashid Johnson's fearless engagement with the central themes, questions and aesthetics of the contemporary era
Co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, A Poem for Deep Thinkers is a three-decade survey of Rashid Johnson's artistic career. It situates the artist within three interconnected spheres: as a scholar of art history; as a mediator of Black popular culture and its widespread commodification; and as an artist engaged with the globalization of contemporary art.
The exhibition and accompanying catalog features nearly 90 artworks, including early photographs, Cosmic Slops, spray-painted text works, collage paintings, Broken Men mosaics, film projects, and key sculptures and installations that incorporate materials such as shea butter, black soap, plants, ceramic vessels and wax. These explorations demonstrate Johnson's uncommon fluency with multiple materials and forms as well as a nuanced ability to synthesize the condition of the human psyche.
This lavish catalog is Bodonia-bound with gold block edges and printed on coated and uncoated papers. Amid more than 200 illustrations, the publication also includes creative meditations on excerpts by literary icons Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Genet, Paul Beatty and Amiri Baraka, interspersed among essays and an interview that illuminate Johnson's work.
Born and raised in Chicago, Rashid Johnson (born 1977) received fine arts degrees from Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of 24, his work was included in Thelma Golden's 2001 exhibition Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Johnson made his directorial debut with his 2019 adaptation of Richard Wright's Native Son.
Gego infused her art with architecture and engineering to create unique works of delicate suspense
Accompanying the first major museum retrospective exhibition of Gego's work in the US in more than 15 years, this expansive, definitive catalog charts the evolution of Gego's singular approach to abstraction through organic forms, linear structures and systematic spatial investigations. Featuring nearly 300 images, including more than 160 sculptures, drawings, prints, artist's books, textiles and installations made between the early 1950s and the early 1990s, this volume also presents 11 illustrated essays by experts in the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art that trace Gego's artistic development across various mediums and disciplines, including her significant contributions to architecture and design; ground her practice in various art movements that materialized in Latin America, Europe and the US during her lifetime; and consider the pedagogical influence of her two-decade teaching career in Caracas. An illustrated chronology tracks Gego's life and artistic progression as well as her exhibition history, contextualized within the rich cultural milieus in which she lived and worked. Also featured are images of Gego's Reticulárea, an environmental installation widely considered to be her magnum opus, and a series of photographs taken by the artist's partner at their shared home and studio in Caracas. Gego remains little known in the US today, despite her unique and striking formal and conceptual contributions. This essential publication advances an expanded understanding and appreciation of the artist's work within the context of 20th-century modernism.
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912-94) came of age as an artist in the midst of Venezuela's development as a modern state, emerging as a vital figure in Latin American modern art whose work intersected with major transnational art movements of the 20th century while remaining distinctly her own. Born in Hamburg and trained as an engineer and architect in Germany, Gego immigrated to Venezuela in 1939, fleeing Nazi persecution. In her new home of Caracas, she worked as an architect and a designer before embarking on her artistic career, which she pursued until her death in 1994.
From C zanne to Braque, the Thannhauser Collection forms the core of the Guggenheim's early modernist holdings
When Justin K. Thannhauser (1892-1976) brought his collection of modern art to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1965, it was his crowning achievement after more than a half-century as one of Europe's most influential and distinguished collectors and dealers. The collection's formal bequeathal to the Guggenheim in 1978 represents a watershed moment for the museum--today its Thannhauser Collection constitutes the core of the Guggenheim's impressionist, postimpressionist, and School of Paris holdings, including 32 works by Pablo Picasso.
This volume presents the astonishing collection in full, offering a concentrated survey of works by such modern masters as Braque, C zanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Picasso, Pissarro and Van Gogh, among others. Throughout, artworks are given rich context and detail with historical installation views and high-tech conservation images. Short essays on collection highlights by current and former Guggenheim curators and conservators illuminate the artists' stylistic innovations as they sought to liberate art from academic genres and techniques. The book also features extensive technical analyses, offering rare insight into the artists' materials and processes based on the latest advances in conservation technology. A lead essay by Megan Fontanella recounts the genesis of Thannhauser's collection and its eventual transfer to the Guggenheim Museum. Tracing his ambitious career as gallerist and collector in Europe during the interwar years and into the calamity of World War II, she explores how Thannhauser's lifelong support for experimental art and eye for original talent helped define the modernist vanguard of 20th-century art.
A pioneering survey of Korea's dynamic postwar avant-garde, with new translations of manifestos, articles and primary sources
The 1960s and 1970s marked a period of exceptional change in Korea, propelled by rapid urbanization and modernization, and influenced by an authoritarian state at home and a globalizing world beyond. Young artists of the era were not immune to these unprecedented socioeconomic, political and material conditions, responding with a groundbreaking and genre-defying body of avant-garde art known broadly as Experimental art (silheom misul). Both as individuals and in collectives, these artists broke definitively with their predecessors, redefining the boundaries of traditional painting and sculpture while embracing innovative--and often provocative--approaches to materials and process through performance, installation, photography and video.
Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s accompanies the first exhibition in North America to examine this influential but understudied period. Featuring incisive new scholarship and lavish photography of works drawn from public and private collections across the globe, the volume also brings together translations of articles, artist manifestos and other primary sources that offer a firsthand perspective on the ideas and discourses then shaping Korean art. What emerges is the story of how this generation of young Korean artists harnessed the power of art to confront and reimagine an ever-shifting present.
Artists include: Choi Boonghyun, Choi Byungso, Chung Chanseung, Ha Chong-Hyun, Han Youngsup, Jung Kangja, Kang Kukjin, Kim Hanyong, Kim Kulim, Kim Tchahsup, Kim Youngjin, Lee Hyangmi, Lee Hyeonjae, Lee Kang-So, Lee Kun-Yong, Lee Seungjio, Lee Seung-taek, Lee Taehyun, Limb Eungsik, Moon Bokcheol, Nam Sanggyun, Park Hyunki, Shim Moon-seup, Shin Hakchul, Song Burnsoo, Suh Seungwon, Sung Neungkyung and Yeo Un.
The story of the pioneering collectors and artists behind the Guggenheim's radical collection
Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim celebrates the late 19th- and early 20th-century masterworks at the core of the institution's holdings, and the trailblazers--artists and early patrons alike--whose contributions helped define the forward-looking identity of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Central to Visionaries is the story of museum founder Solomon R. Guggenheim, who with support from his trusted advisor, Hilla Rebay, become a great champion of nonobjective art and assembled a radical collection against the backdrop of economic crisis and war in the 1930s and '40s.
A lead catalog essay by museum curator Megan Fontanella explores Solomon Guggenheim's fascinating activities in this period, together with that of five similarly pioneering art patrons whose personal holdings would become essential components of the foundation collection: Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early School of Paris artworks from Justin K. Thannhauser; the eclectic Expressionist inventory of migr art dealer Karl Nierendorf; the incomparable abstract and Surrealist paintings and sculptures from self-proclaimed art addict Peggy Guggenheim; and key modern examples from the estates of artists Katherine S. Dreier and Rebay. Alongside vibrant illustrations of works by such iconic artists as Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock, Visionaries also features essays by six curators examining touchstone works from the foundation collection.Twenty years of experimental art from a globalized China
Published on the occasion of the largest exhibition of contemporary art from China ever mounted in North America, organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World explores recent experimental art from 1989 to 2008, arguably the most transformative period of modern Chinese and recent world history.
Featuring over 150 iconic and lesser-known artworks by more than 70 artists and collectives, this catalog offers an interpretative survey of Chinese experimental art framed by the geopolitical dynamics attending the end of the Cold War, the spread of globalization and the rise of China. Critical essays explore how Chinese artists have been both agents and skeptics of China's arrival as a global presence, while an extensive entry section offers detailed analysis on works made in a broad range of experimental mediums, including film and video, ink, installation, land art and performance, as well as painting and photography.
Featured artists include Ai Weiwei, Big Tail Elephant Group, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cao Fei, Chen Zhen, Chen Chieh-jen, Ding Yi, Geng Jianyi, Huang Yong Ping, Kan Xuan, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Libreria Borges, Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, New Measurement Group, Ou Ning, Ellen Pau, Qiu Zhijie, Shen Yuan, Song Dong, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Yan Lei, Yang Jiechang, Yu Hong, Xijing Men, Xu Bing, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Peili, Zhang Hongtu, Zhang Xiaogang and Zhou Tiehai. An appendix includes a selected history of contemporary art exhibitions in China, artist biographies and a bibliography.
With their battle cry Zero is the beginning. Zero is round. Zero is Zero, the ZERO artists anticipated Land art, Minimalism and Conceptual art
ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s is the first large-scale historical survey in the United States dedicated to the German artist group Zero (1957-66). The group was founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who were joined by G�nther Uecker in 1961, and ZERO, an international network of like-minded artists from Europe, Japan and North and South America--including Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Piero Manzoni, Almir Mavignier, Jan Schoonhoven and Jes�s Rafael Soto--who shared their aspirations to redefine art in the aftermath of World War II. The catalogue explores the experimental practices developed by the more than 30 artists from nine countries featured in the show, whose work anticipated aspects of Land art, Minimalism and Conceptual art. The publication is organized around points of intersection, exchange and collaboration that defined these artists' shared history. Among the themes explored are the establishment of new definitions of painting; the introduction of movement and light as both formal and idea-based aspects of art; the use of space as subject and material; the interrogation of the relationship between nature, technology and humankind; and the production of live actions or demonstrations. At once a snapshot of a specific group and a portrait of a generation, this book celebrates the pioneering nature of both the art and the transnational vision advanced by the ZERO network.