John McCracken: Works from 1963–2011

The vessel form in its distended hollowness is both a metaphor and a vehicle for an organic feeling that runs through much of [Duckworth’s] work and reflects her own deep empathy for the natural world.

— Martin Puryear

In the twenty years since the last major publication on the work of Ruth Duckworth, much has changed in how the field of ceramics is understood in relation to the realms of fine art and craft. Always regarding herself as a sculptor rather than a potter or ceramicist, Duckworth was ahead of her time, insisting that her work be considered in the same light and exhibited alongside that of her contemporaries working in bronze (which she also used occasionally), stone, welded metal, and other traditional sculptural media.

The discourse around ceramics has now caught up to her, and Ruth Duckworth includes an extensive presentation of her work in porcelain and stoneware, revealing the continued and growing influence of this trailblazing artist. As Emmanuelle Cooper wrote in the artist’s obituary: “In both her life and work, Duckworth’s background was one of non-conformity. In Germany, as a young girl, she risked prosecution by defacing a Nazi monument and resented being unable to attend art school because her father was Jewish. Most challenging of all was her determination to gain international respectability as a sculptor working primarily in clay.”

Ruth Duckworth includes a foreword and afterword by fellow artists Martin Puryear and Marie Herwald Hermann, along with a deeply humanizing conversation between curator Jo Lauria and Thea Burger, Duckworth’s longtime friend, agent, and representative of her estate.

The first monograph to be published featuring the work of the Japanese American artist Leo Amino, The Visible and the Invisible introduces a vital revision into both the canon of 20th century avant-garde sculpture and the history of Asian American art.

Amino is the first artist in the United States to take up plastics as a principal material of sculptural composition, the innovator of cast plastics in American sculpture, and the most represented artist of color in the history of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s annual exhibitions for sculpture after Isamu Noguchi. He is the only Asian American artist to teach on faculty in the history of the Summer Art Sessions at Black Mountain College, where he taught alongside artists including Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, and Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and informed the education of students Ruth Asawa, Kenneth Noland, and Harry Seidler, among others. Recommended to the faculty at Cooper Union by Josef Albers, Amino taught there for twenty five years, introducing students such as Jack Whitten to sculptural concerns.

Neel’s intimate portraits of her friends and family become a painted diary, documenting what it was like to be a part of her immediate milieu.

— Lily Koto Olive, The Brooklyn Rail

With a practice spanning the 1920s to the 1980s, Alice Neel (1900-1984) is widely regarded as one of the greatest figurative painters of the twentieth century. Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, this book presents a selection of portraits and still lifes from the last two decades of the artist’s life. Based in New York City, Neel chose her subjects from her family, friends, and a broad variety of locals: writers, poets, artists, students, textile salesmen, psychologists, cabaret singers, and homeless bohemians. Her eccentric selection was thus also a portrayal of, and dialogue with, the city in which she lived. Through her forthright and at times humorous touch, her work engaged with ongoing political and social issues, including gender, racial inequality, and labor struggles.

This volume includes portraits and still lifes made between 1964 and 1983, the last two decades of Neel's life. The portraits affirm the shift in her work towards more luminous compositions, as witnessed for example in Abe's Grandchildren (1964) and Richard (1969), where the background is partially rendered and supplanted by abstract areas of paint. Likewise, in the still lifes—a genre Neel continued to address throughout her career—such changes are evident in the arbitrary use of perspective and the artist's bright palette. In Still Life (Breakfast Table) (1965), a bird's eye view of a strident yellow table is set off by many of the objects on its surface, which are shown from their sides, and in Light (1980), a shadow cast by a sun-lit table omits the flowers arranged on its source. In other still lifes, potted plants and cut flowers take on anthropomorphic presences, and even hint at a subtle version of self-portraiture. Aside from two paintings made in her family home in New Jersey, and a portrait from San Francisco, all of the works in the show were painted in New York.

”The difficulty in naming his practice or easily linking it to a school attests to the success of his artistic ambition.”

—Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times

Hardcover
11.25 x 14.25 inches
111 pages / 157 images
ISBN: 9781934435120

Trade:$75.00
Rare: $150

Signed copies no longer available.