Colin Laverty is a Sydney doctor, who, along with his wife Elizabeth, has amassed one of the most singular collections of recent and contemporary aboriginal art in Australia. This book documents the collection, containing clear, color-accurate reproductions, photographs of the landscapes in which particular artists work and some portraits. There are informed essays throughout. The … Continued

At the end of the Civil War, there were very few significant paintings in America. By the start of the Great War, however, thanks to a surprisingly small group of men and women, the extensive collections we possess today had started to be formed. Cynthia Saltzman, a marvelously writerly writer, has studied the literature, read … Continued

Vine and artist Zhang Hongtu present revised/expanded edition at New York Public Library this Wednesday (February 1)

Jed Perl Book Review

Thanks to the very fully annotated correspondence, in 38 volumes, we know a great deal about Marcel Proust’s tastes in visual art. When young he frequented the Louvre, went to the Low Countries and, under the spell of John Ruskin, traveled to see France’s medieval churches. He devoted long essays to Gustave Moreau and Monet, … Continued

Using few footnotes, this collection of Boris Groys’s essays offers a compulsively original account of contemporary art and the political systems that support it. Educated in the former USSR, now a professor in Germany who also teaches at NYU, he brings to contemporary art theory a highly original perspective. Groys discusses fundamental topics: the nature … Continued

Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris by George Baker and I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation by Francis Picabia

Published by Phaidon Press, 2007, www.phaidon.com 336 pages, 280 black & white photographs, 70 color photographs $69.95 When the findings of history, a discussion of uses and the reconstruction of story blend with criticism, portrait content, I hope, is enlivened. Still, the narratives within it keep on turning, like the expressions on faces, themselves… (p. … Continued

“de Kooning: An American Master” By Mark Stevens & Annalyn Swan Knopf, 2004 752 pages, $35 With typical existentialist panache, Francis Bacon coined the phrase “exhilarated despair,” an oxymoron that rings true for Willem de Kooning, whom Bacon admired. Not so much for his work, necessarily, which runs the gamut of emotions and sensations (although … Continued

Sean Scully by David Carrier Thames & Hudson, 224 pages, $65 Sean Scully does for stripes what Giorgio Morandi did for bottles. He turns an unpreposessing form into the cipher for a fulsome range of painterly emotions. Morandi’s jugs and jars were things in the world, still-life motifs that precariously balanced specificity and generalization. Mr. … Continued