So do you think you know Mucha? Engraving? The voracious classism of the art world? This month, our publishers and contributors invite you to ask yourself what you think you know. The editor -in -chief Hakim Bishara takes a look at the first English translation of a photo book by Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain with text by the poet Pablo Neruda, while the editor -in -chief Lisa Yin Zhang reads the experimental fiction collection of Critics Lucy Lippard. Read the continuation for more recommendations, notably the editor -in -chief Hrag Vartanian on the moving memories of Tamara Lanier telling her fight to recover the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors of the University of Harvard and the clever perspectives of the White Pube on the art world, written in a tone that needs: humor. –Lakshmi Rivera Amin, deputy editor -in -chief
Of these roots: my fight with Harvard to recover my inheritance by Tamara Lanier
In her new memories, Tamara Lanier describes the battle continues to claim the daguerreotypes which were taken from its ancestors enslaved in the south of Antellum. From its original state of Connecticut, Lanier embarks on a historic journey to the south, discovers the furniture made by his ancestors in the house of the descendant of the snapshot, teaches us the power of family inheritance and memory to fight against oppression, and describes his fight with rich institutions and their courtiers to recognize the reality of the crime. It is a moving and well written story that will teach you that those of us in art and academic communities can sometimes ignore the living history of the objects that we have known in our research and our work. –HRAG VARTANIAN
Buy on the bookstore | Crown, January 2025
Poor artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Tsarina Muhammad (alias la Pube Blanche)
There are so many twists and turns in this first book by the big minds behind White ad (Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad), the acerbic and hilarious duo who does no prisoner in their regular criticisms of the art world of their British poles. As they explain in their intro, “we talked to one or two winners of the Turner Prize, a fraudster of the Venice Biennale, a communist messiah, some ghosts and a literal knight. We wanted to know the strategies that people put in place to maintain their relationship with art. Just who we want to hear. With a wave of characteristics (transformed into football notes), many digressions and fresh prose, Poor artists is an entertaining reading which will undoubtedly make many people who are or who want to be artists, in a resolutely lonely area infused by luxury consumerism, feel less alone. –HV
Buy on the bookstore | Prestel, November 2024
Sergio Larrain: Valparaíso
“Sometimes Valparaíso contracts like an injured whale. He waded in the air, is agony, dies and returns to life. Thus writes Pablo Neruda of the Chilean Port City in an essay for the book of his Countryman Sergio Larrain on Valparaíso, made up of photos dating from the 1960s. It is a remarkable writing that lives and breathes in an amazing book of one of the best photographers of the 20th century. You can almost feel the brackish air of the coastal city decaying in the bewitching photos of Larrain of its inhabitants, its fish and its ghosts. Like a street cat, he also witnesses moments of beauty, difficulties and in the winding alleys of the city and on his endless stairs. “If we go up and descend all the stairs of Valparaíso, we will have made a trip to the world,” writes Neruda. A single page of this beautiful book is enough to make the sail. –Bishara judge
Buy on the bookstore | Thames & Hudson, February 2025
Timeless Mucha: The magic of the lineedited by Tomoko Sato
Like many 20 years old, I have an Alphonse Mucha poster stuck on my wall, and I am not ashamed. It is a granular reproduction of a 1902 study for “The moon», In which the celestial body takes the form of a starred woman coiled in constellations which founds me with her gaze despite the century and a change between us. Maybe you have a supervised printing suspended in your living room or a postcard pinned above your office. Omnipresent now, too, the whirlwind reinforcements of the Czech artist and the organic lines would embody Art Nouveau, but the crucial political and artistic context to understand his work risks getting lost in reshuffle.
Timeless Mucha: The magic of the line Offers a necessary corrective, reminding us that the artist “dreamed of the political and political resurgence of his homeland”. Accompanying a traveling program of the same name currently visible to the Phillips collection in Washington, DC, the tests of the catalog also detail the impact of Japanese printing on the obstacles to wood on the work of Mucha and how he in turn influenced the psychedelic posters of the manga of the 1960s and other styles. It is a fascinating overview of a network of global influences, market requests and political upheavals that fills the gaps in the history of Mucha, giving me a new appreciation for his work (and my celestial companion on the wall). –THE
Buy on the bookstore | Mucha Foundation and DAP, March 2025
Printing water (and other short fictions) by Lucy Lippard
Printing water (and other short fictions)A complete collection of the narration and the experimental work of Lucy Lippard, does not open with an intro which boosts its vast influence, as you can expect, but with an anxious letter, it wrote to a friend in 1970. “I mean, doing it” – “it is written” I see / you mean: a novel (1979) – “is and was exhilarating and appalling and all the best and aggravating to what I expected.”
This kind of nervous and conscious ambition inflicts the collection as a whole, which begins with the incursions to the Lycée and the college of Lippard in short fiction at the John Updike and Flannery O'Connor, before moving on to early submissions to literary magazines, including extracts from letters of rejection, which will temporarily appease the psychote of aspiring writers. These fictions are not only interesting and good insofar as Lippard is the one who writes them, but that is certainly part of the call.
According to a criticism of his stature, Lippard's criticisms in the introduction feel exactly exact, namely that it is not the best suitable for creating characters and stories developed. Instead, her most successful fictions include Fluxus-Esque instructions, found in a section on her collaborations with artists such as David Lamelas and Sol Lewitt-I particularly liked in which she commands us to walk in the Manhattan district of the 42nd street, losing a piece of ourselves by block. I am also a fan of his strange prose poems. Here, we are witnessing the moving observation of the eye of a critic perceived in the larger world; She describes natural training, for example, like a “winding corridor with rotten rose satin walls”. However, she herself wrote the most succinct encapsulation of her own experimental impulse in this opening letter: “Fuck it.” –Lisa Yin Zhang
Buy the book | New documents, December 2024
Printmakers, printers and printing publishers in the 18th century: the imprint of women, c. 1700–1830Published by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman
Read the Esther Chadwick Radical impression Recently, I have been intrigued whenever women, engraver and sellers appear, notably the artist Angelika Kauffmann, the engraver Caroline Watson and the publishers Hannah Humphrey and Elizabeth of Archery. How lucky, then, to discover these same women covered in depth Printmakers, printers and printing publishers in the 18th century: the imprint of women, c. 1700-1830As well as the work of many others, including longtime favorites like the artist Maria Hadfield Cosway and new fabulous (for me), like the formidable Jane Hogarth, the wife of William Hogarth, and Laura Piranesi, daughter of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. As the last two figures illustrate, “the persistent shadow projected by a matrimonial name or by his father's name” is a way in which women's contributions to the history of impressions have been lost and neglected. Publishers also point out that “prejudice against their genre combined with the lower status of engraving in the hierarchy of visual artistic media have meant that women engaged in engraving were even less visible and less studied than those who have taken painting, sculpture or drawing.” This excellent collection of large -scale tests contributes greatly to recover this past and offer a rich vein for the future scholarship. –Bridget Quinn
Read the book | University of Cambridge Press, March 2024
Barbara by Joni Murphy
About 80 years after the dissolution of Manhattan's project, the third more beautiful novel by Joni Murphy Barbara Trace the relationship of its titular protagonist with the atomic bomb, the theater and an assortment of business. Having grown up in the desert in the nuclear era, Barbara is the daughter of an engineer father and a mother who commits suicide while Barbara is only 13 years old. Later, Barbara became a film actress, trying to give meaning to her own identity – and to the past – by threading the costumes and the characteristics of others. “I had the radiant nucleus of my beauty and the sadness of my mother,” thinks about Barbara as an adult. “This volatile element that wanted to bond with the others but which could not except under the right pressures.” Beauty and violence are therefore inextricably linked in this captivating book on the performance of femininity, the illusory magic of cinema and the geopolitical landscape of America in the mid -20th century. –Hannah Bonner
Buy on the bookstore | Astra House, March 2025
