Guston, Riley And Matisse Essential Autumn Book Releases

Guston Riley Matisse books

Three very colourful large format art books arrived this week and that’s just the covers. Philip Guston is known for his palette of pinks and the jacket to Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting bears his signature colours. The cover to Bridget Riley: The Complete Prints 1962-2020 is a bright orange cloth while Matisse: The Books is a shade of magenta also fabricated in cloth. They look appealing on the shelf or even better spread out on a coffee table. They are all however substantial academic works and not just glossy books for show.

Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting by Robert Storr

There is no doubt that Robert Storr’s new book Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting will prove to be the definitive book on Guston. With more than 800 images and measuring 31 cms by 33 cms by 3.5 cms deep, the book illustrates Guston’s key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book covers his entire career from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. It includes an extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications, and other ephemera drawn from the artist’s archives and other sources, contextualises Guston’s life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions.

Tate Modern is to stage a major retrospective of Guston’s work opening in February 2021. The book will prove to be an invaluable source to filling in the broader picture of Guston’s life, work and interests. I’m looking forward to this show enormously as I was fortunate to be in Venice during the 2017 Biennale when the Gallerie dell’Accademia staged the Philip Guston and the Poets exhibition and the Tate show should be more comprehensive. Many of those works are included in this book. The colour printing is accurate, and the power of his brushstrokes well reproduced. The text is informative, readable and thorough.

The author Robert Storr is one of the world’s leading critics and curators with many books to his name. He is the former Dean of Yale School of Art and senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was the first American to be visual arts director of the Venice Biennale. He has been researching and writing on Philip Guston for more than three decades.

Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting by Robert Storr published by Laurence King Publishing Ltd 14th September, Hardback, £60.00 ISBN: 978 1 78627 4168

for more information see Here

Bridget Riley: The Complete Prints 1962-2020

Foreword by Bridget Riley

Bringing together more than 100 prints made since 1962, this lavishly illustrated book is an entirely up-to-date catalogue raisonné of Bridget Riley’s graphic work over almost sixty years. The book explores Riley’s development as a printmaker as well as her relationship with leading printers in the UK.

Exhibitions devoted to her prints have been rare. There was an Arts Council National Touring Exhibition, Bridget Riley: Complete Prints 1962-2001, organised by the Hayward Gallery which toured between 2001 and 2003 which was two decades after the first Arts Council survey show Silkscreen Prints 1965-78 which toured between 1980 and 1984. Yet the prints provide insights into her explorations and compositional devices in her paintings. In the foreword, Riley states: “printmaking has been a very valuable addition to my working life as a painter, allowing me to extend particular trains of thought”. The book is published to coincide with a survey of Riley’s prints at Cristea Roberts Gallery, London from 11 September to 17 October 2020.

The book will prove to be the definitive edition. All illustrations are reproduced in a large format with a full-colour inventory of the prints and updated essays by Lynn MacRitchie and Craig Hartley and an additional essay by Robert Kudielka, which all provide a greater context for Riley’s work.

Bridget Riley: The Complete Prints 1962-2020

Foreword by Bridget Riley, Essays by Craig Hartley, Lynn MacRitchie and Robert Kudielka, Catalogue Raisonné by Alexandra Tommasini and Rosa Gubay

Published by The Bridget Riley Art Foundation and Thames and Hudson 10 September 2020  £45 hardback ISBN: 978 0 500 97109 3

For more information see Here

To buy the book see Here

Matisse: The Books 

Louise Rogers Lalaurie 

The livre d’artiste, or ‘artist’s book’, is among the most prized in rare book collections. Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was one of the greatest artists to work in this genre, creating his most important books over a period of eighteen years from 1932 to 1950. Jazz (1941-47) is the best-known of these books – the cut-out silhouette of Icarus is from this volume, but there are seven others. Matisse’s familiar line drawings fill the pages. The books are awash with powerful themes and imagery with an intriguing dialogue between word and image.

The chapters take one book at a time and include a selection of illustrations in their original sequence beginning with the cover or wrapper and title spread. Each image appears float mounted on the page with the crinkled edges of the paper visible, which gives the effect of tipped-in illustrations. The book is also handsomely illustrated with archival images and new photography.

The authoritative, informative accompanying text written by Louise Rogers Lalaurie highlights the books’ profound significance for Matisse as the catalysts for the extraordinary ‘second life’ of his paper cut-outs.

Lalaurie explores the page-by-page interplay of the books, translating key sequences and discussing their distinct themes and creative beginnings. Together Matisse’s artist books reveal his deep engagement with questions of beauty and truth; his faith; his perspectives on ageing, loss, and inspiration; and his relationship to his critics, the French art establishment and the women in his life.

Matisse: The Books by Louise Rogers Lalaurie 

Published by Thames and Hudson 24 September 2020 £60.00 hardback ISBN: 978 0 500 02168 2

To buy the book see Here

Words by Sara Faith ©Artlyst 2020

Read More

Tags

, , , , ,