Our Editorial Selections 02/1
By Sybaris Collection
The Art of Love by Kate Bryan is one of the favorite books of 2019 by Lucy Scovell, publisher of the auction house, Christie’s. The director of collections at Soho House & Co wrote the love and loss stories of modern art couples. 34 couples of artists from 1880 to the present tell how romantic relationships shaped their work in the world of fine arts (sculpture, photography, painting and design). Couples like Yayoi Kusama and Joseph Cornell, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Anni Albers and Josef, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Maria Martins and Marcel Duchamp, give life to this series of stories about art and love stories. As Lucy Scovell says: ‘It lacks reproductions of original artworks, but Asli Yazan’s engaging artist portraits in pen and ink more than compensate, while Bryan’s accessible, succinct prose makes this a holiday page-turner — or, indeed, a great gift for the blossoming art lover in your life.’
Tittle: The Art of Love: The Romantic and Explosive Stories Behind Art’s Greatest Couples
Author: Kate Bryan (Autor), Asli Yazan (Ilustrador)
Editorial: White Lion Publishing
Place: London, United Kingdom, 2019
184 pp.
Tittle: Warhol: A Life as Art
Author: Blake Gopnik
Editorial: Penguin
Place: United Kingdom, 2020
976 pp.
For Harry Seymour, a contributor to Christie’s, this is one of the most anticipated books to read in 2020. This year, the Warhol retrospective at Tate Modern will be exhibited for the first time in March. Portraits of Drag Queens, trans women, Marylin Monroe, Campbells and Coca-Cola will be shown for the first time in 30 years. This book is a specialized biography of the life and work of the artist. Gopnik conducted more than 260 interviews with Warhol acquaintances for several years and finally launches the result of his investigation. ‘Art and art history jumped the tracks with Andy Warhol. Adam Gopnik’s lucid account of the artist and the wild times puts all that back on track again. An eye-opening biography that reads like a potboiler’, Jerry Saltz, Senior Art Critic, New York Magazine.
Tittle: I (Heart) Art: The Work We Love from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Author: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Editorial: Harry N. Abrams
Place: New York, USA, 2019
264 pp.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses more than 150 works from its collection in a single book. The publication shows sculptures, photographs, collages and paintings to help readers discover the beauty that the museum keeps in its rooms. The names are, to say the least, impressive: Claude Monet, Alfred Stieglitz, Marc Chagall, Romare Bearden, Rosa Bonheur, Hokusai among others. An essential book for collectors and lovers of art history.
Tittle: Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham
Author: John Cage (Author), Laura Kuhn (Editor)
Editorial: Wesleyan University Press
Place: USA, 2019.
674 pp.
Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham has been selected by New York Times art critics as one of his 26 favorite art books last year. This book contains the 39 letters written between 1940 and 1942 about one of the great modernist love relationships. Although there is only Cage’s opinion in these letters, the emotions that the couple shared during 50 years of marriage are present. “The Selected Letters of John Cage, a wide-ranging selection of correspondence edited by Laura Kuhn, may stand both as Cage’s best biography to date and an unfailingly engaging introduction to his thinking. It demystifies Cage the far-removed guru and restores to us an eternally curious human being with a sharp, original mind and a gift for language that is apparent from the first letter in the book.”―Tim Page, The New York Review of Books
Tittle: Great Women Artists
Author: Phaidon Press
Editorial: Phaidon
Place: New York, USA, 2019
464 pp.
What are the great female artists? In light of recent gender studies and major concerns about claiming the names of women in art history, Phaidon exposes the names of the most relevant female artists, from the 17th century to the present day. The book contains data, images and all the necessary information from more than 400 women from 50 different countries. A fundamental book.
“Phaidon are helping to redress the balance with this encyclopedic volume that examines 500 years of great art by great women artists… no self-respecting art lover should be without a copy.”—Culture Whisper
