Rosalind E. Krauss

The book was purchased used, it has price stickers on the back cover. The binding, covers and pages are intact, but there is highlighting on some of the pages

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Art, Music, Drama/Theater

The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions.

The Optical Unconscious

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David Batchelor

Paul Wood

Briony Fer

The book was purchased used, has stickers on the cover and the spine. It was used as a college textbook, so it does have highlights on many pages.

Art Between the Wars

This book begins by considering responses by French artists to the First World War, showing how Purism, Dada, and early Surrealism are related to the ethos of post-war reconstruction. The authors then discuss the language of construction in places as dissimilar as France, Germany, and the Soviet Union; the contrasting demands of the utility and decoration of objects and paintings; and the relationship of surrealism to questions of sexuality and gender and to Freudian theory. The book concludes by addressing the widespread debate over realism in art: whether it represents an alternative to the elitism of the avant-garde or whether avant-garde art should play a role in the development of a modern realism.

Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism

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Fred S. Kleiner

Christin J. Mamiya

Binding, pages and covers are all intact. The book was used for college studies, so the pages might have light highlights.

Oversized Paperback (4 to 6 lbs)

A Concise History of Western Art

Gardner's Art Through the Ages

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Anja Grebe

Erich Lessing

Vincent Pomarède

Out of the shrink wrap, but binding and dust box are fully intact 

Mammoth Hardcover (8 to 10 lbs)

Louvre: All the Paintings

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Book is in good condition: binding, covers and pages are all intact. The book was a textbook for grad school, so there are highlights on many pages.

A Critical Anthology

What is art history? Why, how and where did it originate, and how have its aims and methods changed over time? This work is a guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most influential texts over the past two centuries.

The Art of Art History

Patrick Bringley

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They're the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamorous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought he'd be one of them. Then his older brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer and he found himself needing to escape the mundane clamor of daily life. So he quit The New Yorker and sought solace in the most beautiful place he knew.

To his surprise and the reader's delight, this temporary refuge becomes Bringley's home away from home for a decade. We follow him as he guards delicate treasures from Egypt to Rome, strolls the labyrinths beneath the galleries, wears out nine pairs of company shoes, and marvels at the beautiful works in his care. Bringley enters the museum as a ghost, silent and almost invisible, but soon finds his voice and his tribe: the artworks and their creators and the lively subculture of museum guards--a gorgeous mosaic of artists, musicians, blue-collar stalwarts, immigrants, cutups, and dreamers. As his bonds with his colleagues and the art grow, he comes to understand how fortunate he is to be walled off in this little world, and how much it resembles the best aspects of the larger world to which he gradually, gratefully returns.

In the tradition of classic workplace memoirs like Lab Girl and Working Stiff, All The Beauty in the World is a surprising, inspiring portrait of a great museum, its hidden treasures, and the people who make it tick, by one of its most intimate observers.

Mary

@mary913662

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Rosalind E. Krauss

The Optical Unconscious

David Batchelor; Paul Wood; Briony Fer

Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism

Fred S. Kleiner; Christin J. Mamiya

Gardner's Art Through the Ages

Anja Grebe; Erich Lessing; Vincent Pomarède

Louvre: All the Paintings

Donald Preziosi

The Art of Art History

Patrick Bringley

All the Beauty in the World

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Rosalind E. Krauss

The Optical Unconscious

David Batchelor; Paul Wood; Briony Fer

Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism

Fred S. Kleiner; Christin J. Mamiya

Gardner's Art Through the Ages

Anja Grebe; Erich Lessing; Vincent Pomarède

Louvre: All the Paintings

Donald Preziosi

The Art of Art History

Patrick Bringley

All the Beauty in the World

Get The App