Library

Library: Third Dimension

New York November 29th, 2019

This library selection features artists in The Brant Foundation’s current New York exhibition, Third Dimension: Works from The Brant Foundation. 

Third Dimension: Works from The Brant Foundation is the second exhibition at The Brant Foundation’s New York space, featuring over 20 artists integral to its collection. The selected sculptures, installations, and other works oscillating between painting and object represent the multifaceted practices of the artists on view, offering visitors the opportunity to encounter artists who have been collected in depth by Brant Foundation founder Peter M. Brant over the past 50 years. With a focus on sculpture and installation, The Brant Foundation pays tribute to the history of its East Village space, formerly the longtime studio of artist and sculptor Walter De Maria.

ARTISTS

David Altmejd, Carl Andre, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Maurizio Cattelan, John Chamberlain, Urs Ficher, Dan Flavin, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Glenn Ligon, Nate Lowman, Adam McEwen, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Prince, Rob Pruitt, Jason Rhoades, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Josh Smith, Dash Snow, Oscar Tuazon, Andy Warhol, Franz West

About The Brant Foundation Library

The Brant Foundation’s library program was established in 2009 to facilitate the appreciation and understanding of contemporary art and to advance our mission of promoting arts education. As both a museum and art study center, the Foundation’s library serves as a crucial resource for students, scholars, and educators by providing access to a unique collection of hard-to-find materials. After noticing the difficulties of obtaining contemporary art publications, typically as a result of rarity or expense, the Foundation was inspired to make efforts to broaden their holdings and increase accessibility to the public.

By reaching out to the surrounding arts community for help, the Foundation has accumulated an actively growing, rich collection of contemporary art books. With the contributions from the many organizations and institutions that share our vision, the public gains access to a wider range of materials used for the scholarly study and examination of contemporary art. Housing over 1,000 volumes – from exhibition catalogs and artist monographs to art criticism texts and periodicals – the library reflects the Foundation’s collection and admiration of contemporary art. Because of the rarity and value of the materials, our library is non-circulating, but we welcome and encourage the public to make use of the study center during operating hours. Please contact info@brantfoundation.org to make an appointment to visit The Brant Foundation’s library.

David Altmejd

Published on the occasion of the exhibition David Altmejd at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

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November 2011 – March 2012

941 North Street | Greenwich, CT 06831

Text: David Altmejd: The Eagerness of Objects by Jeffrey Kastner © 2013

 

Carl Andre

About Carl Andre: Critical Texts Since 1965

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One of the most significant artists of his generation, Carl Andre’s Minimalist sculpture has shifted the boundaries of art. One of the major American minimalists of the 1960s, Carl Andre is often compared to contemporaries like Robert Morris and Donald Judd.

This dynamic collection of essays and exhibition reviews charts the gradual evolution of consensus on the meaning of Andre’s art among the most influential art historians and critics of our time.

Contributors include Clement Greenberg, Donald Kuspit, Lucy R. Lippard, Robert C. Morgan, Barbara Rose and Roberta Smith; some of the essays appear here in English for the first time.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat: By Himself

by Dieter Buchhart, Anna Karina Hofbauer

An American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) first made a name for himself as part of a graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the 1970s, a place and time that saw the coalescence of hip hop, punk, and street art cultures. By the 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums across the globe.

Encompassing Basquiat’s lifelong intensive study of the self, Basquiat: By Himself is dedicated to the expressive self-portraits he created. These portraits are regarded as being among the most important of his radical creative works, and the essays here examine some fifty specific portraits of himself, as well as the concealed reproductions of the artist that can be found in his series of likenesses of African American men. As this book reveals, these similarities were produced by a man who, himself affected by everyday racism, identified with the heroes, saints, and martyrs he portrayed. Within these key works, we can see Basquiat’s focus on identity, discrimination, and prejudice to capitalism, the market, and oppression.

​Featuring 120 color images, Basquiat: By Himself is the first book to examine the central position Basquiat’s self-portraits hold within his oeuvre and sheds new light on the works of this intriguing artist.

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain: Choices

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John Chamberlain rose to prominence in the late 1950s with energetic, vibrant sculptures hewn from disused car parts, achieving a three-dimensional form of Abstract Expressionism that astounded critics and captured the imaginations of fellow artists. For a seven-year period in the mid-1960s, the artist abandoned automotive metal and turned to other materials. Motivated by scientific curiosity, Chamberlain produced sculptures in unorthodox media, such as urethene foam, galvanized steel, paper bags, mineral-coated Plexiglas and aluminum foil. Since returning in 1972 to metal as his primary material, Chamberlain limited himself to specific parts of the automobile, adding color to found car parts, dripping, spraying and patterning on top of existing hues to an often wild effect. In recent years, the artist has embarked on the production of a new body of work that demonstrates a decided return to earlier themes. John Chamberlain: Choices accompanies the Guggenheim Museum exhibition, which comprises 95 works, from the artist’s earliest monochromatic iron sculptures to the outsized foil creations he is working on today, encompassing shifts in scale, material and methods informed by the collage process that has been central to Chamberlain’s working method. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue includes essays by Susan Davidson, Donna De Salvo, Dave Hickey, Adrian Kohn and Charles Ray with an extensive chronology by Helen Hsu and a lexicon by Don Quaintance.

Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer: Paintings 1998-2017

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Urs Fischer announces the first retrospective publication dedicated solely to his paintings – Paintings 1998-2017. The book comes as a set of three volumes neatly housed in a box sleeve and offers the viewer an intimate look at every painting produced from his beginnings until 2017. Fischer’s two-dimensional works elegantly encapsulate some of his biggest strengths: color, precision, and juxtaposition. His inventive approach capitalizes on the relationship between photography and painting in many works, exploring two dimensional texture. In the book, images are printed to scale relative to one another. Selected works are also printed 1:1, providing the reader a detail view not available in any other context. This retrospective includes fresh documentation of early collage works, many of which have not been exhibited for years.

Dan Flavin

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The years 1955–1965 saw artists wreaking havoc with the parameters of painting. If Abstract Expressionists had proposed art as the manipulation of paint on a flat plane, the American artist Dan Flavin further refined art as the manipulation of light itself. Starting out as a convert to Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s, Flavin quickly disposed of painting’s “frame,” as sculptural light object. He first used fluorescent light in a 1961 series of square boxes with lights attached to the sides, titled Icons. The spiritual connotations of the title were soon eschewed for a radical materiality: “It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else,” he famously once said of his work: “everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered.” By using such an everyday material (neon tubing) and arranging it in simple compositions (in rows, or as diagonals, grids, right angles, arcs), Flavin attained a powerful combination of ordinariness and grandeur, and a purity on a par with the modernist artists to whom he dedicated works–Brancusi, Mondrian, Tatlin. This catalogue offers the broadest appraisal of Flavin’s achievement to date. With 200 color plates, it traces his development, from the early painted objects to the first neon tubes, beginning with the “Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi),” and beyond. Also included here are his much admired drawings and prints.

 

Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley: Arenas

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Mike Kelley’s Arenas series of the late 80s and early 90s mark a shift away from the artist’s performance-oriented activity and towards a new sculptural dexterity, in which cultural resonance is elicited from an eerie reframing of everyday objects. First exhibited in 1990 at Metro Pictures, the Arenas are comprised of stuffed animals arranged around the edges of blankets (or occasionally posed isolate in their center). Ten or twenty such toys in such groupings might convey a cheery childhood picnic scenario, but Kelley rarely selects more than five or six, and places them carefully so that their cuddliness and their capacity to comfort is entirely canceled out. Instead, we encounter the toy as a commodity entity―a mass-manufactured product positioned to enter into play but far from inviting it. Skarstedt’s exhibition of seven of the eleven Arenas is here recorded in superb installation shots and with critical commentary.

Karen Kilimnik

Published on the occasion of Karen Kilimnik at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

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May – November 2012

941 North Street | Greenwich, CT 06831

 

Glenn Ligon

Glenn Ligon: America

American artist Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is best known for his landmark body of text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the writings and speech of diverse figures including Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesse Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across a body of work that builds critically on the legacies of modern painting and more recent conceptual art. His subject matter ranges widely from the Million Man March and the aftermath of slavery to 1970s coloring books and the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe—all treated within artworks that are both politically provocative and beautiful to behold.

Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, created in close collaboration with the artist, surveys twenty-five years of Ligon’s art, including paintings, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings. Essays examine his working methods in depth and situate his output within a broad cultural context, while lavish new photography highlights the formal subtlety of his art. This first comprehensive survey of Ligon’s career will greatly advance our appreciation of his pioneering oeuvre.

Nate Lowman

Published on the occasion of Nate Lowman: I Wanted to be an Artist but all I got was this Lousy Career at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

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November 2012 – March 2013

941 North Street | Greenwich, CT 06831

Essay Diversions in the Fields of Dread by Jim Lewis

Adam McEwen

Adam McEwen: I Think I’m in Love

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New York–based British artist Adam McEwen (born 1965) is known for works that engage viewers with a dark yet poignant sense of humor. Once employed to write obituaries for the London Daily Telegraph, McEwen began producing fictional obituaries of living subjects such as Bill Clinton, Kate Moss and Jeff Koons. His recent sculptural works include objects such as a life-size coffin-carrier fabricated from solid graphite (Bier, 2013) and deployed airbags cast in concrete (2015). Designed in close collaboration with the artist, this book includes a selection of works that address the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction, and the everyday and the obscure, and features new texts by Wayne Koestenbaum, Lane Relyea and Heidi Zuckerman, alongside influential reprinted texts by writers Thomas Bernhard and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as well as a short piece by the artist himself.

Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side 1956-1969

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Published by The Museum of Modern Art

Considered a central figure of Pop, installation art, and Happenings, Claes Oldenburg redefined existing notions of art in the 1960s with his landmark environments “The Street” and “The Store,” his soft sculptures and his proposals for monuments. Since his arrival in New York in 1956, Oldenburg’s prolific production has always been accompanied by a daily practice of writing that reveals the conceptual complexity and diversity of his inventive oeuvre.

Comprising the artist’s key writings from the late 1950s and 1960s, this volume makes available a wealth of previously unpublished material, including sections of the diary Oldenburg kept during these formative years, his notes (written on an old typewriter in his studio while standing), facsimiles of sketches that show his abiding interest in the relationship between image and language, plus statements, essays, scripts for Happenings and poems. In diverse styles, vivid descriptions of his environment alternate with intimate confessions, humorous anecdotes, psychological observations and self-analysis, characterizations of the art world and its protagonists, and recurring inquests into his own motivations.

This compilation, the first to be dedicated entirely to Oldenburg’s writings, shows an artist who is not only resolute, informed, and programmatic–deeply concerned with the art and society of his time–but also witty and playful in his confrontation with his own contradictions and ambiguities. The book provides a unique window into the formation and evolution of one of the most influential and ground- breaking contemporary artists, and a lively personal account of the 1960s.

  • Rob Pruitt

Rob Pruitt

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Rob Pruitt’s 50th Birthday Bash at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

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941 North Street | Greenwich, CT 06831

Text: Rob Pruitt and Tom Eccles in conversation at Neuehouse Madison Square (New York), January 21, 2016

Jason Rhoades

Despite his untimely death at the age of 42, Los Angeles-based artist Jason Rhoades (1965–2007) left behind a large body of sculpture that seized the imagination of a generation of artists, curators and collectors in the 1990s. In this substantial new survey, Cologne-based independent curator Eva Meyer-Hermann traces the unfolding of Rhoades’work and provides revelatory interpretations of his large and intricate installations. Rhoades’ art has its roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s L.A. scene fostered by Richard Jackson and Paul McCarthy at the University of California, Los Angeles, at a time when the Southern Californian Performance scene in general had begun to open itself up to international exhibitions and the art market. Like his predecessors, Rhoades included performative elements in his installations and produced epic thematic cycles, drawing on mass culture to develop a dense weave of images and forms. This is the first comprehensive study of Rhoades’ vertiginously sprawling oeuvre.

  • Julian Schnabel Exhibition catalogue

Julian Schnabel

Published on the occasion of Julian Schnabel at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

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November 2013 – March 2014

941 North Street | Greenwich, CT 06831

Essay An Extreme Figure by Alison M. Gingeras

Josh Smith

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Josh Smith: The American Dream at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

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May – September 2011

941 North Street | Greenwich, CT 06831

Essay I Know Josh Smith Killed Me, or I Want to Be Like Josh by David Rimanelli © 2012

Franz West

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From abstract sculptures and collage to furniture and large-scale works, the work of Austrian artist Franz West (1947–2012) is unrestrainedly irreverent and also profoundly philosophical. His papier-mâché pieces that were intentionally made to be handled explore an immediate relationship between art and audience. Extending this theme, he later created playful pieces that doubled as seats and communal spaces. Throughout his career, West collaborated with numerous artists, musicians, writers, and photographers, many of whom are interviewed in this book.

  • Exhibition catalogue

Maurizio Cattelan, Cady Noland, Richard Prince, David Salle, Kenny Scharf

Published on the occasion of Remembering Henry’s Show: Selected Works 1978-2008 at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

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Group Exhibition: David Altmejd, Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Maurizio Cattelan, Larry Clark, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Urs Fischer, Keith Haring, Dennis Hopper, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Cady Noland, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Julian Schnabel, Jim Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklanski, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool

With Remembering Henry’s Show: Selected Works 1978-2008, The Brant Foundation Art Study Center pays homage to the late Henry Geldzahler’s groundbreaking 1969 exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Painting and Sculpture 1940-1970, which, in Geldzahler’s words, established “the New York School as the historical successor to the School of Paris,” and has been a continuous influence on the direction in which The Brant Foundation’s collection is built.  In presenting the exhibition, The Brant Foundation attempts to continue the tradition passed on by Geldzahler: to educate the public, making works available to institutions and individuals for scholarly study and examination, and to represent artists in depth.

 

Essay by Urs Fischer and Darren Bader © 2010

May 2009 – January 2010

941 North Street | Greenwich, CT 06831

Walter de Maria

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Walter De Maria: The Lightning Field presents never-before-seen photographs of this land art masterpiece and its surrounding landscape in western New Mexico. Photographer John Cliett was commissioned by Walter De Maria (1935–2013) and Dia Art Foundation to document this enigmatic artwork over two seasons in 1978 and 1979, but until now nearly all the resulting shots remained in the artist’s archives.

Tracing the course of a typical 24-hour visit to the site, the selection of images shows, for the first time, the rich complexity of site and land. This publication also includes the artist’s 1980 text on the work, “Some Facts, Notes, Data, Information, Statistics, and Statements,” originally published in Artforum; a selection of unpublished primary documents from Dia’s and the artist’s archives, including the photographer’s own notes and reports; and an essay by Dia director Jessica Morgan on De Maria’s complex relationship with photography.