Books : Arts & Photography : History & Criticism : Regional : Caribbean & Latin American

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Books : Arts & Photography : History & Criticism : Regional : Caribbean & Latin American

• Antonio Lopez Garcia

  Cheryl Brutvan

  
  Antonio Lopez Garcia is one of Spain's most revered contemporary artists. Bringing his profound visual sensitivity and mastery of light to bear on a range of deliberately quotidian subjects, Lopez Garcia imbues them with an extraordinary and haunting character. In 1993, his paintings and drawings were given a major retrospective at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, while Victor Erice's 1992 documentary about Lopez Garcia, The Quince Tree of the Sun, received the Critics' Prize at that year's Cannes and top prize at the Chicago Film Festival. Yet Lopez Garcia's work has rarely been exhibited outside his native country. This book, published to accompany the first major exhibition of his art in the United States (in tandem with the MFA's monumental El Greco to Velazquez exhibition), offers the first comprehensive overview in English of this extraordinary oeuvre. An essay by curator Cheryl Brutvan discusses Lopez Garcia as a descendant of the great Spanish naturalists, as well as his indebtedness to Surrealism and "magic realism," while individual appreciations of some 50 paintings offer English-speaking readers their first opportunity to appreciate in depth the remarkable poetry and atmospheric density of this major world artist.
  
   

• Frida Kahlo

  Hayden Herrera, Victor Zamudio-Taylor, Frida Kahlo

  
  Few artists have captured the public's imagination with the force of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. During her lifetime, she was best known as the flamboyant wife of celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity." As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health--the orthopedic corsets that she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, the miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. The artist's sometimes harrowing imagery is mitigated by an intentional primitivism and small scale, as well as by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kahlo's birth, this major new monograph is published on the occasion of the 2007-08 traveling exhibition. It features the artist's most renowned work--the hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits--as well as a selection of key portraits and still lifes; more than 100 color plates, from Kahlo's earliest works, made in 1926, to her last, in 1954; critical essays by Elizabeth Carpenter, Hayden Herrera and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; and a selection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray. The catalogue also contains snapshots from the artist's own photo albums of Kahlo with family and friends such as Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky--some of which have never been published, and several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks or kissed with a lipstick trace--plus an extensive illustrated timeline, selected bibliography, exhibition history and index.
  
   

• Diego Rivera, The Complete Murals

  Luis Martin Lozano, Juan Coronel Rivera

  
  Diego in detail: The most comprehensive study of Rivera's work ever made A veritable folk hero in Latin America and Mexico's most important artist - along with his wife, painter Frida Kahlo - Diego Rivera (1886-1957) led a passionate life devoted to art and communism. After spending the 1910s in Europe, where he surrounded himself with other artists and embraced the Cubist movement, he returned to Mexico and began to paint the large-scale murals for which he is most famous. In his murals, he addressed social and political issues relating to the working class, earning him prophetic status among the peasants of Mexico. He was invited to create works abroad, most notably in the United States, where he stirred up controversy by depicting Lenin in his mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York City (the mural was destroyed before it was finished). Rivera's most remarkable work is his 1932 Detroit Industry, a group of 27 frescos at the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan.
  
   

• Latin American Graphic Design

  
  Comprised of 20 countries located in North, South, and Central America as well as the Caribbean Islands, Latin America is populated by over 500 million people. From Argentina to Mexico, all Latin American countries are Spanish-speaking with the exception of Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Latin America has been producing a very unique form of graphic expression for decades and this historical publication brings together the best examples from the 20th century as well as today. The book begins with an extensive historical essay about the region's contribution to design, featuring the development of graphic design in the region from 1900 to current times, while the main body of the book features A to Z entries of almost 200 designers and design offices that have built up and continue to champion the Latin design identity. Finally, a handy index facilitates access to key information in the book, such as designers' names, countries, publications, educational institutions, and famous events.
  
   

• Posada's Popular Mexican Prints

  Jose Posada

  
  273 great 19th-century woodcuts: crimes, miracles, skeletons, ads, portraits, news cuts. Table of contents: Calaveras; Disasters; National Events; Religion and Miracles; Don Chepito Marihuano; Chapbook Covers; Chapbook Illustrations; Everyday Life; Miscellaneous; Commentary on the Illustrations; Brief Bibliography.
  
   

• Frida Kahlo: The Paintings

  Hayden Herrera

  

  In small, stunningly rendered self–portraits, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted herself cracked open, hemorrhaging during a miscarriage, anesthetized on a hospital gurney, and weeping beside her own extracted heart.

  Her works are so incendiary in emotion and subject matter that one art critic suggested the walls of an exhibition be covered with asbestos.

  In this beautiful book, art historian Hayden Herrera brings together numerous paintings and sketches by the amazing Mexican artist, documenting each with explanatory text that probes the influences in Kahlo's life and their meaning for her work. Included among the illustrations are more than eighty full–color paintings, as well as dozens of black–and–white pictures and line illustrations. Among the famous and little–known works included in Frida Kahlo: The Paintings are The Two Fridas, Self–Portrait as a Tehuana, Without Hope, The Dream, The Little Deer, Diego and I, Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth, and My Nurse and I. Here, too, are documentary photographs of Frida Kahlo and her world that help to illuminate the various stages of her life.

  
   

• Art of the Andes: From Chavin to Inca (World of Art)

  Rebecca Stone-Miller

  
  This wide-ranging survey has established itself as the best single-volume introduction to Andean art and architecture. Now fully revised, it describes the strikingly varied artistic achievements of the Chavín, Paracas, Moche, Chimú, and Inca cultures, among others. Their impressive cities, tall pyramids, shining goldwork, and intricate textiles constitute one of the greatest artistic traditions in history.

  For the second edition, Rebecca Stone-Miller has added new material covering the earliest mummification in the world at Chinchorros, wonderful new Moche murals and architectural reconstructions, the latest finds from the Chachapoyas culture, and a greater emphasis on shamanism. Throughout, Stone-Miller demonstrates how the Andean peoples adapted and refined their aesthetic response to an extremely inhospitable environment. 185 illustrations, 35 in color.

  
   

• Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands: Dreaming Patterns, Weaving Memories

  Nilda Callanaupa Alvarez

  
  A richly illustrated look at Andean weaving, which embodies the living history and culture of the Peruvian highlands, this guide extensively catalogs many of the intricate patterns found in traditional Peruvian textiles. Exploring the personal histories of the Quechua people who sustain this tradition, it examines how they weave extraordinary amounts of cloth on simple backstrap looms—just as their forebears have done for thousands of years—to make clothing, rugs, bedcovers, potato sacks, hunting slings, and sacrificial fabrics for both their villages and for interested tourists. How pattern names such as Meandering River or Lake With Flowers relate to the geography and history of the region is also discussed, as is how the traditional natural materials and colors enhance the value of the work. 
  
   

• Jose Guadalupe Posada and the Mexican Broadside (Art Institute of Chicago)

  Diane Miliotes

  
  Bilingual (Spanish/English)
  José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913), one of Mexico’s most important graphic artists, influenced the generation who lived through and pictured the Mexican Revolution. His powerful and visually arresting newspaper illustrations and woodcut broadsides––whose subjects range from news to religion, from corridos (escapades of bandits and heroes) to calveras (skeletal figures associated with the Day of the Dead)––reflect indigenous folk-art traditions. In these graphically powerful penny handbills, Posada responded to the political and social issues of his day, addressed cultural ills, and spread moral ideas.
  Focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago’s impressive and previously unpublished collection of prints by Posada, this handsome book examines his work and places it in the larger context of Mexican printmaking in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With beautiful reproductions of Posada’s forceful and lively prints, as well as fascinating technical analyses of these works, the book is essential to anyone interested in the graphic arts of Latin America.
  
   

• Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today

  
  This sumptuous survey of Cuban art reveals the development of a distinct national identity and serves as an illustrated narrative of the country s colorful past and present.
  
  Cuba s artistic tradition is as rich as its history, though its treasures are rarely appreciated outside of the country. This catalog, accompanying an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gathers paintings, drawings and photography from Cuba done over the past century and a half. In addition to hundreds of works on paper, it features revealing photographs some never before published that record the country s wars of independence and revolution, its utopian endeavours and social realities. Numerous essays explore aspects of the Cuban visual arts such as nineteenth-century landscapes and photojournalism, the burgeoning of the arte nuevo period, Wifredo Lam s seminal African-inspired images, the creation of the famed collective mural, Castro-era poster art and the emergence of a new generation of artists. This book chronicles a unique culture of synthesis, born at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Americas, and whose art bears witness to important historical events of the past 150 years.
  
   

• Posada: Illustrator of Chapbooks (Library of Mexican Illustrators)

  Mercurio Casillas, Jose Posada

  
  This book is a must-have for any design aficionado, featuring Jose Guadalupe Posada's amazing illustrations for "penny chapbooks," which were published in large numbers for the consumption of a growing public of literate but poorly educated Mexicans in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
  
   

• Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (Annotating Art's Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts)

  
  Migration, whether freely chosen or forcibly imposed, has been a defining feature of twentieth-century modernity—and much of twentieth-century art. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers examines life-changing journeys that transplanted artists and intellectuals from one cultural context to another, making clear the critical and creative role that migration, exile, and displacement have played in shaping the story of modern art. Whether manifested in the striking architectural innovations of Nigerian modernism in the 1920s or postmodern works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and black British filmmakers in the 1980s, the multidirectional appropriation and borrowing described in these essays give us new perspectives on twentieth-century art and modernity.
  
  Distinguishing between exile and diaspora, emigration and immigration, and "the stranger" and "the other," the book examines the different conditions that structure the artist’s experience and aesthetic strategies. From indigenous artists and the question of authorship to the influence of émigré art historians on art history, from the aesthetics of the African diaspora to Adrian Piper's metaphorical exile between philosophy and art, these connections and disconnections in a network of traveling cultures continue art history’s efforts to come to terms with the postcolonial turn.
  
   

• The Aztec World

  

  The Aztec World is an illustrated survey of the Aztecs based on insightful research by a team of international experts from the United States and Mexico. In addition to traditional subjects like cosmology, religion, human sacrifice, and political history, this book covers such contemporary concerns as the environment and agriculture, health and disease, women and social status, and urbanism. It also discusses the effects of European conquests on Aztec culture and society, in addition to offering modern perspectives on their civilization.

   

  The text is accompanied by colorful illustrations and photos of artifacts from the best collections in Mexico, including those of the Templo Mayor Museum and the National Museum of Anthropology, both in Mexico City, as well as pieces from archaeological sites and virtual reconstructions of lost artwork. The book accompanies an exhibition at The Field Museum.

   

  
  
  
  
   

• Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

  Ilona Katzew

  
  The pictorial genre known as casta painting is one of the most compelling forms of artistic expression from colonial Mexico. Created as sets of consecutive images, the works portray racial mixing among the main groups that inhabited the colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Africans. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ilona Katzew places casta paintings in their social and historical context, showing for the first time the ways in which the meanings of the paintings changed along with shifting colonial politics.
  The book examines how casta painting developed art historically, why race became the subject of a pictorial genre that spanned an entire century, who commissioned and collected the works, and what meanings the works held for contemporary audiences. Drawing on a range of previously unpublished archival and visual material, Katzew sheds new light on racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Mexico and on the construction of identity and self-image in the colonial world.
  
  
  
   

• Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture)

  Luis Camnitzer

  

  Conceptualism played a different role in Latin American art during the 1960s and 1970s than in Europe and the United States, where conceptualist artists predominantly sought to challenge the primacy of the art object and art institutions, as well as the commercialization of art. Latin American artists turned to conceptualism as a vehicle for radically questioning the very nature of art itself, as well as art's role in responding to societal needs and crises in conjunction with politics, poetry, and pedagogy. Because of this distinctive agenda, Latin American conceptualism must be viewed and understood in its own right, not as a derivative of Euroamerican models.

  In this book, one of Latin America's foremost conceptualist artists, Luis Camnitzer, offers a firsthand account of conceptualism in Latin American art. Placing the evolution of conceptualism within the history Latin America, he explores conceptualism as a strategy, rather than a style, in Latin American culture. He shows how the roots of conceptualism reach back to the early nineteenth century in the work of Símon Rodríguez, Símon Bolívar's tutor. Camnitzer then follows conceptualism to the point where art crossed into politics, as with the Argentinian group Tucumán arde in 1968, and where politics crossed into art, as with the Tupamaro movement in Uruguay during the 1960s and early 1970s. Camnitzer concludes by investigating how, after 1970, conceptualist manifestations returned to the fold of more conventional art and describes some of the consequences that followed when art evolved from being a political tool to become what is known as "political art."

  
   

• Readings in Latin American Modern Art

  
  This important and welcome volume is the first English-language anthology of writings on Latin American modern art of the twentieth century. The book includes some fifty seminal essays and documents-including statements, interviews, and manifestoes by artists-that encompass the broad diversity of this emerging field. Many of these materials are difficult to access and some are translated here for the first time. Together the selections explore the breadth and depth of Latin American modern art as well as its distinctive evolution apart from American and European art history. Included in this collection are fascinating ideas and insights on the impact of the avant-garde in the 1920s, the Mexican mural movement, Surrealism and other fantasy-based styles, modern architecture, geometric and optical art, concrete and neo-concrete art, and political conceptualism. For students and scholars of Latin American art, the volume offers an invaluable collection of primary and secondary sources.
  
   

• Mexican Painters: Rivera, Orozco, Siquerios, and Other Artists of the Social Realist School (Dover Books on Art, Art History)

  MacKinley Helm

  
  Definitive introduction to the art and artists of Mexico during great artistic movements of the 20s and 30s. In-depth discussion of major figures—Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros — as well as 40 other artists: Galvan, Cantú, Meza, more. Fascinating insights, political and social movements, historical context, etc. 95 illustrations.
  
  
   

• Frida by Frida, 2nd Expanded Edition

  Frida Kahlo

  
  Frida Kahlo, the writer? In this new expanded edition of the painter's writings, art critic Raquel Tibol gathers letters, poems, notes, protests, confessions, brief messages and longer texts written by Kahlo to her friends, her lovers and others. In her writings, Kahlo employs, in Tibol's words, an "unreserved, imaginative language, heart and intimacy laid bare," that reveals her taste for neologisms, colloquial turns and the crossing of linguistic boundaries. The freedom of her language is a path towards sincerity, the origin of Kahlo's pictorial universe, with its recurring motifs: the tramway accident that left the artist physically maimed at the age of 18; her anguished and demanding adolescent passion for Alejandro Gomez Arias; her complex and fascinating relationship with Diego Rivera; her illness as destiny; her political engagements; and her uncompromising quest for liberty. Here the reader will find Kahlo "swinging back and forth between sincerity and manipulation, self-complacency and self-flagellation, with her insatiable need for affection, her erotic upheavals, her touches of humor, setting no limits for herself, with a capacity for self-analysis and a deep humility." By gathering this material, until now scattered in archives and various published sources, Tibol offers us "a tacit autobiography and the placement of Frida within the intimate, confessional literature of the twentieth century in Mexico." This is a Frida Kahlo far removed from the distorted image so often found in films, plays and supposedly serious writings and studies--a beautiful book about Frida, by Frida.
  
   

• Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America

  Jacqueline Barnitz

  

  "An exciting and invaluable work of synthesis and interpretation, Barnitz's grand survey greatly enhances understanding of the extraordinary cultural mix that infuses Latin American art with its soulfulness and vigor. "

  —Booklist

  "With ease and agility, Barnitz navigates an entire century's worth of art produced in the varied regions and cultures of Latin America."

  —ARTnews

  "For breadth of reference and range of coverage, this book will stand for some time as the most comprehensive study to date of modern Latin American art from the Caribbean basin to the Southern cone countries."

  —David Craven, author of Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist

  The twentieth-century art of Latin America is art in the western tradition, and its leading figures—Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Diego Rivera, Joaquín Torres-García, to name only a few—have achieved international stature. Yet much of the writing about this art has offered either a victimized view of an art tradition dominated by foreign models or a romanticized view of what Latin American art should be. This pathfinding book, by contrast, seeks not to "invent" Latin American art but to look at it from the points of view of its own artists and critics.

  Drawing on some forty years of studying and teaching Latin American art, Jacqueline Barnitz surveys the major currents and artists of the twentieth century in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America (including Brazil). She progresses chronologically from modernismo and the break with nineteenth-century academic art to some of the trends of the 1980s, setting each movement within its historical and cultural contexts. This grand survey of modern Latin American art will thus be the essential guide to a vibrant art tradition, as well as a vital teaching tool. Lavishly illustrated with color and black-and-white reproductions of major works, it will be useful to artists, collectors, historians, writers, and social scientists, as well as art historians.

  (20010501)
  
   

• Latin American Art of the 20th Century, Second Edition (World of Art)

  Edward Lucie-Smith

  
  "Richly illustrated...brings to life the work of many lesser-known artists throughout the continent." —Choice

  This comprehensive survey introduces an exceptionally rich, fascinating, and complex art that has gained great popularity in recent years. Edward Lucie-Smith discusses all the major subjects and issues: magic realism, expressionism, and other concepts shared with Latin American literature; the great muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco; the interaction of politics, society, and art; the continuing interest in folk art; and the dialogue between avant-garde European and North American movements and "indigenist" thinking in the work of artists such as Wifredo Lam, Matta, Rufino Tamayo, and Frida Kahlo. Many other artists from the 1900s to the present day are included in this compelling look at a great body of brilliantly original and imaginative art.

  For the second edition, the text has been updated and a new final section introduces some of Latin America's leading contemporary artists: José Bedia (Cuba/USA), Doris Salcedo (Colombia), Rubén Ortiz Torres (Mexico), Miguel Calderón (Mexico), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Diana Domingues (Brazil), and Beatriz Milhazes (Brazil). Several of these artists make use of the latest in modern technology, including interactive installations, photographs, and video art. 178 illustrations, 45 in color.