"In this first book-length study of Robert Ryman, Suzanne Hudson traces the artist's production from his first paintings in the early 1950s, many of which have never been exhibited or reproduced, to his more recent gallery shows. Ryman's largely white-on-white paintings represent his careful working over of painting's conventions at their most radically reduced. Through close readings of the work, Hudson casts Ryman as a painter for whom painting was conducted as a continuous personal investigation. Ryman's method--an act of "learning by doing"--as well as his conception of painting as "used paint" set him apart from second-generation abstract expressionists, minimalists, or conceptualists. Hudson's chapters--"Primer," "Paint," "Support," "Edge," and "Wall," named after the most basic elements of the artist's work--eloquently explore Ryman's ongoing experiment in what makes a painting a painting. Ryman's work, Hudson argues, tests the medium's material and conceptual possibilities. It neither signals the end of painting nor guarantees its continued longevity but keeps the prospect of painting an open question, answerable only through the production of new paintings."--From publisher description.

A close examination of Agnes Martin's grid painting in luminous blue and gold. Agnes Martin's Night Sea (1963) is a large canvas of hand-drawn rectangular grids painted in luminous blue and gold. In this illustrated study, Suzanne Hudson presents the painting as the work of an artist who was also a thinker, poet, and writer for whom self-presentation was a necessary part of making her works public. With Night Sea, Hudson argues, Martin (1912-2004) created a shimmering realization of control and loss that stands alone within her suite of classic grid paintings as an exemplary and exceptional achievement. Hudson offers a close examination of Night Sea and its position within Martin's long and prolific career, during which the artist destroyed many works as she sought forms of perfection within self-imposed restrictions of color and line. For Hudson, Night Sea stands as the last of Martin's process-based works before she turned from oil to acrylic and sought to express emotions of lightness and purity unburdened by evidence of human struggle. Drawing from a range of archival records, Hudson attempts to draw together the facts surrounding the work, which were at times obfuscated by the artist's desire for privacy. Critical responses of the time give a sense of the impact of the work and that which followed it. Texts by peers including Lenore Tawney, Donald Judd, and Lucy Lippard are presented alongside interviews with a number of Martin's friends and keepers of estates, such as the publisher Ronald Feldman and Kathleen Mangan of the Lenore Tawney archive, which holds correspondence between Martin and Tawney.

Published on the occasion of the artist's retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, this catalogue presents a rich selection of paintings, photographs, and works on paper, forming a comprehensive examination of Wool's career to date.

A richly illustrated monograph on the life and work of Lee Krasner, one of the twentieth century’s most inspiring women artists and a pioneer of abstract expressionism. In 1984, Lee Krasner (1908–1984) became one of the few women artists to have been given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She quipped about her belated recognition: “I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.” One of the original pioneers of abstract expressionism, Krasner has for too long been eclipsed by her husband, Jackson Pollock. In fact, his death in 1956 marked her renaissance as an artist. Coinciding with a major exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery, Lee Krasner features an outstanding selection of her most important paintings, collages, and works on paper, contextualized by photography from the postwar period, an illustrated chronology, and an unpublished interview with her biographer Gail Levin. This richly illustrated monograph is a comprehensive survey of the work of one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic artists.

Known for her enormous sculptures, whose disorienting effects the viewer feels instantly, German artist Katharina Fritsch plays on primeval desires and fears. This volume includes 80 works from throughout Fritsch's career.

This is the first monograph to offer a comprehensive account of the work of Californian artist Mary Weatherford (born 1963), beginning in the mid-1980s and extending to the present. Weatherford was a student of pioneering twentieth-century art historian Sam Hunter at Princeton. Her broadly literate and visually arresting paintings address the legacies of American modernists from Arthur Dove and Agnes Pelton to Willem de Kooning and Morris Louis, while grappling with the politics of gender, the representation of specific moods and experiences, and other concerns squarely rooted in the present moment. From her early monumental targets, through canvases studded with real shells and starfish, as well as more abstract evocations of landscape inspired by caves, to her recent neon-appended panels whose atmospheres of rolling color foreground the painting process itself, Weatherford's works argue forcibly and convincingly for the engagement of painting with contemporary life. Suzanne Hudson's text, the fruit of many studio visits and long interviews, reveals a singularly inventive artist whose boundless facility for reinvention will compel any viewer, student, or critic of painting.

This monograph of Lerooy's drawings, paintings, and sculptures surveys nearly 100 works from the vital years of his career.00Thomas Lerooy Field Guide is an important monographic publication that brings together key works by the Belgian artist from 2006 until today. Rather than being a classic catalogue raisonné, the book is a field guide into the artist's practice, that establishes formal and conceptual links between works from different periods and in different media. The authors, Tatjana Bacal, Suzanne Hudson and Jean-Philippe Antoine, all renowned writers in the domains of anthropology, contemporary painting, and art history, each shed a light on Thomas Lerooy's work from their unique perspective.0.

This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition "Lesley Vance and Ricky Swallow at the Huntington," at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens from November 10, 2012 through March 11, 2013.

Impasto Gestures. Robert Janitz (b. Alsfeld, West Germany, 1962; lives and works in New York) makes paintings that uncover processes by exploring the interplay between movement, gesture, and rhythm. Janitz prepares his canvases with an undercoat of color gradient, he then applies long strokes of semi-transparent blends of oil, wax, and flour. His matter-of-fact technique repurposes the basic hand movements involved in actions such as buttering a slice of bread or laying on a coat of tile mortar: gestures from everyday life and skilled manual labor. The wide geometrically patterned brushstrokes in Janitz's compositions also evince symmetrical structures and linear features that are reminiscent of the Latin alphabet or Devanagari, a script used to write Sanskrit, a language the artist studied. In addition to its uniformly aesthetic and contemplative effect, Janitz's impasto brushwork reflects a novel and distinctive engagement with abstraction in painting in the tradition of masters like Markus Lüpertz and Günter Förg. With generous spontaneity and painterly accuracy, the artist synthesizes color and form without veering into the narrative register. After stints in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Paris, Janitz has called New York home for more than a decade. The monograph documents the work he has created there. With essays by Catherine Taft and Suzanne Hudson.