Alice Michel

Jeff Nagy

ekphrasis

There are many myths about the artist Edgar Degas—from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant, to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire than 

, a short memoir published by Alice Michel, who purportedly modeled for Degas.

Never before translated into English, the text’s original publication in 

 in 1919, shortly after the artist’s death, has been treated as an important account of the master sculptor at work. We know that Alice was writing under a pseudonym, but who the real person behind this account was remains a mystery—to this day nothing is known about her. Yet, the descriptions seem too accurate to be ignored, the anecdotes too spot-on to discount; even the dialogue captures the artist’s tone and mannerisms.

What is found in these pages is at times a woman’s flirtatious recollection of a bizarre “artistic type” and at others a moving attempt to connect with a great, often tragic man. The descriptions are limpid, unburdened; the dialogue is lively and intimate, not unlike reading the very best kind of gossip, with world-historical significance. Here in these dusty studios, Degas is alive, running hands over clay, complaining about his eyes, denigrating the other artists around him, and whispering salaciously to his model. And during his mood swings, we see reflected the model’s innocence and confusion, her pain at being misunderstood and finally rejected. It is an intimate portrait of a moment in a great artist’s life, a sort of 

 in which his model (whoever she may be) does not emerge unscathed.

Degas and His Model

Edward A. Vazquez

Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer.

Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.

Aspects: Fred Sandback's Sculpture

Nicholas Fox Weber

Manuel Cirauqui

T’ai Smith

By Anni Albers. Contributions by Manuel Cirauqui and T'ai Smith. Afterword by Nicholas Fox Weber

The classic book on the art and history of weaving—now expanded and in full color.

Written by one of the twentieth century’s leading textile artists, this splendidly illustrated book is a luminous meditation on the art of weaving, its history, its tools and techniques, and its implications for modern design. First published in 1965, 

 bridges the transition between handcraft and the machine-made, highlighting the essential importance of material awareness and the creative leaps that can occur when design problems are tackled by hand.

With her focus on materials and handlooms, Anni Albers discusses how technology and mass production place limits on creativity and problem solving, and makes the case for a renewed embrace of human ingenuity that is particularly important today. Her lucid and engaging prose is illustrated with a wealth of rare and extraordinary images showing the history of the medium, from hand-drawn diagrams and close-ups of pre-Columbian textiles to material studies with corn, paper, and the typewriter, as well as illuminating examples of her own work.

Now available for a new generation of readers, this expanded edition of 

 updates the book’s original black-and-white illustrations with full-color photos, and features an afterword by Nicholas Fox Weber and essays by Manuel Cirauqui and T’ai Smith that shed critical light on Albers and her career.

New Expanded Edition

Anni Albers: On Weaving

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Hilton Als

Jeremy Lewison

By Hilton Als. Foreword by Jeremy Lewison

Known for her portraits of family, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists, and more, Alice Neel created forthright, intimate, and, at times, humorous paintings that quietly engaged with political and social issues.

, writer and curator Hilton Als brings together a body of paintings and works on paper of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other people of color for the first time. Highlighting the innate diversity of Neel’s approach, the selection looks at those whose portraits are often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them; “what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered,” Als writes.

The publication, which opens with a foreword by Jeremy Lewison, advisor to The Estate of Alice Neel, explores Neel’s interest in the diversity of uptown New York and the variety of people amongst whom she lived. This group of portraits includes well-known figures such as playwright, actress, and author Alice Childress; the sociologist Horace R. Cayton, Jr.; the community activist Mercedes Arroyo; and the widely published academic Harold Cruse; alongside more anonymous individuals of a nurse, a ballet dancer, a taxi driver, a businessman, and a local kid who ran errands for Neel.

In short and illuminating texts on specific works written in his characteristic narrative style, Als writes about the history of each sitter and offers insights into Neel and her work, while adding his own perspective. A contemporary and personal approach to the artist’s oeuvre, Als’s project is “an attempt to honor not only what Neel saw, but the generosity of her seeing.”

This catalogue is published on the occasion of the 2017 exhibitions of Neel’s paintings and drawings at David Zwirner, New York, and Victoria Miro, London.

Alice Neel: Uptown

Billy Sullivan

Mimi Thompson

Stanley Whitney

John Yau

Text by John Yau. Interview with Stanley Whitney and Billy Sullivan by Mimi Thompson

Al Taylor began his studio practice as a painter and although he is more widely known for the three-dimensional works he started making in 1985, the artist maintained that his constructions weren’t “at all about sculptural concerns; [they come] from a flatter set of traditions.” Throughout his career, whether he worked on canvas, drawings and prints, or sculpture, the creative process of Taylor’s oeuvre was fundamentally grounded in the formal concerns of painting. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in spring 2017, 

 is the first book to focus exclusively on the artist’s works on canvas, featuring a selection of rarely seen paintings created between 1971 and 1980.

New scholarship by poet and art critic John Yau examines the visual relationships that connect Taylor’s paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects, while also reflecting on the art world in New York City during the 1970s. In addition, a conversation conducted by Mimi Thompson between renowned painters Stanley Whitney and Billy Sullivan—all of whom knew Taylor well during his lifetime—provides insight into his reputation as an “artist’s artist.” Twenty-six paintings are at the heart of this catalogue—embodying the subtleties of reduction and restraint, they nonetheless have hints of the idiosyncratic playfulness that would come to characterize Taylor’s later works. In some canvases, the artist delineates spatial perspectives by incorporating the wall in shaped compositions where a single color often dominates; elsewhere, it is the interaction of his color juxtapositions and fluid paint application that energize the canvas. Both painterly and sculptural in their address, these works deviate from the usual tropes of abstraction to uniquely engage space, perception, and possess a lyrical rhythm.

This new publication reveals and validates the importance of Al Taylor’s paintings both within his own practice and in the context of twentieth-century abstraction.

Al Taylor: Early Paintings

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn

By Jean-Claude Lebensztejn. Translated by Jeff Nagy

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s history of the urinating figure in art, 

, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on transgression and limits in works of art in general. Lebensztejn is one of France’s best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of cognoscenti.

—the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous fountain and is also the logo for a Belgian beer company—the author takes the reader through a semi-scatological maze of cultural history. The earliest example is a fresco scene located directly above Cimabue’s 

 from around 1280 at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, in which Lebensztejn’s careful eye locates an angel behind a pillar who looks like he is about to urinate through a hole in his garment. He continues to navigate expertly through cultural twists and turns, stopping to discuss Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film 

, for example, and Marlene Dumas’s 1996–1997 homage to Rembrandt’s pissing woman. At every moment, Lebensztejn’s prose is lively, his thinking dynamic, and his subject matter entertaining.

In this short and poignant cultural history, readers not only find the care for detail that has made Lebensztejn into one of the greatest European art historians, but also the rebelliousness that makes him one of the most interesting intellectuals of our time. The first widely distributed book of Lebensztejn’s in English, 

 is simultaneously published in France by Éditions Macula.

Pissing Figures 1280–2014

Brenda Danilowitz

A superb facsimile of the only known notebook of legendary artist Anni Albers, this publication offers insight into the methodology of a modern master.

Beginning in 1970, Anni Albers filled her graph-paper notebook regularly until 1980. This rare and previously unpublished document of her working process contains intricate drawings for her large body of graphic work, as well as studies for her late knot drawings. The notebook follows Albers's deliberations and progression as a draftsman in their original form. It reveals the way she went about making complex patterns, exploring them piece by piece, line by line in a visually dramatic and mysteriously beautiful series of geometric arrangements.

An afterword by Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, contextualizes the notebook and explores the role studies played in the development of her work.

Anni Albers: Notebook 1970–1980

A detail from a painting by Steven Shearer, titled The Collector's Visit, dated 2019.

Steven Shearer, The Collector's Visit, 2019

Conversation between Steven Shearaer and Jim Lewis

The exhibition, which spans Steven Shearer’s prolific 20-year career working in a variety of media, brings together paintings, drawings, collages and poems to demonstrate the constantly evolving nature of the artist’s practice. Shearer’s work draws upon a visual lexicon of portraiture and representation of the body, often using found imagery that he collects and archives as source material. Through this process, contemporary imagery is distilled into the tradition of portraiture revealing affinities between various modes of figuration throughout history to the present.

Shearer consistently returns to the found imagery he collects to use as the subject matter of his collage works, which incorporate images lifted from various fan magazines as well as from the web. These references often reflect not only his own personal experience of growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, but also a collective memory of the visual and verbal landscape of suburban and teenage alienation.

Cover of the book Steven Shearer published by The Brant Foundation in 2025

Steven Shearer

This groundbreaking book re-evaluates the work of Alice Neel, one of the most renowned American portrait painters of the 20th century

This insightful catalogue examines anew the full range of Alice Neel’s (1900-1984) celebrated paintings of people, still life, and cityscapes. Featuring around seventy paintings spanning the entire length of her career, this handsome book accompanies a major retrospective of her work, and reveals her underlying interest in the history of photography, German painting of the 1920s, and other artists, such as Van Gogh and Cézanne, all of which provided an important precedent for the veracity and raw emotional intensity of her figurative works. Neel is renowned for her visual acuity and psychological depth, and her portraits and nude paintings of friends, family, strangers, and prominent cultural figures alike convey an incredibly consistent intimacy regardless of the relationship to her subject.

The accompanying essays trace the trajectory of Neel’s artistic language as it evolved alongside contemporaneous trends in the New York City art world and examine the manner in which her own work figured into the social and cultural contexts of her time. Created over a sixty-year period, Neel’s oeuvre offers a remarkably expressive document of the specific milieus she navigated through and ultimately transcends the marker of time altogether.

Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life

A scuplture by Yayoi Kusama called Dancing Pumpkin dated 2020

Yayoi Kusama, 2021.  Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki

Yayoi Kusama

Akira Tatehata

Text by Akira Tatehata. Poem by Yayoi Kusama

Widely recognized as one of the most popular artists in the world, Yayoi Kusama has shaped her own narrative of postwar and contemporary art. Minimalism and Pop art, abstraction and conceptualism coincide in her practice, which spans painting, sculpture, performance, room-sized and outdoor installation, the written word, films, fashion, design, and architectural interventions. Born in 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan, Yayoi Kusama briefly studied painting in Kyoto before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. In the mid-1960s, she established herself in New York as an important avant-garde artist by staging groundbreaking happenings, events, and exhibitions. Now in her late 80s, Kusama is entering one of the richest creative periods of her life. Immersed in her studio six days a week, Kusama has spoken of her renewed dedication to creating art over the past years: “[N]ew ideas come welling up every day….Now I am more keenly aware of the time that remains and more in awe of the vast scope of art.”

 documents the artist's most recent exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which marked the US debut of 

, an all-white, domestic interior that viewers are invited to cover with dot stickers of various sizes and colors. Taking 

 as its centerpiece, this catalogue reveals, in vivid large-scale plates, the transformation of the space from a clean white interior to a stunningly saturated room, with ceilings, walls, and furniture covered in myriad multicolored stickers put there by viewers over the course of the exhibition. The catalogue also includes beautiful reproductions of Kusama's new large-format paintings from 

 series. Ranging from bright and densely pixelated forms, to umber figures with darker blues and muted oranges, these paintings demonstrate the artist's striking command of color, and her exceptional control over balance and contrast. Bold brushstrokes hover between figuration and abstraction; vibrant, animated, and intense, these paintings introduce their own powerful pictorial logic, at once contemporary and universal. The catalogue continues with a selection of new, large 

 sculptures, a form that Kusama has been exploring since her studies in Japan in the 1950s, and which gained prominence in the 1980s, continuing to remain an essential part of her practice. Made of shiny stainless steel and featuring painted dots or dot-shaped perforations that recall 

, these immersive works seem created on human scale, with the tallest measuring 70 inches (178 cm). Vibrant plates capture how color, shape, size, and surface merge in these sculptures and mesmerize the viewer. Texts include a "Hymn to Yayoi Kusama" by art critic and poet Akira Tatehata and a poem by the artist herself.

Yayoi Kusama: Give Me Love

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

A1 That's Desire (featuring Ash B.)
A2 Fast Lane
A3 Anderes Osterlied

Wolfgang Tillmans: That's Desire / Here We Are EP 

Alex Needham

, Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) chronicles East London’s art scene and nightlife of the early 2000s, as well as his friendship with collaborator and artist Conor Donlon. The book sees Donlon’s appearance and style changing, as well as his backdrops: a 2003 demonstration against George W. Bush’s state visit; a picnic at the park after an opening at Tillmans’s exhibition space Between Bridges; the bright yellow walls of Tillmans and Donlon’s home; long-gone LGBT clubs The Ghetto and The Joiners’ Arm; and quieter moments spent talking in the studio and around town.

Tillmans’s photographs are at once intimate and emblematic of a flourishing arts era, where both artists’ work gained momentum. 

 culture editor Alex Needham introduces the work with an essay about Donlon’s initial role as Tillmans’s assistant, contextualizing the artists’ collaboration and the inception of London independent bookstore Donlon Books in 2008.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Conor Donlon

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

Kay Heymer

Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans

 continues the artist’s questioning of traditional ideas of originality and authorship, developed over four decades, and her interest in the deconstruction of images and objects from the past in order to create new relationships with contemporary audiences today. Through repetition, duplication and restatement, this series not only re-examines the central and ongoing concerns of Levine’s artistic practice but also revisits one of the most prominent subjects of her oeuvre – the work of Walker Evans.

I–XXIV 

Sherrie Levine: African Masks After Walker Evans

Paul Gauguin

Donatien Grau

By Paul Gauguin. Translated with an introduction by Donatien Grau

“Criticism is our censorship . . .” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote “Racontars de rapin” only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his contemporaries and predecessors, Gauguin unpacks what he viewed as the mistakes and misjudgments behind much of art criticism, revealing not only how wrong critics’ interpretations have been, but also what it would mean to approach art properly—to really look.

Long out of print, this new translation by Donatien Grau includes an introduction that situates the essay within Gauguin’s written oeuvre, as well as explanatory notes. This text sheds light on Gauguin’s conception of art—widely considered a predecessor to Duchamp—and engages with many issues still relevant today: history, novelty, criticism, and the market. His voice feels as fresh, lively, sharp in English now as it did in French over one hundred years ago. Through Gauguin’s final piece of writing, we see the artist in the full throes of passion—for his work, for his art, for the art of others, and against anyone who would stand in his way.

As the inaugural publication in David Zwirner Books’s new 

 sets a perfect tone for the books to come. Poised between writing, art, and criticism, Gauguin brings together many different worlds, all of which should have a seat at the table during any meaningful discussion of art. With the express hope of encouraging open exchange between the world of writing and that of the visual arts, David Zwirner Books is proud to present this new edition of a lost masterpiece.

Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter

Michael Fried

Poems by Michael Fried. Photographs by James Welling

Michael Fried is as much a poet as he is a critic. His experiences among artworks and luminaries of the art world have resulted in a canonized body of criticism, but they have also provided the raw material for many of the poems in his newest collection, 

Fried’s passion, lyricism, and humor, which have been lauded by Allen Grossman and J. M. Coetzee, are on display as he explores the people and the objects that have moved him—great minds and great works of art. Along the way, Fried begins to reveal himself to the reader: he is at once a student, unsure of himself; a young man, ambitious and in love; a committed champion of artists; a world-class intellectual among intellectual peers; and a poet, transmuting the world around him. Here we find the poet-critic at his most complete.

 breaks ground for Fried by combining the eighty poems—a mix of lyrical and prose poetry—with over thirty photographs, most of them made, all of them selected, by renowned American photographer James Welling. More often than not, the photographs stand in oblique relation to the poems, as complementary pieces of a mesmerizing whole.

Written under the epigraph of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s urging in “Self-Reliance”—“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events”—the poems engage diverse subjects: from the high modernist art world of the 1960s to a major poet’s tragic loss of memory, from exemplary works such as Edgar Degas’s 

, and Adolf Menzel’s drawings, from the lives of figures such as Edouard Manet, Anna Akhmatova, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Ian Hamilton, and John Harbison, to erotic love, late fatherhood, the death of parents and friends, and the onset of age. 

is a uniquely vivid and compelling volume, at once a collection of wide-ranging yet intimately related poems and a brilliant photobook, that aims to hold the reader/viewer in its spell from first page to last.

“Ever alert within the shifting frames of his forms, Michael Fried\s poems persistently surprise the real, which he rides for all it’s worth. His poetry takes shape along the fault lines of experience, as raw material in the margins of our idea of the major. Candor and calamity, tenderness and intelligent irreverence—that’s the 

—Peter Cole, 2007 MacArthur Fellow, has published several books of poems and many volumes of translations from Hebrew and Arabic, both medieval and modern. He has received numerous honors for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He is the author of 

Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations

Promesse du Bonheur

Briony Fer

Jessamyn Fiore

Sarah Sze

Text by Briony Fer. Interview with Sarah Sze by Jessamyn Fiore

Well known for his radical “anarchitectural” interventions throughout the 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark was always deeply, though less publicly, committed to drawing. His works on paper—which span three-dimensional reliefs, calligraphy, and notebook entries—capture the interdisciplinary spirit that defined the art world in the 1970s. Intricate and concise, they testify to his interest in the crossovers between visual and performance arts, as well as the broader integration within his oeuvre of the natural and built environment.

Documenting the artist’s extraordinary accomplishments as a draftsman, this publication originates from the 2015 solo presentation at David Zwirner, New York, entitled 

, organized in close collaboration with Jane Crawford and Jessamyn Fiore from the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. This catalogue presents in vibrant detail selections from Matta-Clark’s 

, and his own “calligraphy,” many of which have never been published. Perhaps the best known of the group, the 

 explore parallel, smaller-format versions of his physical interventions in architecture; slicing meticulously through several layers of paper, gesso, or cardboard, Matta-Clark created sculptural flat works that emphasized the voids created by the extraction of matter. Drawings with his own “calligraphy” emphasize the medium of drawing as an independent form. Abstract letters make up a code that remains indecipherable, but points toward a visionary longing to invent new languages and structures of experience. Some of the most elaborate and colorful compositions include trees, several of which refer explicitly to Matta-Clark’s 

 performance at Vassar College in upstate New York in 1971. In full-color plates, the reader can see the physical structure of his trees “dissolving” into kinetic energy and, in some drawings, becoming reduced to a multitude of arrows. Near-abstract tree shapes also incorporate his calligraphic marks, with branches constructed from imaginary letters, again emphasizing the importance of language to a new visual experience. Matta-Clark’s notebooks, which he often insisted on completing in a single sitting, are presented in elegantly curated groups. Combining elements of Surrealist automatic drawing with an interest in choreography, these works appealed to performance artists at the time—including Laurie Anderson and Trisha Brown. This unparalleled presentation of Matta-Clark’s drawings is accompanied by new and exciting scholarship by Briony Fer, as well as a conversation between Jessamyn Fiore and contemporary artist Sarah Sze; it marks a major contribution to the literature on this highly influential artist.

Drawings and Notebooks

Gordon Matta-Clark: The Beginning of Trees and the End

Eva Badura-Triska

Veit Loers

Bernhard Riff

Texts by Eva Badura-Triska, Veit Loers, and Bernhard Riff

During the 1990s, Franz West’s work moved in new and innovative stylistic directions, as his career was solidified through important international exhibitions. This publication delves into this significant decade in an effort to contextualize the evolution of West’s singular practice.

The 1990s proved critical in the development of the idiosyncratic style for which West is still known today. His key innovations from this period—which included the addition of exuberant color to his papier-mâché forms, the incorporation of furniture both as art object and as social incubator, and the inclusion of work by other artists in his own installations—resulted in dynamic, frequently interactive installations that helped to expand the possibilities of sculpture and the ways in which art is experienced. Produced on the occasion of David Zwirner’s 2014 exhibition in New York, this fully illustrated publication gives an in-depth overview of the decade, arguably the most important of the artist’s lengthy career. It features essays by noted West scholars Eva Badura-Triska and Veit Loers, as well as a personal account by Bernhard Riff on video collaborations made with the artist throughout the 1990s.

Franz West: The 1990s

Abigail McEwen

Pedro de Oraá

Susanna Temkin

Lucas Zwirner

Text by Abigail McEwen. Interview with Pedro de Oraá by Lucas Zwirner. Illustrated chronology by Susanna Temkin

Radical political shifts that raged throughout Cuba in the 1950s coincided with the development of Cuban geometric abstraction and, notably, the formation of Los Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters). The decade was marked by widespread turmoil and corruption following the 1952 military coup and by rising nationalist sentiments. At the same time, Havana was undergoing rapid urbanization and quickly becoming an international city. Against this vibrant backdrop, artists sought a new visual language in which art, specifically abstract art, could function as political and social practice.

 marks one of the first major presentations outside of Cuba to focus exclusively on the origins of concretism in the country. It includes important works from the late 1940s through the early 1960s by the twelve artists who were at different times associated with the short-lived group: Pedro Álvarez, Wifredo Arcay, Mario Carreño, Salvador Corratgé, Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, Alberto Menocal, José M. Mijares, Pedro de Oraá, José Ángel Rosabal, Loló Soldevilla, and Rafael Soriano. Many of the group’s members had traveled widely in the preceding years and corresponded with those at the forefront of European and South American abstract movements.

Produced on the occasion of the major exhibition at David Zwirner, 

 is the first in-depth catalogue on the subject to be published in English; the show offered a “wonderful taste of a very complicated history,” according to Roberta Smith of 

. With an extensive plate section, which includes works from the exhibition and a selection of important pieces from the permanent collection of Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, this volume provides readers with a rich visual experience of this crucial period in modernism’s history. The catalogue also features an extensively researched illustrated chronology, compiled by Susanna Temkin, which tracks the development of the period artistically and politically from 1939 through 1964. New scholarship by Abigail McEwen offers an interpretative framework for this group of artists, and a deeper understanding of the forces behind the development of this movement. Also included is a conversation between Lucas Zwirner and Pedro de Oraá, one of the central members of Los Diez.

Concrete Cuba: Cuban Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s

Marcel Proust

Jennie Feldman

By Marcel Proust. Afterword by Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat. Translated by Jennie Feldman

Long overlooked in Proust’s posthumously published writings, 

, written when he was only twenty-four years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but contains the seeds of his later work.

Proposed in 1895 by Proust to the newspaper 

 (it was rejected), this essay is much more than a straightforward piece of art criticism. It is a literary experiment in which an unnamed narrator gives advice to a young man suffering from melancholy, taking him on an imaginary tour through the Louvre where his readings of Chardin imbue the everyday world with new meaning, and his ruminations on Rembrandt take his melancholic pupil beyond the realm of mere objects.

Published for the first time as a stand-alone volume and newly translated, this edition, part of the David Zwirner Books 

 series, aims to introduce a wider audience to one of Proust’s most important and influential works in Western literature. “For the true artist,” as Proust writes, “as for the natural scientist, every 

 is interesting, and even the smallest muscle has its importance.” The same could be said of the author’s own work—every essay has its own crucial place in the formation of his groundbreaking oeuvre.

The afterword by renowned Proust scholar Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat, originally published in the French by Le Bruit du Temps, is an impassioned argument in favor of returning to the lost paths of Proust’s early thinking. It sees, in the passage from Chardin’s world of objects to Rembrandt’s contemplative paintings, a movement toward the radical interiority for which Proust would later become widely celebrated as a novelist. Written at the beginning of his literary career, 

 gestures back to some of Proust’s earliest notes on art, while creating space for what was to come.

Chardin and Rembrandt

Stan Douglas

Jason E. Smith

Diana Thater

Edited with an introduction by Stan Douglas. Foreword by Diana Thater and Jason E. Smith

Contributions by Beth B, Rosetta Brooks, Luís Castro Leiva, Meg Cranston, Charles Gaines, Jack Goldstein, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Susan Hiller, Roni Horn, Kellie Jones, Mike Kelley, Justen Ladda, Thomas Lawson, Sylvère Lotringer, John Miller, Constance Penley, Brian Routh, Mira Schor, Allan Sekula, Robert Storr, and Lynne Tillman

This collection of never-before-published talks at one of the leading art schools in the United States, documents an exciting decade in the development of contemporary art and arts education, featuring interviews with renowned artists, curators, and writers.

Introduced in 1986 as an initiative by Richard Hertz (Chair, Academic Studies, 1979–2003), the Graduate Art Department of the ArtCenter College of Design, located in Pasadena, California, celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in 2016. This book documents the first decade of the department’s existence by presenting a selection from over three hundred talks, including a 1990 symposium conducted by renowned curator and art historian Robert Storr, as well as twelve talks from its artists and critics lecture series known as the Graduate Seminar. Discussions between students and faculty members range from what it means to be an artist and the changing role of art in society, to how artists function within an academic setting.

Alongside the newly transcribed talks, this volume also includes reproductions of slides used by participants at the time. Bringing the presentations to life, these archival images offer a sense of the context and spirit of the original seminars. Together, an introduction by Stan Douglas—ArtCenter Graduate Art faculty member—and a foreword by Diana Thater and Jason E. Smith, Chair and Associate Chair of Graduate Art, present historical context for these illuminating talks.

The First Decade 1986–1995 

ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar

An untitled painting by Noah Davis, dated 2015.

Texts by Maikoio Alley Barnes, Helen Molesworth, Henry Taylor, and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

This catalogue is published by the Frye Art Museum on the occasion of the exhibition 

Young Blood: Noah Davis, Kahlil Joseph, The Underground Museum

. Celebrating the life and legacy of painter, curator, and visionary artist Noah Davis (1983–2015), 

 places Davis’ work in the context of an ongoing visual dialogue with his elder brother, artist and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. The catalogue features essays by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, curator of the exhibition; Helen Molesworth, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Henry Taylor, Davis’ friend and fellow artist; and Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, director emerita of the Frye Art Museum. The catalogue contains rich reproductions of the paintings, installations, sculptural, and filmic works in the exhibition. 

is a celebration of black culture, spirituality, and creative legacy.

A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Robert Kudielka

Texts by Robert Kudielka and Richard Shiff

Bridget Riley’s explorations of perception through form and color have made her into one of the most significant painters working today. Since the early 1960s, she has used elementary shapes—lines, circles, curves, and squares—to create visual experiences that immediately draw the viewer in, often triggering optical vibrations and illusions. More recently, Riley has shifted back to black and white in her large-scale paintings, marking a departure from her recent colored stripe paintings and a return to the palette of some of her earliest works.

Published on the occasion of her 2015 solo exhibition at David Zwirner, 

 presents paintings from the last thirty-four years of her career, including images of 

, a wall painting previously shown in Germany and England, and exhibited for the first time in New York. These dynamic reproductions begin with stripe paintings from the 1980s and end with a coda of sorts —a return to black and white that ties back to her work from the 1960s, but bear traces of Riley’s deep engagement with color in the interim. As critic Éric de Chassey puts it in his essay for Riley’s 2015 catalogue with Galerie Max Hetzler: “The black-and-white paintings not only enter into a dialogue with the 1960s works, but take stock of every painting experience Riley has created during a long career.”

Also included is a selection of the artist’s works on paper; taken together, these complementary aspects of her practice over the past four decades reveal the astonishing variety she has achieved by developing and rediscovering different forms. An essay by art historian Richard Shiff helps contextualize the developments in Riley’s practice since the early 1980s, and further emphasizes her influence and lineage as a painter. Rounding out the publication are biographical notes by Robert Kudielka, one of the artist’s foremost critics. With a career spanning six decades, Bridget Riley remains one of the most exciting painters today, and 

 presents a selection of works from what may be her richest period to date.

Bridget Riley: Works 1981–2015

 is published on the occasion of Tillmans's 2015 exhibition at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, his first solo exhibition at a Japanese museum in eleven years. Housed in a display space designed by Tillmans himself, the exhibition included new works appearing in Japan for the first time, numerous photographic works from recent years, and the video installation 

Wolfgang Tillmans: Your Body is Yours

Gordon Hughes

Richard Serra’s “Reversal” drawings employ two identical rectangular sheets of paper that are adjoined in a vertical or horizontal format, with the black and white areas reversing themselves top to bottom (or left to right). The area that is black on the top (or left) sheet is white on the bottom (or right) sheet, and the area that is white on the top (or left) sheet is black on the bottom (or right) sheet in a figure / ground reversal.

, designed by McCall Associates in close collaboration with the artist and printed by Steidl, is the most extensive presentation of the “Reversal” drawings to be published. The book reproduces all thirty-three drawings shown in 2014 at David Zwirner in New York, in addition to documenting this series in its entirety. The book also includes new scholarship by art historian Gordon Hughes.

Richard Serra: Vertical and Horizontal Reversals

All Books

Collect: Discover, Buy and Sell Art

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.