Catalogue

Photography has come to be identified internationally with the artistic production of Düsseldorf over the last few decades, and the consolidated Düsseldorf School today epitomizes excellence in its highly varied and innovative practice of the medium. The extraordinary success of this phenomenon, developed in a very precise geographic and artistic context, has not given rise as yet, however, to in-depth examination. This book intends to fill the gap with an organic study of a German movement that is comparable in terms of global impact and resonance solely to the Bauhaus in the 1920s. It all started with Bernd and Hilla Becher, who inaugurated the photography course at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1976, precisely when their “typologies” were gaining recognition on the national and international artistic scene. Starting from the renewal of documentary photography pursued by the Bechers with the utmost coherence and commitment, the three generations of artists of the Düsseldorf School have broadened the photographic horizons considerably, venturing with their works into the spheres of multimedia experimentation and digital art. Highly prized on the market and sought after by the world’s leading museums, the works of the Bechers’ former students shed light today on the future developments of the art of photography. Eleven different aesthetic stances and eleven very personal approaches to harnessing the medium’s potential are gathered together in a book that presents the most significant photographs selected jointly with the individual artists concerned. The text by Stefan Gronert (1964) examines the phenomenon and focuses on the members of the Düsseldorf School. An art historian, curator at the Bonn Kunstmuseum since 1993, teacher in the art history department of Bonn University since 2001 and lecturer in the universities of Dresden and Cologne, Gronert has written numerous publications and papers on the photography of the 20th and 21st century.Preface by Lothar Schirmer.

Museum S.p.a. is not a book on the Guggenheim Museum or indeed on museums in general but a pamphlet that reveals the perverse mechanisms of art through the example of a museum transformed into a multinational. The museum in question was the New York Guggenheim and its diabolic planner a man named Tom Krens. The formula was simple and wholly in line with the times. Art was a commodity like all the others and to be exploited as such for profit. The speculative bubble was on target once again. The coupling of art and business was now acceptable and the Guggenheim began to open branches all over the world. But can art be treated like a Big Mac or a packet of Corn Flakes? What are the consequences of this absurd plan after the outbreak of the world-wide economic crisis? Paul Werner worked at the New York Guggenheim for nine years and went through this epoch-making change on the inside. A specialist in contemporary art, he was suddenly required to be an expert on everything from Chinese and African art to Armani clothes, motorcycles and even Vaseline. This short, incandescent text takes the lid off that bizarre postmodern museum to reveal its internal dynamics, shedding completely unprecedented light on the path that museums – all museums – have ended up taking over the last twenty years, a slippery slope whose disastrous consequences are clear today. On these ashes, with great acumen and fierce passion, the author indicates a new and exciting path towards a future yet to be constructed.

Solitary figures caught up in silent dramas. Pared down to the bare essentials, the space is real and metaphysical at the same time, bathed in relentless, limpid light. The scene is nearly always deserted and the atmosphere rife with expectancy. Edward Hopper’s human landscapes are as laconic and haunting as his urban or rural landscapes devoid of human presence and sounds. What man is concealed behind such a piercing vision? In what circumstances were his pictorial dramas generated? A taciturn and introverted artist, Hopper said little about his life. It is largely the diaries and the letters written by his wife Jo during a conjugal symbiosis of over forty years that provide the basis for this monumental biography of one of the great interpreters of the modern American scene, a painter who has left an indelible imprint on posterity both in the visual arts and in cinema. Gail Levin has drawn upon largely unpublished materials to offer a gripping narrative in which the birth of masterpieces alternates with accounts of intimate everyday life lived with Jo in a domestic theatre fraught with attraction and violent conflict, admiration and support, hostility and reconciliation. As the model of his works, intellectual stimulus, an overshadowed artist and his primary champion, Jo Nivison Hopper played a key part in her husband’s success and receives equal prominence in the pages of this book.

A British artist sells all his belongings on eBay. A Dutch colleague analyzes business culture through his own initiatives. An American prints banknotes and finds a way to spend them. A Swiss sells his invitation to take part in Manifesta. The idea that art and business are incompatible now seems to be wholly superseded. Many contemporary artists not only express their views on the market and the economic implications of art through the media but also use their art to reflect on or parody economic mechanisms in the wake of iconic figures of the 20th century like Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys. Hence the birth of “imaginary economics” – a term indicating alternatives to the institutional paradigms of economics – for those not content with the answers to be found in the cosy rooms of dominant economic thought. The relationship between art and business certainly does not appear to favour the former. On the one hand, given the slender earnings of most artists, the economy could be regarded from their standpoint as a negative force. The artist is generally a victim of the economic system or at best forced to submit to it. On the other, the financial community makes use of art like a duster to give lustre and cultural prestige to company reputations through sponsorship or the creation of collections. Moreover, the symbolic production of companies is often fuelled by the images of artists whose works are not protected by copyright. Olav Velthuis seeks to demonstrate the existence of a new balance between art and business where the art is no longer the victim but becomes an unusual source of knowledge about the market economy. After a brief historical overview, he analyzes the various attitudes of artists and shows how the stances they adopt towards the economic system can be critical, positive and even playful, as though to call into question the presumed aura of seriousness that surrounds the market.

Described by André Breton as the most intelligent man of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp has never ceased to wield great influence over contemporary art since his death in 1968. From Dada and Surrealism to Futurism and Cubism, his art is interwoven with the great artistic movements of the 20th century without ever being reducible to any one of them. If Picasso insistently presents the figure of the artist as demiurge, Duchamp personifies the contemporary artist through his invention of the ready-made and has been recognized since the 1960s as an undisputable source of inspiration by younger generations of artists. A great deal has been written about his work but far less about his life, which he led outside the current categories, not as an artist or anarchist but as an “anartist”, to use his own neologism. Detachment, elegance, the freedom of indifference and interpenetration of opposites as well as a constant assertion of laziness and physiological disdain for money were for him the original tools of an unprecedented stance with respect to the world and things: “I prefer living and breathing to working.” Duchamp’s frequent, caustic remarks on his life serve as a whole to delineate a personal economics (reduce needs in order to be truly free) and an authentic art of living. According to Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s finest work was his use of his time. Bernard Marcadé takes this view as his starting point in the deep conviction that detailed examination of the artist’s life will provide the best understanding of his art. By describing the ready-made as a sort of appointment, Duchamp himself suggests the importance of the events of everyday life in the conception of his works. The biographical elements in play – meetings, friendships, secrets, correspondence and love affairs – are not only anecdotal and marginal trimmings of the work but “biographemes” constituting its fundamental components.

One of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation, Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, 1925 – Captiva Island, 2008), is a key figure in the radical upheavals that American visual art went through as from the late 1950s during the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Born in Texas and part Cherokee on his mother’s side, Rauschenberg daringly challenged all assumptions on taking his first steps in the art world. From his first stay in Paris, the formative experience at Black Mountain College under the guidance of Joseph Albers and his trip to Rome with Cy Twombly to his friendship with John Cage and Merce Cunningham and recognition at the international level with the award of the Golden Lion at the 1964 Venice Biennial, his art developed off the beaten track in the field of experimentation that breaks all the rules, transforming the two-dimensional space of the painting into a receptacle for heterogeneous materials. Newspaper cuttings, pieces of fabric, photographs and found objects, nothing was excluded from his Combine paintings, hybrid creations halfway between painting and sculpture, which combine a love for discarded objects inherited from Dadaist collage with abstract-Art Informel brushwork. Calvin Tomkins offers us extraordinary insight into the revolution whereby art emerged from the museums and galleries to occupy the centre of the social stage. He presents its leading figures: the old guard of Pollock and de Kooning and the new generation of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol alongside art dealers and gallery owners like Betty Parsons, Leo Castelli and the collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim. He documents the rise to the pinnacle of success of the artist who aimed more than any other in this context at a cumulative art, the irrepressible innovator who stated his desire to create a situation in which there was as much space for the viewer as the artist.

The book offers a comprehensive view of Nanda Vigo’s artistic production, from the sixties up to her last artworks in 2005. An exhaustive critical essay, edited by Dominique Stella, presents Nanda Vigo’s career, emphasizing her interdisciplinary approach rather than the traditional and restrictive classification of the artist as architect and designer. The book is divided into three sections: art, architecture and design, each introduced by unpublished texts by Tommaso Trini, I.J. Schoonhoven, Ettore Sottsass and Lucio Fontana, which highlight her talent in combining such different artistic expressions. Nanda Vigo was born in Milan and has studied Architecture in Losanna. After some professional experience in the United States she came back to Milan to work with Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Giò Ponti. She joined actively major European movements of artistic experimentation such as Gruppo Zero, Aktuel and Licht und Bewegung, cultivating an interdisciplinary link between architecture, art, design and the environment. She now lives and works in Italy and Africa.

Libraries are spiritual places, sanctuaries of knowledge, temples of wisdom, oases of silence. From the splendid baroque libraries of monasteries to the age-old archives of the most illustrious universities, from the rich cabinets of enlightened princes to the most sober and functional buildings, they all are imbued with a sort of sacral solemnity. Since the outset of her professional career as a photographer in the mid-1970s, Candida Höfer has taken pictures of the interiors of public buildings such as castles, museums, theatres, exhibition spaces and libraries. This book is devoted to the latter. In these pages as never before, the objectivity and terseness characteristic of Candida Höfer’s work succeed in glorifying libraries all over the world of every size and period: the Trinity Library in Dublin, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar shortly before the catastrophic fire as well as the libraries of the Escorial and the Villa Medici in Rome. A witty introduction by Umberto Eco reflecting on the various purposes of an ideal library and how to obviate its managerial shortcomings precedes 137 colour photographs by Candida Höfer constituting a sumptuous celebration of bibliophilism.Preface by Umberto Eco.

Born in Rotterdam in 1904, Willem de Kooning moved to the United States in 1926. Together with Gorky, Pollock, Rothko and Kline, he was one of the leading pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, which marked New York’s replacement of Paris as the world’s capital of art. De Kooning lived the longest of that group of painters and produced the most, continuing to create surprisingly daring images into the 1980s. Active in a variety of genres including figure painting, the female nude and landscapes verging on complete abstraction, he developed many different styles, each deeply personal and at the same reflecting movements of great importance in 20th-century American culture. De Kooning’s life, from embarking as a stowaway to the attainment of celebrity, repeats the classic American myth of the emigrant who crosses the ocean in search of a better life and experiences poverty, failure and success first-hand. On the basis of a decade of research including hundreds of interviews and a series of previously unpublished letters and documents, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann offer the first major biography of this complex and romantic figure. De Kooning. L’uomo, l’artista is a living and richly detailed portrait and reconstruction of the painter’s life from the difficult years of poverty, instability and often violent family life in Rotterdam, the scene of his academic training and initial employment in decorative art, to his arrival in the United States, where he fought doggedly to establish himself as an American artist during the Depression. His early years in the United States are marked by the influence of Gorky, another immigrant, who was not only his mentor but also the role model who inspired his willingness to sacrifice everything to art. It was not until 1948 that his first solo show at the Egan Gallery revealed his talent to critics like Rosenberg and Hess, who vied with one another to champion his work and recognized him as a charismatic leader of the New York School, which was just beginning to make an international impact. His stormy marriage to Elaine Fried, another renowned figure in the world of art, reached its crisis in the late 1940s and early ’50s. At the peak of his fame, de Kooning was caught up in a self-destructive spiral to the point of personifying the new American myth of the man destroyed by his own success. He spent his days painting powerful abstract works and provocative female figures, and his nights haunting the Cedar Tavern, talking to friends like Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara, womanizing, drinking and roaming the streets. In the 1960s, worn out by the feverish world of art and nearly destroyed by success, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals followed by a vast body of haunting, ethereal late work. Until the end, afflicted by senile dementia, de Kooning remained the painter he had always been, spending the day in front of the canvas and never hesitating to destroy his creations in order to renew a constantly shifting style in accordance with his conviction that you have to change in order to stay the same.

Milan is a city dear to Orhan Pamuk, Nobel prize for literature in 2006 and author of The Museum of Innocence (2008), a novel conceived at exactly the same time as the eponymous museum in Istanbul, opened to the public a few years after the book came out. In both, reality and fiction intertwine in a project that challenges categories and encourages us to question not only relations between writing and reality and between artistic and functional objects, but also the very statute of the artwork and that of its container, the museum. The central focus of the twofold enterprise is the relationship established between word, image and representation, with “image” meaning everything that pertains to the visual realm. The youthful aspiration of Pamuk to become an artist – with drawings that did not reproduce nature, objects and streets, but the forms of his mind – fuelled the refined visual sensitivity of the author that permeates the entire novel, in which Milan itself plays a significant part. This is the city where the main character Kemal dies, after visiting the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi for the last time, and it was also in Milan, in January 2017, that the Accademia di Brera awarded Pamuk a diploma honoris causa, devoting a conference to him, the contents of which feature in this book. Together with Pamuk’s lectio magistralis, Salvatore Settis’ laudatio and contributions from scholars in different disciplines regarding the Museum of Innocence “operation”, a number of texts by the Turkish writer are presented here on his museum poetics, including a brand new piece inspired precisely by the dialogues of his Milanese days. The importance and topicality of Pamuk’s ideas, in relation not only to the mose recent museographic and museological conceptions, but also the research of contemporary artists who conceive collections as an art form, are therefore strongly reiterated: his work as a writer and artist is the expression of a precise desire not to tell the “Story”, but to bring “stories” back to life within a vision that is both utopian and real at the same time.

"Each became absorbed in their own artistic universe, in ways that gradually acquired consistency and weight over the years. Art animated their lives, an inexorable imperative. Painting was the sole, intimate necessity for both, perhaps the only real secret of their indissoluble bond."

Re-programmed Art: An Open Manifesto is an action research project that explored the impact of methods and approaches linked to open source hardware and software on the field of art. The aim was to produce a number of physical and technological artefacts whose information and implementation specifications are publicly released under free licenses.The group of digital artists and designers involved in the project had the task of re-programming a number of works by Gruppo T, the pioneering group at the forefront of the Italian art movement known as Arte Programmata. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, these artists developed a ground-breaking vision of art as reproducible, participatory and interactive, and created prototypes based on the use of algorithms and technology which were designed to be reproduced as series of constantly changing artefacts. The concept of 're-programming' is about more than just reconstructing the original works, understanding what they were made of and how they were made, and the algorithms used to incorporate an element of chance. It means bringing them to life again, reworked using new materials and technology. Pieces by Gruppo T were thus transformed into new, open artworks that can be reproduced, expanded on and completed by other users: a vibrant tribute to an original, innovative movement that occupied the no man's land between art and design.