Agnes Martin: Life & Work explores the life, origins, and art of one of the most internationally celebrated painters to emerge from this country. It reveals how Martin gained renown in the male-dominated art world of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a pivotal figure between two of the era’s dominant movements: Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Delving into Martin’s signature style composed of tranquil grids and stripes, the book investigates the origin of Martin’s method, which she perfected over the better part of four decades, following her belief in the transformative power of art. “I would like [my pictures] to represent beauty, ...

Annie Pootoogook: Life & Work traces the artist’s life from her youth at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative’s Kinngait Studios, where she began drawing in 1997, predominantly in ink and crayon, to her death in 2016. The book explores how in addition to depicting scenes of everyday life in the North—including people watching TV, playing cards, shopping, or cooking dinner—Pootoogook depicted such subjects as alcoholism, domestic abuse, food scarcity, and the effects of intergenerational trauma. In 2006 Pootoogook was the recipient of Canada’s Sobey Art Award, an important early career achievement that recognized the artist’s singular vision. The award led to her ...

Playwright, poet and activist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was known for his theory of the Epic Theatre and his attempts to break down the division between high art and popular culture. The Threepenny Opera, his collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, was a milestone in musical theatre, and plays like Mother Courage and Galileo changed the course of modern drama and aesthetic theory. Framed by two world wars, the Weimar Republic and a global depression, Nazism and exile and East German socialism, Brecht’s own life became a project, illuminating and intervening in the ongoing crisis of modern experience, shaped by capitalism, nationalism and visions of social utopia. Brecht ...

Renowned for his contribution to the development of the motion picture, Eadweard Muybridge was a pioneering photographer. Alongside his remarkable photographic achievements, his personal life was riddled with melodrama, including a near-fatal stagecoach accident, a betrayal and a murder trial. Marta Braun’s new biography traces the sensational events of Muybridge’s life against his personal reinventions as artist, photographer, high-minded researcher and showman. Muybridge’s opportunity in photography came in the 1870s, when his skills were enlisted by a racehorse breeder to prove the ‘unsupported motion controversy’ – the theory that during a horse’s stride, there was a moment when all four of ...

Provocateurs General Idea (active 1969–1994) invented their history and made it reality: “We wanted to be famous, glamourous and rich. That is to say we wanted to be artists and we knew that if we were famous and glamourous we could say we were artists and we would be.… We did and we are. We are famous, glamourous artists.” The group—comprised of AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal—met in Toronto in the late 1960s and went on to live and work together for twenty-five years. General Idea ceased activities in 1994, with the untimely deaths of Partz and Zontal ...

Gilles Deleuze, the person and philosopher, was both singular and multifaceted. Frida Beckman traces Deleuze’s remarkable intellectual journey, mapping the encounters from which his life and work emerged. She considers how his life and philosophical developments resonate with historical, political and philosophical events, from the Second World War to the student uprisings in the 1960s, the opening of the experimental University of Paris VIII and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Although less of a public figure than many of his contemporaries, Deleuze’s life and philosophy are bound up with his numerous friendships, collaborations and disputes with several of the period’s most influential ...

In the mid-1970s Sylvère Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing house. Since its creation Semiotext(e) has been the place for stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and American artistic and intellectual life for the past fifty years has largely depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing house revolves essentially around the notion of the collective, and its creator Sylvère Lotringer has rarely divulged his personal journey: his existence as a hidden child during the Second World War; the liberating and then traumatic experience of the collective in the ...

Joyce Wieland: Life & Work documents one of Canada’s pivotal and most internationally renowned artists of the 1960s and 1970s. By 1971 her canvases could be found in museums across Canada and her pioneering experimental films were included in such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Royal Belgium Film Archives, and the Austrian Film Archives. This book traces her career, which began as a painter but expanded to incorporate a range of media and materials, including sculpture, textile-based art, and experimental film. Johanne Sloan reveals how Wieland’s work—often politically engaged with issues of war, gender, ecology, and nationalism while remaining ...

For over sixty years Tom Bishop has contributed to shaping the literary, philosophical, cultural, artistic, but also political conversation between Paris and New York. In his position as professor and director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture at New York University, he made the Washington Square institution one of the great bridges between French innovation and a New York scene that was then in full transformation. Tom Bishop was close to Beckett, championed Robbe-Grillet in the United States, befriended Marguerite Duras and Hélène Cixous, organized historic public encounters—such as the one between James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. He ...

Michael Snow traces the dualistic structure of his work to his Canadian upbringing between two cultures—English and French—and his early awareness of the different qualities of sight and sound, learned from his parents. Having studied at the Ontario College of Art in his native Toronto, he travelled in Europe in the 1950s and lived in New York in the 1960s. Snow’s contributions to three spheres of cultural activity—visual art, experimental film, and music—have been recognized internationally.

“Born too late to see the war and too early to forget it.” So writes Reiner Schürmann in Origins, a startlingly personal account of life as a young man from postwar Germany in the 1960s. Schürmann’s semi-autobiographical protagonist is incapable of escaping a past he never consciously experienced. All around him are barely concealed reminders of Nazi-inflicted death and destruction. His own experiences of displacement and rootlessness, too, are the burden of a cruel collective past. His story presents itself as a continuous quest for—and struggle to free himself from—his origins. The hero is haunted relentlessly by his fractured identity—in ...

Sara Penn’s Knobkerry: An Oral History Sourcebook is the culmination a years-long oral history project, conceived and developed by writer and oral historian Svetlana Kitto, that begins to demarcate a potential sphere of influence for artist and designer Sara Penn (1927-2020) and Knobkerry, the store she founded and ran in New York City. This publication assembles fifteen long-form interviews with figures close to Penn and Knobkerry, conducted by Kitto between 2017 and 2020, including Sara Penn, Andrea Aranow, Charles Daniel Dawson, David Hammons, Joanne Robinson Hill, Kate Prendergast and Jane Barrell Yadav, Sana Musasama, Eric Robertson, Fumi Schmidt, Seret Scott, Elena Solow, Carol Thompson, Ken Tisa, and Paulette Young. It also includes extensive reproductions of archival materials related ...