From Publishers Weekly
In this beautifully produced book, Misrach, a photographer best known for his pictures of the American desert, turns his lens to paintings by Thomas Cole, van Dyke, Bouguereau, Rubens, Eakins and other famous American and European artists and "rephotographs their signs, symbols, and gestures." By taking pictures of small sections of the paintings-their bottom left-hand corners, for example, and slices of their gilded frames-Misrach attempts to draw attention to "their manifestation of the Eurocentric values of race, religion, class, and gender touted in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny." Portraits and allegories thus become politicized, their underlying assumptions questioned and implicitly critiqued. As Misrach puts it, "I thought this series of pictures reflected a collision between two primary practices of photography: appropriation art like Sherrie Levin's and the documentary tradition like Walker Evans'." Art historian Navjotika Kumar's dense scholarly essay illuminates but occasionally frustrates, while Getty Museum photography curator Weston Naef offers a brief and elegant postscript on the history of taking pictures of paintings.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
What do paintings signify in an age of photographs? How do photographs modify the visual language of paintings? Richard Misrach's
Pictures of Paintings showcases photographs of select museum masterpieces. Working primarily in the art museums of the American West, along with The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Misrach photographs paintings to reexamine specific details, not so much as a guide to the artist’s style or technique, but as a means of understanding a lexicon of cultural values, among them race, gender, religion, and power.
By collapsing the barriers between the traditional practice of documentation and the recent strategies of appropriation art, these photographs raise important questions regarding representation itself. This publication marks the first comprehensive compilation of this significant body of work.
Blind Spot Books, a division of Blind Spot Inc. (publisher of the premiere art photography magazine
Blind Spot), is now partnering with powerHouse Books to produce elegantly designed, sumptuously produced works of artistic and literary significance. Founding
Blind Spot editor and publisher Kim Zorn Caputo will use the same uncompromising production standards and the finest printing available for the series. Each book will be treated as a creative medium that celebrates the integrity of the best in art and literature.
