By Calvin Tomkins
"Brilliantly illuminating . . . This latter-day Vasari places his dry wit and willing eye to paintings in fashioning enduring pictures of ten contemporary-art stars, tracing the end result of artistic genius again to their unusual roots."--Vogue
For greater than 4 many years Calvin Tomkins's incisive profiles in The New Yorker have given readers the main enjoyable stories on modern paintings and artists to be had in any language. In Lives of the Artists ten significant artists are captured in Tomkins's cool and ironic kind to checklist the recent instructions paintings is taking in the course of nowadays of unlimited freedom. With the decline of formal strategy and rigorous education, paintings has turn into, between different issues, an method of residing. As Tomkins says, "the lives of latest artists are at the present time so quintessential to what they make that the 2 can't be thought of in isolation."
Among the artists profiled are Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the reigning heirs of intentionally outrageous artwork; Matthew Barney of the pregenital obsessions; Cindy Sherman, who manages a number of differences as she disappears into her personal paintings; and Julian Schnabel, who has cast a moment occupation as an award-winning movie director. regardless of the selection, the making of paintings is still one of the so much not easy jobs on earth.
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Extra resources for Lives of the Artists: Portraits of Ten Artists Whose Work and Lifestyles Embody the Future of Contemporary Art
Example text
Rachel Whiteread, a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, who wasn’t in the “Freeze” show, remembered with amazement how Damien used to bring Norman Rosenthal and other art world power brokers to her studio to see the work she’d done. ) She had met Damien in a pub three years before the “Freeze” show, and they had liked each other on sight. ” Damien did want to take over the world, but he was serious about being an artist. “Freeze” continued, with two extensions, through September 29, and new artists and new work were added each time.
She left town two days later, a few hours before the Academy Awards ceremony. “I was just as happy not to go to that,” she told me. ” GROWING UP IN suburban Long Island, in the 1950s and 1960s, Cindy Sherman watched a lot of movies on tele vision. Million Dollar Movie played the same film five nights running, and she’d watch all five showings. She watched horror films, and classics, and occasionally an art film on PBS; she vividly remembers seeing Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a post-nuclear-holocaust story done almost entirely in still images and voice-over.
Copyright © 2008 by Calvin Tomkins All rights reserved. Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd. —1st ed. p. cm. ” Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8872-4 ISBN-10: 0-8050-8872-5 1. Artists—Biography—History and criticism. 2. Art, Modern—20th century. I. Title. 92—dc22 2008013121 Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets. First Edition 2008 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Once again, for Dodie CONTENTS Preface DAMIEN HIRST CINDY SHERMAN JULIAN SCHNABEL RICHARD SERRA JAMES TURRELL MATTHEW BARNEY MAURIZIO CATTELAN JASPER JOHNS JEFF KOONS JOHN CURRIN Acknowledgments Index PREFACE Making art is both harder and easier than it used to be.