So you think you know Mucha? Printmaking? The ravenous classism of the art world? This month, our editors and contributors invite you to question what you think you know. Senior Editor Hakim Bishara takes a look at the first English-language translation of a book of photos by Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain with text by poet Pablo Neruda, while Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang reads critic Lucy Lippard’s collection of experimental fiction. Read on for more recommendations, including Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian on Tamara Lanier’s moving memoir chronicling her fight to reclaim daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard University and The White Pube’s shrewd perspectives on the art world, written in a tone it sorely needs: humor. Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy by Tamara Lanier
In her new memoir, Tamara Lanier outlines the continuing battle to claim the daguerreotypes that were taken of her enslaved ancestors in the antebellum South. Beginning in her home state of Connecticut, Lanier embarks on a historic journey to the South, discovers furniture made by her ancestors in the home of the descendant of the enslaver, teaches us about the power of familial heritage and memory to combat oppression, and outlines her fight with wealthy institutions and their courtiers to acknowledge the reality of the crime. This is a moving, well-written account that will teach you that those of us in the art and academic communities can sometimes overlook the living history of the objects that we reputedly prize in our research and work, Hrag Vartanian
Poor Artists by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad (aka The White Pube)
There are so many twists and turns in this debut book by the great minds behind The White Pube (Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad), the acerbic and hilarious duo who take no prisoners in their regular critiques of the art world from their UK perches. As they explain in their intro, “We spoke to a Turner Prize-winner or two, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a few ghosts and a literal knight. We wanted to know the strategies people put in place to hold on to their relationship with art.” Just who we want to hear from. With a flurry of asides (turned into footnotes), lots of digressions, and fresh prose, Poor Artists is an entertaining read that will undoubtedly make a lot of people who are or want to be artists, in a decidedly lonely field infused by luxury consumerism, feel less alone.
Sergio Larrain: Valparaís
“Sometimes Valparaíso twitches like a wounded whale. It flounders in the air, is in agony, dies, and comes back to life.” Thus writes Pablo Neruda of the Chilean port city in an essay for his countryman Sergio Larrain’s book on Valparaíso, comprised of photos dating back to the 1960s. It’s a remarkable piece of writing that lives and breathes inside a stunning book by one of the best photographers of the 20th century. You can almost smell the briny air of the decaying coastal town in Larrain’s spellbinding photos of its people, fish, and ghosts. Like a street cat, he also witnesses moments of beauty, hardship, and ennui in the city’s winding alleys and on its endless stairs. “If we walk up and down all of Valparaíso’s stairs, we will have made a trip around the world,” Neruda writes. A single page from this beautiful book is enough to set sail.
Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line, edited by Tomoko Sato
Like many a 20-something-year-old, I have an Alphonse Mucha poster taped to my wall, and I am not ashamed. It’s a grainy reproduction of a 1902 study for “The Moon,” in which the celestial body takes the form of a starlit woman wreathed in constellations who grounds me with her gaze despite the century and change between us. Maybe you have a framed print hanging in your living room, or a postcard pinned above your desk. Ubiquitous now as then, the Czech artist’s swirling armatures and organic lines would come to epitomize Art Nouveau, but the political and artistic context crucial to understanding his work risks getting lost in the shuffle.
Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line offers a necessary corrective, reminding us that the artist “dreamed of his homeland’s political freedom and resurgence.” Accompanying a traveling show of the same name currently on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, the catalog’s essays also detail the impact of Japanese woodblock printing on Mucha’s work and how he influenced manga, 1960s psychedelic posters, and other styles in turn. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a web of global influences, market demands, and political upheaval that fills in the gaps of Mucha’s story, granting me a new appreciation for his work (and my celestial companion on the wall).
Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions) by Lucy Lippar
Headwaters (and Other Short Fictions), a comprehensive collection of Lucy Lippard’s narrative and experimental work, opens not with a fawning intro extolling her vast influence, as you might expect, but with an anxious letter she wrote to a friend in 1970. “I mean, doing it”, “it” being writing I See/You Mean: A Novel (1979) — “is, and has been, exhilarating and appalling and all the betters and worses I’d expected.”
This kind of nervous, self-conscious ambition inflects the collection as a whole, which begins with Lippard’s high school and college forays into short fiction á la John Updike and Flannery O’Connor, before moving into early submissions to literary magazines, including excerpts of rejection letters, which will momentarily soothe the psyche of aspiring writers. These fictions aren’t only interesting and good insofar as Lippard is the one writing them, but it’s definitely part of the appeal.
Befitting a critic of her stature, Lippard’s critiques of herself in the introduction feel mostly accurate, namely that she isn’t best-suited for creating developed characters and narratives. Instead, her most successful fictions include Fluxus-esque directions, found in a section on her collaborations with artists such as David Lamelas and Sol Lewitt, I particularly loved one in which she commands us to walk uptown in Manhattan from 42nd street, shedding a piece of ourselves block by block. I’m also a fan of her odd little prose poems. Here, we witness the stirring outcome of a critic’s eye loosed on the larger world; she describes a natural formation, for instance, as a “winding corridor with walls of rotting pink satin.” Still, she herself penned the most succinct encapsulation of her own experimental impulse in that opening letter: “Fuck it.”
Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830, edited by Cristina S. Martinez and Cynthia E. Roman
Reading Esther Chadwick’s The Radical Print recently, I was intrigued whenever glimpses of women printmakers and sellers appeared, including artist Angelika Kauffmann, engraver Caroline Watson, and publishers Hannah Humphrey and Elizabeth d’Archery. What luck, then, to discover these same women covered in depth in Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700-1830, as well as the work of many more, including longtime favorites like artist Maria Hadfield Cosway and fabulous new ones (to me), such as the formidable Jane Hogarth, wife of William Hogarth, and Laura Piranesi, daughter of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. As the latter two figures illustrate, “the persistent shadow cast by a marital name or by one’s father’s name” is one way women’s contributions to the history of prints have been lost and overlooked. The editors also point out that “biases against their gender combined with the lower status of printmaking in the hierarchy of visual art media have meant that women engaged in printmaking have been even less visible and less studied than those who took up painting, sculpture, or drawing.” This excellent collection of wide-ranging essays goes a long way toward recovering that past and offering a rich vein for future scholarship.
Barbara by Joni Murphy
Roughly 80 years after the Manhattan Project’s dissolution, Joni Murphy’s blisteringly beautiful third novel Barbara traces her titular protagonist’s relationship to the atomic bomb, acting, and an assortment of affairs. Growing up in the desert during the nuclear age, Barbara is the daughter of an engineer father and a mother who takes her own life when Barbara is only 13 years old. Later, Barbara becomes a film actress, trying to make sense of her own identity and past by donning the costumes and characteristics of others. “I had my mother’s radiating core of beauty and sadness,” Barbara reflects as an adult. “That volatile element that wanted to bond with others but couldn’t except under the right pressures.” Beauty and violence are thus inextricably linked in this captivating book about the performance of femininity, the illusory magic of cinema, and the geopolitical landscape of mid-20th century America.
