Exhibitions,Museums and Galleries

ings on paper, mainly of fruit, are fresh

and vivid, quite different from the muchreworked canvases and not dissimilar to
Manets last still lifes. The canvases, with
their broad palette and blend of primer
undercoat, wash and impasto, are hard to
reproduce. Each item has a thorough
listing of provenance, exhibitions and
literature, often with additional comments. The extensive bibliography will
prove handy for writers and students.
All five essays are readable, well
annotated and copiously illustrated.
Flams essay summarises Bonnards reputation. Remi Labrusse puts a not entirely
persuasive case for Mallarmes influence.
Bonnard admired the poet and referred
to him obliquely. The links are interesting in themselves and do not need overstating. Two contributors describe model
Renee Monchaty as blonde when
there is some evidence that she was a
brunette and that Bonnard altered her hair
colour in his paintings after her suicide.
This is a significant conflict. If Bonnard is
to be elevated to the highest tier of
modernism, more primary research needs
to be published. A multi-essay catalogue is
a perfect opportunity to publish new
academic research beside more general
discussion (as in the recent Tate Rothko
catalogue).
This attractive and engrossing book is
an accessible study of a complex and
underappreciated artist. Even Bonnard
enthusiasts are likely to be surprised by the
gouache and watercolour still lifes included.
alexander adams
Artist and writer, Berlin

THE PICTURES GENERATION

19741984
douglas eklund
The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University
Press, 2009 d35.00 $60.00
352 pp. 240 col/47 mono illus
isbn 978-1-58839-314-2

his large-format, hardback catalogue

accompanied a well-received exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York from April to
August 2009 and contains a substantial,
well-researched and informative text by
Douglas Eklund, Associate Curator in the
Mets Department of Photographs. He
devised the label Pictures Generation to
describe a loosely knit group of American
artists active during the decade 1974 to 1984
who became known partly as a result of a
show called Pictures (New York, Artists
Space, 1977), curated by the critic Douglas
Crimp. The most famous names to emerge
from this group were Cindy Sherman,
David Salle, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Thomas Lawson, Jack Goldstein,
Sherrie Levine, Matt Mullican and Robert
Longo. Around 30 artists were featured in
the exhibition and it was refreshing to find
the art of lesser-known figures such as
Barbara Bloom and James Welling discussed and illustrated in the catalogue.
As students, the pictures artists were
familiar with the Pop, Minimalism and
Conceptual art movements and with art and
Richard Prince,Untitled (four single men with
interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right)
(1977). FromThe Pictures Generation 1974--1984
by Douglas Eklund.

media theories, but reacted against the

austerity, demateriality and linguistic emphasis of Conceptualism by reviving the use
of visual representation and optical pleasure. They employed a variety of media to do
so: drawing, painting, photography, photomontage, posters, books, magazine illustrations, models, sculpture, installation,
film, video and performance. Visual images
were also crucial in another way: the images
the artists created (or quoted or appropriated) were mostly derived from the visual
and audio cultures of the mass media and
from the fine arts, rather than from
empirical reality directly perceived. Examples are Shermans famous series of
photographs starring herself that simulated
Hollywood movie stills and Princes rephotographed Marlboro cigarette advertisements. Texts or slogans were often retained
along with imagery, as in Krugers political
and feminist graphics. As Eklund points
out, the artists relationship to mass culture:
was productively schizophrenic: while they
were first and foremost consumers, they also
learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward
the very same mechanisms of seduction and
desire that played upon them from the highly
influential writings of French philosophers and
cultural critics such as Michel Foucault, Roland
Barthes, and Julia Kristeva that were just
beginning to be made available in translation.

A greater theoretical sophistication

thus distinguished the pictures generation
from the earlier generation of Pop artists.
Although New York was the key location, Eklund begins by discussing the
young artists Salle, Mullican, Goldstein,
Bloom and Welling who emerged from
Cal Arts on the West Coast and were
inspired by the teaching of the photoconceptual artist John Baldessari. Another
group, which included Sherman and
Longo, were associated with the artistrun space Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York
State. Both groups eventually moved to
New York, where they linked up with
artists already resident. Eklund then considers the artists associated with the tactic
of appropriation Levine, Prince, Sherman, Louise Simmons and Sarah Charlesworth whose work challenged received
wisdom concerning originality, authorship and copyright. A final chapter is
devoted to art in a reinvigorated market,
which discusses the new gallery Metro
Pictures (co-founded by Helene Winer in
1980), the magazine Real Life (co-edited by
the Scottish-born painter and theorist
Thomas Lawson) and works by Longo,
Kruger, Louise Lawlor and Allan McCol-

26 The Art Book volume 17 issue 1 february 2010 r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah

Exhibitions,Museums and Galleries

lum. Along the way, there are also
accounts of performances, multimedia
and musical events (several Pictures artists
also played in bands such as Glenn
Brancas Theoretical Girls). Eklund analyses numerous works of art and his
accounts of them are generally acute and
illuminating. He also sets them within a
socio-historical context. The book ends
with an exhibition checklist, an extensive
bibliography and an index.
In his introduction Eklund argues that,
despite the commercial success and popularity of its leading lights, much of this art
still intellectually polarizes both general
and specialist audiences and disturbs
people on both the Right and the Left of
the political spectrum. Certainly, much of
the work continues to challenge the viewers preconceptions of what art is and
should be about. For instance, McCollums
dozens of small, framed paintings all
painted solid black (no pictures pictures?).
It ought to be recorded that a comparable post-Conceptual art movement equally
concerned with pictorial rhetoric and the
mass media occurred in London during the
mid 1970s. It was associated with such
individuals as John Stezaker, Yve Lomax,
Paul Wombell, Jonathan Miles, Peter Kennard,Vaughan Grylls, Stephen Willats, John
Hilliard and Victor Burgin. Furthermore,
the Americans were recognised by the critic
Rosetta Brooks, the British editor of the
small but influential magazine entitled ZG
(Zeitgeist, 19805). (A 1981 issue of ZG
devoted to New York with a cover featuring
a Longo Men in Cities image is reproduced in the catalogue.) Unfortunately, the
London movement has not yet been
celebrated by a British curator or museum.
john a walker
Painter and art historian

THE ADAM BROTHERS IN ROME:

DRAWINGS FROM THE GRAND TOUR
a a tait
Scala 2008 25.00 $45
160 pp. 115 col illus
isbn 978-1-85759-574-1

he Adam brothers, Robert (172892)

and James (173294) dominated
British architecture for the second
half of the eighteenth century, owing
much of their success to detailed studies
of the antique during their visits to Italy
indeed, it would be difficult to speculate
what type of achievements they might have

made without this preliminary work, though it could

scarcely have been anything
as innovative or influential.
Robert arrived in Italy in
1755. He visited the great
classical monuments of
Rome, explored the newly
discovered sites of Pompeii
and Herculaneum, and learnt
a great deal from other artists
working in Italy, notably the
French painter Charles-Louis
Clerisseau. James arrived in
1760, and although the brothers were working to some
extent in tandem with each
other, their separate journeys
served to enrich their combined experience.
Rather unusually, the
brothers combined the roles
of both students and Grand
Tour collectors, amassing
between them an outstanding collection of paintings,
drawings and sculpture.
James also organised the
purchase of the great Albani
collection for George III.
Back in Britain, much of their collection
was displayed in their casino gallery, in
the garden of their house and office in
London. But between 1765 and 1821 the
collection was sold, the brothers own
drawings being acquired by Sir John Soane
in 1833 for his own Museum in Lincolns
Inn Fields, London.
This publication accompanies an exhibition of the same title at Sir John
Soanes Museum 20089. Leading Adam
expert A A Tait has both curated the show
and written the publication, drawing on the
Museums own holdings of Adam drawings and those by other artists that they
collected, together with relevant extracts of
the brothers correspondence. This adds to
information and scholarship already published by Tait in his Robert Adam: Drawings
and Imagination, in the Cambridge Studies
in the History of Architecture series
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), and
his catalogue to an exhibition in 19967,
Robert Adam: The Creative Mind: From the Sketch
to the Finished Drawings (Sir John Soanes
Museum, London, 1996).
This is the first in a planned series of
five publications by Scala covering the
work of Robert and James Adam held by
Sir John Soanes Museum; it also repre-

Robert Adam, study for an octagon pavilion on a

rusticated arcaded basement withVenetian
windows. Image courtesy of theTrustees of Sir
John Soanes Museum. Photography by Geremy
Butler. FromThe Adam Brothers in Rome:Drawings
from the Grand Tour byA ATait.

sents the first stage of an ambitious

project to catalogue all the drawings at
the Museum made by Robert and James on
their Grand Tours. The publication standards are very high indeed. All the
illustrations are in colour, with the drawings reproduced to their edges, sometimes
torn or clipped, conveying fully the sense
of drawings as objects as well as illustrations. This promises to be a valuable series
documenting an outstanding collection.
patricia andrew
Art historian, Edinburgh

PICASSOS LATE SCULPTURE: WOMAN

elizabeth cowling
Museo Picasso, Malaga 2009 h29.90
160 pp. 118 col/17mono illus
isbn 978-84-934981-8-8
Dist. Museo Picassolalibreria@mpicassom.org

icassos late sculpture has been little

studied until now. Part of a series
that places pieces from Museo

r 2010 the authors. journal compilation r 2010 bpl/aah volume 17 issue 1 february 2010 The Art Book 27