30 YEARS: INTERVIEWS AND OUTTAKES, BY MICHAEL AUPING
In a curatorial career that spans thirty years, Michael Auping has had the unique opportunity to visit hundreds of painters, sculptors, architects, and writers in their studios to talk about what they do and how they do it. Here he collects thirty of the most compelling and penetrating of these interviews, each illustrated with images of the artist at work. Conversations with Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Jenny Holzer, Anselm Kiefer, Susan Rothenberg, and Richard Tuttle, among others, offer extraordinary insight into the creative process of some of the most influential artists at work today. Available via Random House and Amazon.
40 Years: Just Talking About Art, By Michael Auping
Auping, one of America’s foremost curators of contemporary art, explores process and technique through conversations he has had over the past four decades with the most significant artists during his career. This book collects nearly eighty conversations with more than forty of the artists he worked with, including Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Kara Walker, and Lawrence Weiner. In his interviews–divided into thematic chapters such as “Dimensions of Drawing,” “The Studio,” “Figures of Speech,” and “Light and Space”–Auping’s probing and eloquent curiosity elicits illuminating and fascinating insights from his subjects and touches on every aspect of the artistic process, allowing many of the artists to reveal interests and influences not exposed in other contexts.
THE ART OF FOUND OBJECTS: INTERVIEWS WITH TEXAS ARTISTS (JOE AND BETTY MOORE TEXAS ART SERIES), BY ROBERT CRAIG BUNCH
In this first book of interviews with visual artists from across Texas, artists reflect on topics from formative influences and inspirations to their common engagement with found materials. Since 2010, Robert Craig Bunch has interviewed sixty-four of Texas’ finest artists, who have responded with honesty, clarity, and great insight into their own work. None of these interviews has been previously published, and stand collectively as a reference of lasting value.
CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS, BY SELDEN RODMAN
From the book jacket: “Making no prejudgments, taking no position, but faithfully reporting what he was told, [Selden Rodman] has written a book about an American art “colony” that is all things to all men: vigorous, dedicated, and intelligent; chatty and at times catty, but always loaded with ideas; generous, ungenerous, and seeking always an aspect of the truth. Includes interviews with Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Morris Graves, Alexander Calder, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Saul Steinberg, and many others.” This increasingly rare book gives equally rare insight into the minds of the big men of the American art scene in the 1950s. Well worth a read… if you can get your hands on it. Available via Amazon.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST CONVERSATION SERIES
This affordable and accessible series from German art book publisher and bookseller Walther König collects conversations between curator and culture activator Hans Ulrich Obrist and other seminal and emerging figures in the worlds of art, architecture, and ideas. Including Matthew Barney, Rosemarie Trockel, Jeff Koons, Nancy Spero, and Yoko Ono. Available through Artbook.
INTERVIEWS WITH AMERICAN ARTISTS, BY DAVID SYLVESTER
This book includes 21 interviews with leading American artists recorded over the past forty years: David Smith, Richard Serra, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, and more. Conversations from the 1960s vividly conjure up the New York art scene immediately after the war, when the newly arrived Europeans met the Americans who had worked together in the Depression, their different traditions colliding and fusing as they walked the city, talked and worked together. Others, like those with Carl Andre, Cy Twombly, Alex Katz, and Jeff Koons, speak straight from today. No one but Sylvester could have produced this intricate collage, this chorus of voices that blend to create one of the most revealing and unusual histories of American art in the twentieth century. Available via Yale Press and Amazon.
INTERVIEWS WITH ARTISTS: 1966-2012, BY MICHAEL PEPPIATT
A renowned curator and respected insider of the international art scene since the mid-1960s, Michael Peppiatt has spent his professional life with many of the greatest artists of the 20th century. His close friendships and frequent studio visits with Jean Dubuffet, Sonia Delaunay, Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Balthus, Oldenburg, Brassaï, and Cartier-Bresson, among many others, have produced an incredible archive of interviews, from formal question-and-answer sessions to off-the-cuff conversations. Peppiatt has selected forty-five of the most noteworthy and fascinating of his conversations with artists, from the world-famous to the under-recognized. The author approaches his subjects with a characteristic mix of passion, insight, and humor in a book that is consistently entertaining and informative, as the artists open up in unexpected ways about their work and their lives. Available via Yale Press and Amazon.
PRESSPLAY: CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION
A personal encounter with 50 of the world’s most significant contemporary artists, “pressPlay” draws together the full texts of the complete Phaidon interviews with living artists, 1995-2005, originally appearing in “Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists” series. From highly established artists Louise Bourgeois and Alex Katz, to mid-career masters Richard Prince, Christian Marclay, Jenny Holzer, and Raymond Pettibon, to the most exciting artists of the current generation, including Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson and Pipilotti Rist, “pressPlay” is a highly readable, comprehensive look at contemporary art today. Available via Phaidon and Amazon.
Robert Storr: Interviews on Art
Collating, in a single volume, the major body of interviews conducted by the revered American critic and curator Robert Storr, Interviews on Art includes around 40 illustrated discussions with some of the most renowned names in the artworld over the last century. Storr’s interviewees include Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons, Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Richard Serra, Gabriel Orozco, Elizabeth Murray, Harald Szeemann and Mike Kelley, whilst each text is accompanied by relevant works and previously unpublished photographs of the artists themselves. A conversation between MoMA and Tate Modern curator and art historian Francesca Pietropaolo and Storr introduces the texts, in which they dissect the interview as a medium: discussing the ethics involved, the notion of technique and approach, alongside the limitations and difficulties of the process.
SPEAKING OF ART: SELECTIONS FROM THE ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART’S ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION, 1958-2008
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Archives’ oral history program, the Archived of American Art selected audio excerpts from some of their most fascinating interviews and paired them with photographs from their collections. Lee Krasner rejects the word ‘drip’ as an accurate descriptor of Jackson Pollock’s paintings; Charles Burchfield reads poems that he penned on the verso of his paintings; and Emmy Lou Packard recounts working with Diego Rivera on the Pan-American Unity mural in 1940. These samplings, among 3,000 audio recordings in the Archives’ collection, chronicle the great diversity of the American scene, augmenting and refining our perception of individual artists, dealers, collectors, and curators and their social worlds.