Brandon Taylor

Late Americans

A bold novel about a black painter caught up in the currents of art, faith, and desire.

New York simmers with heat and unrest as Wyeth, a painter, finds himself at an impasse in his own work.

After attending a dubious show put on by a collective of careerist artists, he retreats to a bar in the West Village where he meets Keating, a former seminarian. Over the long summer, as the two get to know each another, they talk and argue about God, sex, and art.

Meanwhile, at his job working for an art restorer, Wyeth begins to investigate the life and career of a forgotten, minor black artist. His search yields potential answers to questions that Wyeth is only now beginning to ask about what it means to be a black artist making black art amid the mess and beauty of life itself.

As he did so brilliantly in the Booker Prize finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings alive a captivating set of characters, this time at work and at play in the competitive art world. Minor Black Figures is a vividly etched portrait, both sweeping and tender, of friendship, creativity, belief, and the deep connections among them. 

Minor Black Figures

A Novel

Shortlist des Booker Prize 2020

Real Life

'Funny, merciless, brilliant... I loved it' CURTIS SITTENFELD, author of ROMANTIC COMEDY 'Assures Taylor's position as one of the most important novelists of his generation' GUARDIAN 'Taylor is a sharp chronicler' RAVEN LEILANI, author of LUSTER What was happiness if not this moment, if not then, right then, the group of them, together for maybe the last time, coming together for this moment, for this very instant, what were they if not happy? Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah and Fatima are running out of time to decide on their futures. In a university town in the American Midwest, this circle of lovers and friends ask themselves and each other: what is the right thing to stake a life on? Work, love, money, dance, poetry? Is love possible without harm? And what does true connection look like in an age of precarity? The author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women trying to work out what they want, and who they are. 'Remarkable' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Elegant... Taylor has a Chekhovian generosity' CLAIRE MESSUD, author of THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN

from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Real Life

The Late Americans

A fascinating journey through Western art from the 1910s to the 1960s, charting how artists wrestled with the headlong changes of a turbulent and conflict-ridden world From the chaos of the First World War to the ravages of the Second, from the Great Depression to the rise of consumer culture, artists we call "modern" faced the challenge of responding imaginatively to utterly new circumstances of life. Original thought, startling artistic techniques, and new attitudes to experimentation were required to produce exceptional and timely work. Make It Modern guides the reader through the art of the modern world. Works of celebrated artists, from Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky to Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, and Yayoi Kusama, alongside a panoply of undervalued or less-known figures, populate this decade-by-decade narrative. Make It Modern tells an unforgettable story of how art was changed forever.

A History of Art in the 20th Century

Make it Modern

In Contemporary Art Brandon Taylor charts the ideas and practices of contemporary art across a wide international spectrum. From Minimalism and Conceptualism to video and film, from painting and sculpture to performance and installation, he shows how advanced art has continued to provoke and perplex a fascinated public. Generously illustrated in color, Contemporary Art is a guiding narrative to the most adventurous art of our time.

Art Since 1970

Contemporary Art

In this book, the author provides a summary of the main tenents of modernism in art, and then considers the phenomenon of post-modernism, allegedly the central condition of art in the post-war world, one determined by popular culture, feminism, historical styles and new trends in psychoanalysis and philosophy.

A Critical Perspective for Art

Modernism, Post-modernism, Realism

When Constructivism emerged shortly after the Russian Revolution, its central principles concerned structure and efficiency in the work of art and the nature and properties of materials. In a series of eight essays, Brandon Taylor examines the origins of these principles and their extraordinary consequences for the rest of modern art. Even before Constructivism, structure was a vital ingredient in Cubist art. After it, ideas about faktura or the "madeness” of an art object--and about its rational organization--became stock-in-trade for De Stijl in Holland and Art Concret in France and bore decisively on other currents such as Surrealism and abstract art. After 1945, artistic movements including Systems, Kinetic and Minimal Art were all touched by the long reach of Constructivist ideals. Recent art has proved no exception. Taylor shows that casual attitudes to materials, even the collapse of Constructivist ideals, have helped form the artistic tenor of our times.

After Constructivism

What is form in modern art? How could a work of art achieve its organic life in a world increasingly dominated by mechanism, by new technology? In this new book, Brandon Taylor proposes that biology and the life sciences themselves supplied many of the analogies and metaphors by which modern artists were guided. For the creative giants of the period - Picasso, Miró, Kandinsky, Strzeminski, Dalí, Arp, Motherwell and Pollock, as well as less-known figures such as Taeuber, Erni and Kobro - questions of 'living' form loomed large in studio conversation, in the press, and in the writings of the artists themselves. In a book rich in new research and fresh thinking, a well-known art historian proposes six modalities of organic and vital life that pervade the radical experiments of modern art: the organic, the biomorphic, the ambiguous, the monstrous, the dialectical, and the liquid.

Modernism, Organism, Vitality

The Life of Forms in Art

Matthew Cullerne Bown

This work considers aspects of the art and architecture of the Soviet Union during the turbulent period of 1917 to 1922, covering a broad range of art, some modernist, some anti-modernist, but all to some degree guided by (and sometimes coerced by) the apparatus of the over-arching state.

Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-party State, 1917-1992

Art of the Soviets

In Art Today Brandon Taylor charts the ideas and practices of contemporary art across a wide international spectrum. From Minimalism and Conceptualism to video and film, from painting and sculpture to performance and installation, he shows how advanced art has continued to provoke and perplex a fascinated public. Art Today shows how the new art of the last three decades has been energized not merely by changing technologies of art-making, but by the spread of new museum architecture, by the voice of the critic, and in recent times by the activity of the powerful international curator. It also shows how the dominant narrative of advanced art in the USA and Western Europe has been invigorated by an expanding international network, from the West Coast of America, from Eastern and Central Europe, and more recently from Asia and Africa. Reviewing the major controversies of the later twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, it also includes a discussion of the impact of the internet and digital art. Generously illustrated in colour, Art Today is a guiding narrative to the most adventurous art of our time.

Art Today

"Offering a critical perspective-rather than a traditional survey, this provocative text explores the art of the last twenty years-the latter 1970s, the 1980s, and the first half of the 1990s-in both a thematic and chronological fashion. Using an engaging and approachable style-and an abundance of color illustrations, it takes a long look at dominant tendencies in contemporary art in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Russia-and provides a series of challenging view points on the most advanced art forms, themes, and issues."--Amazon.

Rethinking Art Now

Avant-garde and After

Sheretta Taylor

Tokens of Love explores the Bible's most inspiring and devastating love stories to equip readers with insightful, practical lessons for healthy, happy, and holy relationships. This devotional will encourage you to earnestly seek God's will for your love life and discover the Bible as God's chosen tool to guide you along the way.

A 31-Day Devotional Journey Through the Love Stories of the Bible

Tokens of Love

Wilfried van der Will

This book raises the question to what extent Nazi culture prefigured the Post. Modernism of today.

Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich

The Nazification of Art

Newly available in paperback, this visually sensational book is the only comprehensive study of the history of collage and its fundamental place in modern art.

The Making of Modern Art

Collage

Burhan Dogançay

An extensive look at the history of collage and its dialogue with the art of decollage, or ungluing of paper, in the 20th century with particular emphasis on such greats as Robert Rauschenberg and Burhan Dogancay.

A Generation of Collage in Europe & America : Burhan Dogançay with François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Robert Rauschenberg, Mimmo Rotella, Jacques Villeglé, Wolf Vostell

Urban Walls

Art first became public in Britain through a series of interlocking relationships between national galleries, patrons, collections of art, and sections or classes of the population as a whole. This study concentrates on London, and analyzes the formation of the major national art institutions at its geographical and managerial centre.

Exhibitions and the London Public, 1747-2001

Art for the Nation

Just what do psychoanalysis and modern sculpture have to do with one another? The present collection of essays, unique in its field, shows how key metaphors of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis - splitting, projection, sublimation, identification, the schizoid and reparative mechanisms - as well as Lacan's concepts of the stade du mirroir and the objet petit a, can be fruitfully applied to a range of modern three-dimensional art, from Surrealism to the present day. As these essays show, figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Gilbert and George, Rebecca Horn and others have often approached the material of sculpture with something like these mechanisms in mind. The need to unlock the levels of psychoanalytic connection between artist, object and viewer in recent debate has fuelled the diverse proposals of this original and important book.

Sculpture and Psychoanalysis

Levent Calikogu

Richard Vine

Clive Giboire

Nazim Dikbaş

"Since the early 1960s, Burhan Doğançay examines the social, cultural and political transformation of modern and contemporary urban culture through the use of walls. As an urban traveller, he has been tracking walls in various cities across the world for almost half a century. With the guise of an anthropologist, Doğançay examines these surfaces that are open to all manners of contemporary interventions ranging from posters to slogans, and messages with sexual content to newspaper clippings. Doğançay's works with different techniques and styles, are positioned in both a historical and contemporary ground through their incorporation of the icons of popular culture and political symbols. Fifty Years of Urban Walls: A Burhan Doğançay Retrospective stands as an anthology for Doğançay's last 50 years of work. With works that range from small sized pieces to big canvases, and installations that run beyond the walls, to various materials and pursuits, this exhibition unrolls the background to Doğançay's ways of working. The exhibition gathers together 14 distinct series and periods of time with works coming from different collections all over the world. The accompanying catalogue presents images of works along with explanatory texts, which provide different perspectives to his ouevre while documents and photographs on Doğançay's life alludes to his urban traveller identity." -- Publisher's website.

Brandon Taylor

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