Robert Slifkin

Bruce Nauman: Going Solo is the first volume in Companion Editions' series of pocketbook readers. Robert Slifkin's meditation on Nauman's early films and conceptual sculptures explore the significance of the studio environment and Nauman's relationship to privacy, identity, subjectivity and intimacy.

Going Solo

Bruce Nauman

Anthony E. Grudin

The Present Prospects of Social Art History represents a major reconsideration of how art historians analyze works of art and the role that historical factors, both those at the moment when the work was created and when the historian addresses the objects at hand, play in informing their interpretations. Featuring the work of some of the discipline's leading scholars, the volume contains a collection of essays that consider the advantages, limitations, and specific challenges of seeing works of art primarily through a historical perspective. The assembled texts, along with an introduction by the co-editors, demonstrate an array of possible methodological approaches that acknowledge the crucial role of history in the creation, reception, and exhibition of works of art.

The Present Prospects of Social Art History

Glenn Adamson

Edward S. Cooke

This comprehensive survey of Paul Evans's work encourages a fresh look at the practice of making objects in the third quarter of the twentieth century, as it examines the dynamic career of an artist who evolved from metal-smith to furniture maker to designer, shifting his focus from the New York craft world to the national world of design.

Crossing Boundaries and Crafting Modernism

Paul Evans

How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.

U.S. Sculpture Between War and Peace, 1945–1975

The New Monuments and the End of Man

Focusing on the thirty-three paintings that Philip Guston exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, this in-depth account reconsiders the history of postwar American art and the conception of figuration in modern art history. Through a myriad of cultural touchstones, including evidence from literary and musical vogues of the period, Robert Slifkin examines the role of history as both artistic medium and creative catalyst to Guston’s practice as a painter. Slifkin employs a wealth of visual examples, archival materials, and original scholarship to situate Guston’s paintings within broader artistic debates of the time, using the cultural movement of “the sixties” as its orienting foreground. This historical framework provides an interface between the notions of time in art and time in the material world. Lively and edifying, Slifkin’s comprehensive text productively complicates the prescribed traditions of postwar art history and, in turn, shifts our perception of Guston and his place in the domain of modern art.

Robert Slifkin

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