Didier Ottinger Book order

George Condo’s unconventional paintings are illuminated in context with his vast range of artistic influences—from Tiepolo to Picasso to Basquiat, and from psychedelic to new wave. George Condo is renowned for his eclectic mix of artistic influences—from the Old Masters to cubism to pop art. The artist who coined the term “artificial realism” blends imagery and styles from various movements in works that critique contemporary Western culture and its excesses. His paintings and sculptures feature Humanoids—figures that are metaphors of our humanity, magnifying our emotions and revealing our high and low points. For the first time in his own words, Condo reveals the genesis and significance of his distorted creations and unveils previously unseen paintings created during the pandemic and the political turmoil in the United States. Didier Ottinger examines the career, influences, and works of this unconventional artist who is at once rewriting the history of art and caricaturing the immoderation of the modern world. An exhibition of Condo’s Humanoids at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco opens nearly a quarter century after he created set and costume designs for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo.

• Ground-breaking analysis of the dynamic between developments in modern Western art and calligraphic traditions in the Near East and Asia going back over 1,000 years• Includes contributions from a distinguished range of experts from the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Centre Pompidou• Features works by many of the greatest names in modern Western art, including Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse, Miró, Pollock and Twombly• Published to accompany an important collaboration between Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Centre Georges Pompidou, ParisThe Louvre Abu Dhabi's exciting exhibition program explores the enduring dialog between Eastern and Western artistic expression. Abstraction and Calligraphy brings together a rich array of works, from 10th-century ceramics from Samarkand to paintings and drawings by Kandinsky, Matisse, Miró, Twombly and other modern masters. The ways in which these artists respond to Eastern calligraphic traditions enriches our understanding of the dynamic between modern art in the West and long-established forms from Asia and the Near East.

The book serves as a catalog for an exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, showcasing a collection of artworks from December 2004 to March 2005. It highlights the exhibition's subsequent displays at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona and the National Academy Museum in New York. The catalog captures the essence of the artworks featured, providing insights into the themes and artistic significance presented during these events.

A radically new perspective on Francis Bacon’s art, analyzing the ways in which literature inspired the artist’s work. Published to accompany a major Francis Bacon retrospective in Paris, which will travel to the Fine Arts Museum, Houston, Francis Bacon analyzes Bacon’s works from 1971 onward in light of his relationship to literature. Bacon always vigorously opposed overanalysis of his paintings, preferring to interpret them in purely illustrative or symbolic terms; he admitted, however, that literature was a powerful stimulus to his imagination. The artist was inspired by the images conjured up by certain texts: Aeschylus’s phrase “the reek of human blood smiles out at me” particularly haunted Bacon, while his 1978 work Painting refers to T. S. Eliot’s seminal poem The Waste Land. An inventory of Bacon’s personal library has identified more than 1,300 books, ranging from Georges Bataille and Joseph Conrad to Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Leiris. Including twelve of Bacon’s renowned triptychs, this lavish publication features eleven gatefolds and some sixty paintings created by Bacon between 1971 and his death in 1992. Reproduced here with analyses of Bacon’s paintings in the light of some of his most admired authors, these specially commissioned texts reveal new ways of understanding some of the most powerful works in the modern canon.