Klaus Kertess Books

Tony Smith is primarily known as a sculptor of large abstract constructions, which he made during the last 20 years of his life. Less well known is the fact that he was also an architect and a painter--a true Renaissance man. In the mid-1930s he studied drawing, painting, and anatomy at the Arts Student League in New York, later moving to Chicago, where he took courses in architecture and design at the New Bauhaus. Subsequent work with Frank Lloyd Wright led him to establish his own architectural firm in the 40s. Becoming disheartened with the role of architect, he returned to painting, and in the late 50s found his ultimate calling in sculpture. This volume provides the first complete overview of the career of this unique figure in the postwar American artistic vanguard. Published in conjunction with a 1998 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this book presents Smith's life and work in all mediums; thoughtful, critical essays; an illustrated chronology; a section of writings, interviews, and letters by Smith, his family, and his friends; and a selected bibliography and exhibition history.

Few artists' names can connote such diverse associations as the Virgin Mary, Rudolph Giuliani and elephant dung. (Put thus, it seems rather an achievement.) Controversy tends to dog the art of Chris Ofili, and former New York Mayor Giuliani's suspension of funding for the Brooklyn Museum upon its exhibition of his 1996 painting "The Holy Virgin Mary" in 1999 was but one instance of the ire Ofili routinely arouses. When these occasional media commotions subside, one sees that the work is actually pleasing in more familiar Ofili's surfaces sparkle with smears of glitter and bright veneer, resembling nothing so much as African icons. But Ofili has always been political, specifically in his confrontations with racial cliché, and in his insistent incorporation of materials from popular black culture. Devil's Pie derives its title from singer-songwriter D'Angelo's 1998 lyric meditation on temptation and retribution. According to the song, the ingredients of a devil's pie include "materialistic, greed and lust, jealousy, envious / bread and dough, cheddar cheese, flash and stash, cash and cream." Similarly diverse in its references and dichotomies, Ofili's work contains contradictions. This catalogue collects his work in sculpture, painting, printmaking and graphite drawing for the first time and includes texts by art writer and curator Klaus Kertess and writer Cameron Shaw.