Helle Crenzien Books

This publication presents over one hundred of Avedon-s most beautiful classic images from his entire oeuvre of photography.

What is color? From Aristotle and Plato through Newton and Goethe to Wittgenstein, philosophers and scientists have worked to understand and categorize color, while artists have made their own efforts to demonstrate its enigmatic logics. This is a book about color, and a book about color and art. Across eight essays and more than 150 works of art drawn from the collections of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Merzbacher Collection, this book aims to define color as a phenomenon that manifests across many different lines of thought and areas of the history of art, the history of ideas, psychology, psychiatry and cognitive science, architecture, marketing, literature and music. The essayists for the volume are John Gage, Erich H. Buxbaum, Jacob Wamberg, Klaus Stromer, Morten Kringelbach with Kristine Rømer Thomsen, Gertrud Olsson, Lars Handesten, Steen Chr. Steensen, Helle Crenzien and Stephanie Rachum.

Concentrating on 150 works by 64 international artists from the past two centuries, this volume contemplates questions of representations of the self and identity. At the simplest level, it can a self-portrait be simply documentary? The self-portrait not only represents physical appearance, but, more tellingly, the artist's conception thereof. In this volume, each of the works was assigned a category, according to a thematic motif determined by the artist's technique of the artist in the studio, pioneers, the course of life, simplification, dissolution, type cast, exhibitionism and mirrors. These revealing categories speak not only to the conceptions of self at work in these portraits, but also to the evolving nature of over time, one's origins and affiliations have become less important as determining factors of identity. The major works represented in this volume include self-portraits by, among others, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Jean-Michel Basquiat.