Books by Ian Alteveer

Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years

by Mark Rosenthal, Marla Prather, Ian Alteveer, Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery

For decades, commentators have acknowledged Andy Warhol's phenomenal impact on contemporary art. Unlike the many existing books about the artist, Regarding Warhol: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years is the first full-scale exploration of his tremendous reach across several generations of artists who in key ways respond to his groundbreaking work. Examining in depth the nature of the Warhol sensibility, the book is organized around five significant themes in the artist's work: popular consumer culture and tabloid news; portraiture and the cult of celebrity; issues of sexual identity and gender; artistic practices such as seriality, abstraction, and appropriation; and the role of collaboration in Warhol's ventures into filmmaking, publishing, and the creation of environments and spectacles. Each theme is delineated with visual "dialogues" between prime examples of Warhol's work and works in various media by some sixty other artists, among them John Baldessari, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, and Ryan Trecartin. These juxtapositions not only demonstrate Warhol's overt influence but also suggest how artists have either worked in parallel modes or developed his model in dynamic new directions. The volume includes a major essay by Mark Rosenthal, original interviews with a number of the artists featured in the book, and a visual archive and extensive illustrated chronology that chart the "Warhol effect" over the past fifty years.

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Exhibition Schedule:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art(09/18/12–12/31/12)
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh(02/02/13-04/28/13)

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

by Dieter Roelstraete, Ian Alteveer, Helen Molesworth, Abigail Winograd

The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

Vija Celmins To Fix the Image in Memory

by Ian Alteveer

The beautiful catalogue that accompanies the critically-acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum

Best known for her striking drawings of ocean surfaces, begun in 1968 and revisited over many years both in drawings and paintings, Vija Celmins (b. 1938) has been creating exquisitely detailed renderings of natural imagery for more than five decades. The oceans were followed by desert floors and night skies--all subjects in which vast, expansive distances are distilled into luminous, meticulous, and mesmerizing small-scale artworks. For Celmins, this obsessive "redescribing" of the world is a way to understand human consciousness in relation to lived experience.

The first major publication on the artist in twenty years, this comprehensive and lavishly illustrated volume explores the full range of Celmins's work produced since the 1960s--drawings and paintings as well as sculpture and prints. Scholarly essays, a narrative chronology, and a selection of excerpts from interviews with the artist illuminate her methods and techniques; survey her early years in Los Angeles, where she was part of a circle that included James Turrell and Ken Price; and trace the development of her work after she moved to New York City and befriended figures such as Robert Gober and Richard Serra.