Brian O'Doherty: Collected Essays

by Brian O'Doherty, Liam Kelly (Editor), Anne-Marie Bonnet (Introduction)

Overview

This long-awaited volume brings together much of Brian O’Doherty’s most influential writing, including essays on major figures such as Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, and Andy Warhol, and a substantial follow-up to his iconic Inside the White Cube. New pieces specifically authored for this collection include a meditation on O’Doherty’s various alternate personae—most notably Patrick Ireland—and a reflection on his seminal “Highway to Las Vegas” from 1972, penned after a return visit in 2012. The beautifully written texts, many of which have been unavailable in print, are insightfully introduced by art historian Anne-Marie Bonnet and complemented by forty-five color illustrations of artwork discussed in the essays as well as documentary photographs of O’Doherty and other major art-world figures. Adventurous, original, and essentially O’Doherty, this collection reveals his provocative charm and enduring influence as a public intellectual.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520286559
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/29/2018
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Brian O’Doherty is an acclaimed artist and writer. Formerly an art critic for the New York Times and editor in chief of Art in America, he has lectured widely in Europe and America. He is the author of many essays and several books, including the renowned critical essay Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, first published in 1976. O’Doherty is a recipient of the prestigious Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing and the College Art Association's Mather Award for Criticism. His novel The Deposition of Father McGreevy was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2000.

Liam Kelly is Professor of Irish Visual Culture at the School of Art, University of Ulster, Belfast. His publications include Thinking Long: Contemporary Art in the North of Ireland and Art and the Disembodied Eye: Collective Histories of Northern Irish Art.

Anne-Marie Bonnet is Professor and Director of the Institute of Art History, Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Bonn.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Preface: Field Notes from the Crossroads, Liam Kelly xi

Introduction: A Ship's Log of/to Modernism, Anne-Marie Bonnet 1

On the Nature of Masquerade, Brian O'Doherty 7

Hopper/Rothko

Hopper's Look 13

Word and Image: A Reciprocal Arrangement 28

Windows and Edward Hopper's Gaze 37

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning: A Forensic Examination 49

Rothko's Dark Paintings: Tragedy and Void, with Barbara Novak 55

The Rothko Chapel 72

Rothko's Endgame 80

Chamber Music in the Next Room 89

Art-Like

The Politics and Aesthetics of Heart Transplants 99

The Microscopic Vision 107

Highway to Las Vegas 114

Las Vegas Revisited 122

Miami and the Iconography of the Pompadour Style 128

Photography / Film / Video

Kane's Welles: The Phantom of the Opus 139

Et in Arkadin Ego 148

Barzyk: Electronic Visionary 158

The Worlds of Nam June Paik 168

Hans Richter 172

FACEtime: Katharina Sieverding and (Maybe) Oscar Wilde 184

Narcissus in Hades 190

Development Errors: Michener's Photographs 193

James Coleman: What Waiting Can Do, Given Time 196

Terrible Beauty: On Steve McQueen's Hunger 201

Nigel Rolfe: Two Drums 204

Dispatches from the Sixties and Beyond

Stella and Hesse: Dispatches from the Sixties 211

Segal's Metropolis 222

Warhol: The Medium as Cultural Artifact 233

Taking Duchamp's Portrait 241

Morton Feldman: The Burgacue Years 250

Divesting the Self: A Striptease 263

Rauschenberg/Counter-Rauschenberg 274

Wesley's Hip-Pop 281

William Scharf: The Long and the Short Eye 286

Chamberlain: Projective Sculpture 292

Peter Hutchinson: A Green Thought in a Green Shade 303

Joseph Cornell: Innocence and Experience 317

White Cube / Black Box

Boxes, Cubes, Installations, Whiteness and Money 327

List of Illustrations 333

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

"O’Doherty shifts between active participant and detached speculative mind with a fluidity and stylistic grace that propels you forward, even as it tugs at your sleeve and asks you to stop, reread, and give it more thought. O’Doherty wants us to inhabit what we perceive, to be an acute looker while fully engaging in the conundrums and contradictions that art puts to us. It is not an easy task, but it is one that he has managed admirably these many years." 

Art in America

"O’Doherty is a gifted writer whose Irish-honed literary skills are placed at the service of New York’s cosmopolitan visual culture."

artcritical.com

"The present volume of this polymath’s criticism is perhaps most notable for its collection of O’Doherty’s writings on Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, two painters whom the writer befriended and knew well. It also contains his latest word on the “white cube” (he coined the now-ubiquitous phrase) from 2009, an update to his influential 1976 Inside the White Cube, an early critique of institutional Modernism."

The New Criterion