Hardcover
2016 · New Haven
by Goodyear, Anne Collins et al.
New Haven: Yale University Press for Bowdoin College, 2016. Hardcover. VG/VG (One copy has bumping to corners of book and dust jacket.). Red boards; gilt lettering. White/taupe illus. dj with red lettering. xi, 252 pp. with color illustrations throughout. With a title that plays on Robert Rauschenberg´s infamous 1961 portrait of Iris Clert-a telegram that simply states, "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so"—this major groundbreaking exhibition examines the rise and evolution of symbolic, abstract, and conceptual portraiture in modern and contemporary American Art during the past century. Featuring nearly seventy-five works by leading American innovators from Gertrude Stein, Marsden Hartley, and Alfred Stieglitz, to Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, and Eleanor Antin, to Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, and L.J. Roberts, This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today represents the first exhibition to address the breadth and significance of the phenomenon of non-mimetic portraits in American art. The show poses provocative questions about the very nature of likeness and personal identity. The sumptuously illustrated accompanying catalogue, published by Yale University Press, explores portraiture as a site of artistic experimentation, in works that shift the genre from one based on mimesis to one stressing symbolic associations between artists and subjects. Featuring over 100 color illustrations this publication probes the way we think about and picture the self and others. Essays exploring three significant periods of experimentation in portraiture during the past century: the 1910s-20s; 1960s, and 1990 - present have been prepared, respectively, by each of the three curators of the exhibition: Jonathan Frederick Walz, director of curatorial affairs & curator of American art, the Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia; Kathleen Merrill Campagnolo, independent curator and scholar, and Anne Collins Goodyear, co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Dorinda Evans, professor emerita at Emory University, contributed a study of the prehistory of symbolic and abstract portraiture in the United States. - from the Bowdoin web site.
(Inventory #: 160672)