TWO BERND & HILLA BECHER BOOKS (2005 & 2022)

This time, two books from an artist couple also featured in my favorite art book list I posted back in 2017. The first is a monograph from 2007 I’ve had for ages, but never got around to actually reading. The second book was published last year, and it’s the first posthumous monograph about the Bechers to appear, published to accompany the exhibition in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an exhibition that traveled to San Fransisco, and is still on display until April 2, 2023.

Over the years, I’ve steadily collected all the thematic monographs Bernd and Hilla Becher published – my collection is pictured above. Their work resonates deeply with me, and as their work is among the most revered of 20th century photographers, I know I’m not the only one. For almost 50 years the Bechers documented mine winding towers, blast furnaces, gas tanks, grain elevators, water and cooling towers, processing plants, factory halls, lime kilns, timber framed houses and entire complexes of factory buildings. They did so in much of Western Europe, and the United States as well. In a way, the things they depict are more machines than buildings, as critic Armin Zweite wrote.

Bernd also taught photography at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1976 to 1996, and Hilla was intricately involved with that too. This resulted in the so-called Becher school of photography, with prominent German artists like Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff & Thomas Struth.

Both books at hand cover similar territory: they try to provide an overview of Bernd & Hilla Becher’s life and work, framed in an historical context. Is one markedly better than the other? And, more importantly, what did I learn from these books about the Bechers and their work? Why does it resonate so deeply with me?

HOCKNEY: SPRING CANNOT BE CANCELLED (2021) & A CHRONOLOGY (2020)

I have to confess David Hockney always remained a bit under my radar – when I was younger and wilder, I probably thought him too conventional or so, and more importantly, it seems as if the museums I’ve visited the last 20 years in the various cities around the world didn’t have many of his paintings on display. I really cannot recall seeing a Hockney in real life – although I must have, I’m sure. But when I learned of the Van Gogh & Hockney exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2019 it was as if I was struck by lightning. Hockney’s landscape paintings of the last 15 years are among the best landscapes I know in the history of painting.

I’ve tried to remedy my ignorance by reading about him, and I have to say, I’m very much looking forward to the double exhibition in Bozar, Brussels, later this year.

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DAVID HOCKNEY. A CHRONOLOGY. – Hans Werner Holzwarth, David Hockney, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima & Lutz Eitel (2020)

This budget Taschen book – 20 euros, like the stellar Basquiat in the same 40th Anniversary Edition series – is a marvel. 511 pages, excellent reproductions and an authoritative, clear text by Lutz Eitel.

IT is a newly assembled edition from the SUMO size David Hockney: A Bigger Book and the chronology volume that accompanied that expensive limited edition mammoth. It is the only career spanning monograph in existence I know of. There’s 2007’s Hockney’s pictures by Thames & Hudson, but that is very, very low on text.

Effectively organized as a chronology, it starts at the end of the 50ies up onto 2016, and has about 1.5 page text for each year, followed by about 8 to 10 pages of art. Hockney’s full oeuvre is on display: paintings, water colors, drawings, photographic assemblages, stage designs, iPad drawings, etc.

TWO BOOKS ON TURRELL (2013 & 2018)

For those that need an introduction to American light artist James Turrell (°1943), I’ve included two short YouTube documentaries at the very end – both worth viewing if you’re familiar with the man too. This post will be part book review, part essay.

Turrell rose to general public fame as Drake stole his visual approach for the video of Hotline Bling in 2015, and when I visited a site-specific installation of Turrell in a burial chapel on the grounds of Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin in July 2016, the crowd was massive, and, surely, some teenagers took out their smartphone and filmed each other making gestures like Drake in his clip. Regardless of the crowd, the experience was spiritual and uplifting – about 40 minutes of carefully programmed shifting lights to be started at the onset of dusk. Luckily, most teenagers didn’t have the meditative stamina to sit it out fully, so we had the place to ourselves at the end. After the book reviews I’ve included some pictures I took, and one that a friend took featuring some other friends and yours truly in summer outfits.

For starters, a book from my favorite art book list I posted in 2017 – I included it back then on the strength of the visuals, but I hadn’t fully read it. The second book is a bit more recent, published in 2018, and has much less text.

“My work is about how we construct reality. The real illusion is that we aren’t aware of how we give reality to things. We have awarded them concreteness of reality and are unaware of how we’ve done that.”

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JAMES TURRELL: A RETROSPECTIVE – Michael Govan & Christine Y. Kim (2013)

James Turrell: A Retrospective was published for a major retrospective exhibition in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Guggenheim in New York. The retrospective also traveled to Jerusalem and Canberra. It has 304 pages and 250 illustrations, in a lavishly published hardback.

I always wonder whether people that haven’t experienced Turrell firsthand can truly get the idea of how revelatory & moving his work actually is. I’ve been luckily to live nearby one of his Skyspaces in Antwerp, and catch the Turrell exhibition in De Pont in Tilburg in 2015, as well as his permanent installation in that Berlin cemetery.

Art books are rarely substitutes for the real deal, but it is doubly so for Turrell, as the spatial aspects of perceiving light are so hard to translate in a 2D medium. As such, my experience of these books obviously is colored by my real world experience with Turrell. Having said that, this book does a spectacular job, and it shines especially in the accompanying text – essays and an interview. It made me realize that I’ve only seen a glimpse of his oeuvre, and his work is much richer and more diverse than I thought.

NICO DOCKX TALKS WITH DENNIS TYFUS (2018)

An outright fantastic book on artist Dennis Tyfus, a monograph really, and a bulky one: 880 pages. It’s lavishly illustrated: every other page is a full colour illustration, drawing, painting, photograph or collage, and the pages with text generally also feature smaller illustrations. This massive tome is the best publication yet to get a feel for the scope and nature of Tyfus’s work.

It is structured around a year-long daily email interview, printed in English. Dockx’s questions at times seem designed to showcase his own reading & his own network – there’s a lot of name dropping. As a result, the questions sometimes veer a bit too much into the hot air territory art critics infatuated with their own theoretical framework like. In other instances the questions are simply a bit daft, like this one: ‘Have you ever worked with notions of camouflage in your work (as sometimes it can be interesting to stay under the radar)?’. But I guess I’m too harsh on Dockx: coming up with 366 questions is no mean feat, and it is to his credit he provides a fertile platform for Tyfus’s thoughts.

FAVORITE ART BOOKS

A couple of months ago I moved the bulk of my art book collection to another room. I decided to keep a small part, favorites, on my regular shelves. I’ve written a bit on each of those 20 titles below – 20 being just a coincidence by the way.

It is very much intended as a book list, not a list of favorite artists, as that would include a lot more names. The titles are mainly from established contemporary artists, with just three older painters – three big ones, yes.

Click on the covers to be taken to the publisher’s website or some other resource – with more extensive text on the book and the artist.

I’ve included images of artworks too: click those to enlarge.

Here’s an index of all my other art book reviews, most of which are not included in this list.

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KADER ATTIA – The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures
Greenbox, 2014, 176 pages

In 2012, my visit to dOCUMENTA (13) would have been a bit of a disappointment if it weren’t for two artists. One of those is Kader Attia. His installation The Repair From Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures was jaw dropping, the highlight being slides showing repaired African statues and the likes next to the mended faces of mutilated soldiers from the First World War. The book has all slides, and more. A beautiful edition, full of the uncanny.