Best Selling Books by Hal Foster

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the present. And he poses this retroactive model of art and theory against the reactionary undoing of progressive culture that is pervasive today. After the models of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s, Foster suggests that we are now witness to a return to the real—to art and theory grounded in the materiality of actual bodies and social sites. If The Return of the Real begins with a new narrative of the historical avant-gard, it concludes with an original reading of this contemporary situation—and what it portends for future practices of art and theory, culture and politics.

Essays by Hal Foster and Carmen Gim nez.

How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Godsdoes not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.

Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today’s global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the “art-architecture complex” provides invaluable insight into broader social and economic trajectories in urgent need of analysis.

In these diatribes on the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle—architecture and the rise of global cities, Hal Foster surveys our new political economy of design. Written in a lively style, Design and Crime explores the historical relations of modern art and modern museum, the conceptual vicissitudes of art history and visual studies, the recent travails of art criticism, and the double aftermath of modernism and postmodernism in an attempt to illuminate the conditions for critical culture in the present.

A Village Voice Best Book, a "lucid and provocative work...that allows us to glimpse the stirrings and upheavals in the hothouse of modern art". Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–WWII Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book spans the artist’s rich and varied oeuvre from the early 1960s to the present, including photo paintings, portraits, large-scale abstract series, and works on glass. Essays by leading experts on the artist illuminate Richter’s preoccupation with painting in relation to other modes of representation, and emphasize the ongoing importance of the medium’s formal and conceptual possibilities in contemporary art.

Junkspace first appeared in the Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001), a vast compendium of text, images, and data concerning the consumerist transformation of city and suburb from the first department store to the latest mega mall. The architect Rem Koolhaas itemized in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is updated here and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from the cultural critic Hal Foster. Junkspace describes the bleak and featureless world of capitalism, while Running Room seeks to find a space within the junk in which the individual might still exist.

Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? This book presents an interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.

The authors of Art Since 1900 adopt a unique, year-by-year structure in which they present more than one hundred and twenty short essays, each focusing on crucial events and the creation of a seminal work, the publication of an artistic manifesto, or the opening of a major exhibition that tell the story of the dazzling diversity of practice and interpretation that characterizes art of this period. Each turning point and breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism is explored in depth, as are the frequent anti-modernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art in a way that enables them to comprehend the many "voices" of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Jean Dubuffet and his brutes -- Georges Bataille and his caves -- Asger Jorn and his creatures -- Eduardo Paolozzi and his hollow gods -- Claes Oldenburg and his ray guns.

One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”

From the distinguished art critic and historian, vital essays on key artists and critics, revealing how they redefined art and criticism over the last six decades. “Serious art anticipates the future as much as it reflects the present,” Hal Foster remarked in a 2015 interview. “By the same token serious art history is driven by the present as much as it is informed by the past.” In Fail Better, Foster, an art critic and historian whose influential work spans disciplines and decades, brings this peripatetic perspective to contemporary art, art criticism, art history, and his own work over the past 50 years. In these 40 texts, Foster reviews artists from Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns to Gerhard Richter and Ed Ruscha; considers contemporaries from Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman to Jeremy Deller and Adam Pendleton; and traces the development of criticism since the early 1960s, with essays on such influential figures as Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss and institutions like Artforum magazine and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Taking his title from Beckett—“try again, fail again, fail better”—Foster notes that, etymologically, an essay is always an attempt, more or less failed. Critics fail artworks, because there can never be a definitive reading; art fails its historical moment, because it cannot resolve the contradictions that prompt it. But in these failures Foster finds historical consciousness, and with it the promise of future work, future illumination. In his “reckonings” he turns his own long history of criticism to account, and succeeds in conveying shifting concepts of art and criticism, the work of key artists and critics, and the relationships between criticism, theory, history, and politics over the last six decades.

This incisive publication explores the formal, conceptual, political, and technical aspects of the work of contemporary American artist Charles Ray. For Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Spanning the whole of his fifty-year career, Charles Ray: Figure Ground considers the artist''s intriguing, often unsettling sculptures from both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in relation to his early photographs and performances. It also explores his interest in Mark Twain''s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Kelly Baum addresses patterns and patterning in Ray''s art, foregrounding his engagement with preexisting traditions, classicism among them, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality. Brinda Kumar investigates the modalities of touch that run through Ray''s work, while a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice.

Gauguin: Metamorphoses explores the remarkable relationship between Paul Gauguin''s rare and extraordinary prints and transfer drawings, and his better-known paintings and sculptures in wood and ceramic. Created in several discrete bursts of activity from 1889 until his death in 1903, these remarkable works on paper reflect Gauguin''s experiments with a range of media, from radically "primitive" woodcuts that extend from the sculptural gouging of his carved wood reliefs, to jewel-like watercolor monotypes and large mysterious transfer drawings. Gauguin''s creative process often involved repeating and recombining key motifs from one image to another, allowing them to metamorphose over time and across mediums. Printmaking in particular provided him with many new and fertile possibilities for transposing his imagery. Though Gauguin is best known as a pioneer of modernist painting, this publication reveals a lesser-known but arguably even more innovative aspect of his practice. Richly illustrated with more than 200 works, Gauguin: Metamorphoses explores the artist''s radically experimental approach to techniques and demonstrates how his engagement with media other than painting--including sculpture, printmaking and drawing--ignited his creativity. Painter, printmaker, sculptor and ceramicist, Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) left his job as a stockbroker in Paris for a peripatetic life traveling to Martinique, Brittany, Arles, Tahiti and, finally, the Marquesas Islands. After exhibiting with the Impressionists in Paris and acting as a leading voice in the Pont-Aven group, Gauguin''s efforts to achieve a "primitive" expression proved highly influential for the next generation of artists.

Surveying the artistic and cultural scene in the era of Trump In a world where truth is cast in doubt and shame has gone missing, what are artists and critics on the left to do? How to demystify a political order that laughs away its own contradictions? How to mock leaders who thrive on the absurd? And why, in any event, offer more outrage to a media economy that feeds on the same? Such questions are grist to the mill of Hal Foster, who, in What Comes after Farce?, delves into recent developments in art, criticism, and fiction under the current regime of war, surveillance, extreme inequality, and media disruption. Concerned first with the cultural politics of emergency since 9/11, including the use and abuse of trauma, conspiracy, and kitsch, he moves on to consider the neoliberal makeover of aesthetic forms and art institutions during the same period. A final section surveys signal transformations in art, film, and writing. Among the phenomena explored are machine vision (images produced by machines for other machines without a human interface), operational images (images that do not represent the world so much as intervene in it), and the algorithmic scripting of information that pervades our everyday lives. If all this sounds dire, it is. In many respects we look out on a world that has moved, not only politically but also technologically, beyond our control. Yet Foster also sees possibility in the current debacle: the possibility to pressure the cracks in this order, to turn emergency into change.