Afterall Books: 10 books

An illustrated investigation into the critical motives behind the last, unfinished work that has defined the romantic legacy of conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader. In 1975 Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea while trying to sail from the East Coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project...

An illustrated examination of Philip Guston's comic and complex painting The Studio. Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913–1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him—along...

A close examination of Agnes Martin's grid painting in luminous blue and gold. Agnes Martin's Night Sea (1963) is a large canvas of hand-drawn rectangular grids painted in luminous blue and gold. In this illustrated study, Suzanne Hudson presents the painting as the work of an artist who was...

An illustrated examination of an early photo-essay by Lee Friedlander that shows television screens broadcasting eerily glowing images into unoccupied rooms. Lee Friedlander's The Little Screens first appeared as a 1963 photo-essay in Harper's Bazaar, with commentary by Walker Evans. Six untitled...

Drawing on unpublished documents and oral histories, an illustrated examination of an iconic artwork of an artist who has made a lifework of tactical evasion. One wintry day in 1983, alongside other street sellers in the East Village, David Hammons peddled snowballs of various sizes. He had...

An illustrated examination of one of Hirschhorn's “precarious” monuments, now dismantled. Part-text, part-sculpture, part-architecture, part-junk heap, Thomas Hirschhorn's often monumental but precarious works offer a commentary on the spectacle of late-capitalist consumerism and the global...

An examination of Lee Lozano's greatest experiment in art and endurance—a major work of art that might not exist at all. The artist Lee Lozano (1930–1999) began her career as a painter; her work rapidly evolved from figuration to abstraction. In the late 1960s, she created a major series...

An illustrated examination of a 1995 work by Mike Kelley that marked a significant change in his work. One of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954–2012) produced a body of innovative work mining American popular culture as well as modernist and postmodernist art—relentless...

An illustrated examination of a work—a Warhol that isn't by Warhol—that embodies a shift in attitudes about artistic authorship and originality. Warhol Marilyn (1965) is not a work by Andy Warhol but by the artist Elaine Sturtevant (1930–2014). Throughout her career, Sturtevant (as she...

Examining a work that marked the emergence of photography as an art made for the gallery wall instead of the printed page. Jeff Wall's Picture for Women (1979) marks the transition of photography as an art form from the printed page to the gallery wall. Before this, photographs—from the orthodox...