David Zwirner Ekphrasis Series

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal...

Derek Jarman's Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves as both a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love.   “For Blue there are no boundaries or...

Master sculptor Auguste Rodin’s illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame.    In this volume,...

Long overlooked in Proust’s posthumously published writings, Chardin and Rembrandt, written when he was only twenty-four years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his...

There are many myths about the artist Edgar Degas—from Degas the misanthrope to Degas the deviant, to Degas the obsessive. But there is no single text that better stokes the fire...

Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between an artist and her subject. The artist book unites Stein’s ten...

The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history,...

This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality. In the artist’s only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where...

A compilation of esoteric musings, Kandinsky: Incarnating Beauty explores Alexandre Kojève’s philosophical approach to the relationship between art and beauty.   A teacher to...

Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating Letters to a Young Painter, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his...

Mad about Painting collects beautiful new translations of Hokusai’s painting tutorials and related essays written by the artist and his peers—a selection made available in English for...

“I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but I still don’t invent the whole of painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made—but to be untangled—in the real...

The twentieth volume in the renowned ekphrasis series, this collection of Virginia Woolf’s writings on the visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author...

Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist César Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap...

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that “seeing is believing”. Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, David Levi Strauss...

Jean-Claude Lebensztejn’s history of the urinating figure in art, Pissing Figures 1280–2014, is at once a scholarly inquiry into an important visual motif, and a ribald statement on...

Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy,...

“Criticism is our censorship . . .” So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote “Racontars de rapin” only months...

Charles Baudelaire, considered a father of modern poetry, wrote some of the most daring and influential prose of the nineteenth century. Prior to publishing the international bestseller Les Fleurs...

A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history In her memoir, Elisabeth...

Selections from Romaine Brooks’s unpublished memoir No Pleasant Memories expose the psyche and practice of this underrecognized queer, female artist.   Most known for her bold and...

In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed...