Curator and historian, gallerist and writer: Klaus Kertess has long been a decisive and forward-thinking presence in the art world. He founded the Bykert Gallery in 1966, where he represented artists including Chuck Close, Ralph Humphrey, Brice Marden and Dorothea Rockburne; three decades later, he curated the 1995 Whitney Biennial, the follow-up to the famously political 1993 iteration. "What is being proposed here," he wrote in a catalogue essay for the 1995 exhibition, "is not a return to formalism but an art in which meaning is embedded in formal value. An acknowledgment of sensuousness is indispensable--whether as play or sheer joy or the kind of subversity that has us reaching for a rose and grabbing a thorn." The art world has changed considerably from the relatively convivial world of the 60s to today's globalized milieu, but Kertess has been a constant throughout the years, curating shows of provocative new work and writing critical essays on artists whose work challenges and engages him, while also maintaining a vital literary sideline (his short stories are collected in 2000's South Brooklyn Casket Company). This volume collects Kertess' critical works from the past 30 years, including meditations on Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, John Chamberlain, Vija Celmins, Chris Ofili and Matthew Richie. With each essay accompanied by full-color reproductions of works discussed, Seen, Written provides a priceless opportunity to see art through the eyes of a lifelong viewer.
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"In college I already knew I would spend my career in art and, at first, was convinced I would have been happier living in fifteenth-century Florence making occasional side trips to Arezzo to watch Piero della Francesca at work on his frescoes in the Church of San Francesco. However, reading books like Robert Rosenblum's Cubism and Twentieth Century Art, studying with George Heard Hamilton, and, most of all, spending time in the Yale University Art Gallery drifting and/or shocked into works like Vincent Van Gogh's Night Café began to propel me five centuries forward. After completing my first year in graduate school, including a too hastily written master's thesis, I informed the head of Yale's art history department Egbert Haverkamp Begeman that I didn't want to go for my doctorate and had decided I wanted to open a contemporary art gallery in Manhattan. "Whore, whore, you will become a whore," he repeated and repeated in ever-higher decibels, as I walked out of his office. And so began my life in the contemporary art world, in the spring of 1964…"
Below is Andrew Russeth's review of Klaus Kertess' insightful essay collection, Seen, Written, reproduced from the August 15, 2011 edition of New York Observer. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 7 x 9 in. / 220 pgs. LIST PRICE: U.S. $25.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $34.5 GBP £22.00 ISBN: 9780980024296 PUBLISHER: Gregory R. Miller & Co. AVAILABLE: 3/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co.. By Klaus Kertess.
Curator and historian, gallerist and writer: Klaus Kertess has long been a decisive and forward-thinking presence in the art world. He founded the Bykert Gallery in 1966, where he represented artists including Chuck Close, Ralph Humphrey, Brice Marden and Dorothea Rockburne; three decades later, he curated the 1995 Whitney Biennial, the follow-up to the famously political 1993 iteration. "What is being proposed here," he wrote in a catalogue essay for the 1995 exhibition, "is not a return to formalism but an art in which meaning is embedded in formal value. An acknowledgment of sensuousness is indispensable--whether as play or sheer joy or the kind of subversity that has us reaching for a rose and grabbing a thorn." The art world has changed considerably from the relatively convivial world of the 60s to today's globalized milieu, but Kertess has been a constant throughout the years, curating shows of provocative new work and writing critical essays on artists whose work challenges and engages him, while also maintaining a vital literary sideline (his short stories are collected in 2000's South Brooklyn Casket Company). This volume collects Kertess' critical works from the past 30 years, including meditations on Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, John Chamberlain, Vija Celmins, Chris Ofili and Matthew Richie. With each essay accompanied by full-color reproductions of works discussed, Seen, Written provides a priceless opportunity to see art through the eyes of a lifelong viewer.
