CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/1/2019

Shunk-Kender, participants in the subversive games of the avant-garde

Featured photograph, of Niki de Saint-Phalle in her studio on Impasse Ronsin, Paris, in 1961, is reproduced from Shunk-Kender: Art Through the Eye of the Camera, the glorious new 484-page catalog published to accompany the late artistic collaborators' current exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Featuring a shocking 848 (out of more than 10,000) black-and-white photographs of virtually everybody who was anybody in the international avant-garde between 1957 and 1983—ranging from Josef Albers to Merce Cunningham, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama and Andy Warhol—this volume is an absolute must for any serious contemporary art library. "Can we call photographers who are ready to play the subversive games of the avant-garde documentary photographers?" Florian Ebner asks. "Or are they, like the muscle-bound judokas, more companions, and benevolent chroniclers of the artist? If we look from this angle at the joint and prolific production of the two photographers… we discover that they were genuine partners of the artists."