Stephen Kaltenbach

For much of the 1970s, the artist Stephen Kaltenbach (born 1940) developed a monumental painting called Portrait of My Father inside a rented Northern California barn where he lived without plumbing or insulation. Sustained by a formidable love for his father, experience with psychedelics and a blooming spiritual life, it took him nearly seven years to finish. Since 2001, the work has held pride of place at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. This book-length study is the definitive history of a painting that is mind-boggling from across the room—as a larger-than-life depiction of a man on death's door—and from up close, as each trippy beard whisker explodes a window onto eternity. It consists of an epic interview with the artist conducted and annotated with context, corrections, images and observations by curator and writer Jordan Stein, who also offers an introduction, alongside a trove of newly discovered archival material.

A pioneering figure in the history of conceptual art, Sacramento-based artist and author Stephen Kaltenbach (born 1940) is long overdue for scholarly treatment; in the past decade and a half there has been a resurgence of interest in his work, but this is the first major publication dedicated to him and his unique contribution to art post-1960.

Alongside reproductions of works, essays by the principle authors, exhibition co-curators Constance Lewallen and Ted Mann, explore, respectively, Kaltenbach’s dialectic of concealment and exposure, and his enduring interest in the nature of artistic influence and authorship. Contributing essays by Gwen Allen, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and Lawrence Rinder focus on more specific works or bodies of work: Kaltenbach’s seminal Artforum Ads of 1968-69; his series of Life-Dramas; and his monumental painting Portrait of My Father (1972-79). The book also includes an exhibition history and bibliography.