Intimate Geometries | Robert Storr, Deborah Kass, Christopher Lyon, Irving Sandler, and special guest | An Art Book Series Event

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In celebration of the unprecedented publication of Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois, Robert Storr, author, art historian, curator, painter and critic; and special guest experts converse about the book and the artist's oeuvre and life. The discussion is moderated by Christopher Lyon, editor and Bookforum columnist. Robert Storr worked closely with Louise Bourgeois on the book for over twenty years. 

In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her 1982 solo retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98.

Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois is the first comprehensive survey of Bourgeois's oeuvre and biography, and a unique critical evaluation of the intertwining of the two. Robert Storr, acknowledged as Bourgeois's leading interpreter, worked closely with the artist on this book for some twenty years. He describes her sometimes fitful but extraordinarily long and prolific career and explores the many metamorphic aspects of the work to which the alternating currents of her imagination gave rise to.

From his uniquely privileged point of view, Storr considers how such longevity, stamina, and accomplishment were possible and what prodigious imaginative powers that produced them. Long awaited, this handsome volume is sure to be among the major artists’ biographies of our time, confirming Louise Bourgeois’s legendary status, both as a witness to art history in her era and as one of its moving forces. Intimate Geometries is a riveting look into the life and works of this iconic artist.

Copies of Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois (Monacelli Press, 2016) are available for purchase and signing at the end of the event.

Robert Storr is a painter, critic, museum man, and exhibition-maker. From 1990 until 2002, he worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he was curator and then senior curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. His group exhibitions there included ISLOCATIONS, a survey of installation art that included Louise Bourgeois, and Modern Art despite Modernism, in addition to which he organized retrospectives of Robert Ryman, Tony Smith, Chuck Close, Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, and Max Beckmann. From 1990 until 2000 he directed MoMA’s Projects program, for which he assembled small monographic shows by Art Spiegelman (the first exhibition devoted to a “comix” artist in MoMA’s history), Franz West, Ann Hamilton, and others. In 2002 he was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and from 2006 to 2016 he served as Dean of the Yale University School of Art, where he is also a professor of painting. Since 1982 his essays, reviews, and columns have appeared in Art in America, Artpress, Frieze, Artforum, Corriere della Sera, The New York Review of Books (online edition) and numerous other magazines and journals.

Robert Storr’s latest book is Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois (The Monacelli Press, November 2016.) In addition to catalogues written for shows he has organized in Brazil, Greece, Japan, Spain, and the United States, he has contributed to exhibition publications for all the major museums in New York and for many other museums around the world. In 2007 he served as Director of the Venice Biennale, the first American to hold that position. Storr is the recipient of five honorary doctorates and awards from organizations including the International Association of Art Critics and the Archives of American Art. In 2000 he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and was later promoted to Officier of the same order. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, and Brooklyn, New York.

Deborah Kass is an artist whose paintings examine the intersection of art history, popular culture and the self. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum, The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, The Cincinnati Museum, The New Orleans Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Fogg/ Harvard Museum, as well as other museums and private collections. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. The Andy Warhol Museum presented Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, Mid- Career Retrospective in 2012, accompanied by a catalogue published by Rizzoli. The artist's monumental sculpture OY/YO located in Brooklyn Bridge Park has become an instant icon, appearing on the front page of The New York Times and is a beloved destination in NYC. In 2014, Kass was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. She was honored with the Passionate Artist of the Year Award by the Neuberger Museum in 2016. The Jewish Museum is honoring her in 2017. She is a member of the Board of the Andy Warhol Foundation. Deborah Kass’s work is represented by Paul Kasmin Gallery. 

Christopher Lyon publishes art books in digital and print editions under the imprint Lyon Artbooks. He is the author of Nancy Spero: The Work (2010), a co-author and the editor of The Art and Spirit of Paris (2003), and writes regularly on art and art publishing. His "Artful Volumes" column appears in Bookforum. Lyon was a writer and editor at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for ten years, and subsequently held senior editorial positions at publishers including Abbeville Press, Bulfinch/Little, Brown, The Monacelli Press, Prestel Publishing, and Rizzoli International Publications. He received his BA from the University of Chicago and pursued graduate studio at the University of California at Los Angeles and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. He lives in Brooklyn.

Irving Sandler is an art critic, writer and professor of art at SUNY Purchase since 1972. He joined the Marine Corps during War War II, receiving some training at Franklin and Marshall College between1943-1944.  He rose to the rank of second lieutenant.  After the war he attended Temple University where he was awarded a B.A. in 1948.  He continued at University of Pennsylvania, gaining an M.A. in 1950. Sandler ran a private New York Gallery from 1956 to 1959 and was senior critic for the magazine Art News between 1956-62.  He came to personally know many of the abstract expressionist artists of the 1950's and 1960's.  He married the art historian Lucy Freeman in 1958. He and NYU professor Robert Goldwater wrote the book Three American Sculptors: Ferber, Hare, Lassaw in 1959. After receiving a Tona Shepherd grant for research in Germany and Austria for 1960, he joined the New York Post as art critic the following year which he held until 1964.  Irving Sandler was a signer of the infamous 1961 "Letter to the New York Times" chastising its critic, John Canaday, for disparaging modern art.  In 1963 he was appointed a lecturer in art history at New York University.  He was a 1965 Guggenheim fellow. In 1970 he authored an important memoir/history of the abstract expressionist movement, The Triumph of American Painting.  He was a major force in the organization of Artist's Space, an  alternative exhibition space for young artists, in 1972. He was appointed professor of art at the State University of New York College at Purchase, NY, in 1972. He completed his Ph.D., from New York University in 1976. He gained a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1977.  He was a board member of the College Art Association 1985-89.  His papers are housed at the Getty Center Research Institute. His writing on Abstract Expressionist art was criticized in 1983 by Serge Guilbaut in his book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art as incorporating historical idealism. Charging that Irving Sandler had ignored political ramifications of Abstract Expressionism, particularly how the U.S. state department used it as an advertisement for freedom of expression.

In its ninth year the program series An Art Book, initiated and organized by Arezoo Moseni, is a celebration of the essential importance and beauty of art books. The events showcase book presentations and discussions by world 
renowned artists, critics, curators, gallerists, historians and writers.

The event is free and advanced registration is recommended. 

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