Artist Stories

"For some fifty years, Sanford Schwartz has written about artists, writers, and moviemakers in a voice all his own. In conversationally written pieces that present large, synoptic views of an artist's ambitions and are frequently salted with engagingly detailed descriptions of artworks-and often surprising yet illuminating comparisons between figures-Schwartz manages to speak to artists, the art world, and the precincts of museum curators and art historians all at once. But his writing is really geared to the widest audience: people who want to more deeply experience the artworks they have encountered. Now, for Artist Stories, his third book of criticism, Schwartz has selected writings, almost all of which have appeared in The New York Review of Books, from primarily the past twenty years. Basing his observations on both major events and unheralded gallery exhibitions, he shows the period to have been a complex and dazzling time. Alongside novel considerations of Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, and Frida Kahlo, for example, Schwartz gives us living portraits of the increasingly renowned outsider artist Martâin Ramâirez and the uncategorizable moviemaking puppeteers the Quay Brothers. Fresh approaches on Orson Welles, Salvador Dalâi, and Julian Schnabel have us wondering how well we ever knew them. Artist Stories is accompanied by forty pages of full-color illustrations of works Schwartz has noted"--