"Alex Katz: Small Paintings" and "Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting"

I’m in Kansas City for a conference and I snuck out this afternoon and headed to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s tiny. Basically one building with about four exhibition rooms. But… they did have a great collection so it’s well worth the visit if you are in town, and it’s free. In the foyer they had this great sculpture of a female Mao Zedong (titled “Miss Mao” ) and also a Glenn Brown portrait that I really enjoyed. Also, if you go ask for directions to the mansion called Kemper East. It’s where the administrative offices are and it’s about a block away, but part of their permanent collection is on display and they let you wander around the building.

OK, on to the gift shop: I picked up two books that were on sale for $15 each, a bargain for both. One was Alex Katz Small Paintings (hardbound) and the other was Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting (paperback).

Alex Katz: Small Paintings

I don’t think I have any Alex Katz books at home and I guess I’ve never really been that jazzed up about his work because the paintings always looked so flat. I don’t dislike them, but I’m just a big fan of seeing the brushstrokes. This book, though, focused on his smaller paintings and provided excellent reproductions. You really got to see all the blended edges. Maybe I naively assumed a lot of his other paintings that I’ve only seen in books or digitally were flat looking only because I was seeing them on such a small scale. In this book though, which measured 10 x 12 inches, most of the plates covered both pages. So if you are an artist that likes to see things up-close, then this book is for you. Some people may be annoyed by seeing the book spine through the middle of each page, but I can easily forgive this for the chance to see good blow-up images.

There are 65 large plates and then at the back of the book there are several pages of thumbnail sized images giving you all the pieces that were in this traveling exhibition. I think the retail was $30, but in the gift shop it was only $15. It’s not available directly from the U.S. Amazon.com, but it was available from several used booksellers on Amazon from about $11.

Alex Katz: Small Paintings
Essays by Adam D. Weinberg, Dana Self, and Shamim M. Momin
120 pages, hardbound, 65 color illustrations, 12 x 10 inches
ISBN: 1-891246-04-6
Published 2001 Distributed by University of Washington Press




Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting

The second book I bought was “Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting”. This was from an exhibition held at the Kemper Museum in 2003, which I’m going to go out on a limb and say was probably about 50 years after Wayne Thiebaud started painting. There isn’t an essay accompanying this book, but there is a six-page interview with the artist at the beginning of the book, then it jumps right into the plates. There are 43 plates all displayed in the simple format of title on the left page and plate on the right page. It’s clean and the images are nice and big, making use of the large format (12 x 9 inch) book. Pet peeve though, the image titles do not include the original painting dimensions. You have to flip to the back of the book to see the size of each piece. Since his work is all over the place, from 11x14’s up to 72 inches or more, I wish the dimensions were just included along with the artwork. Come to think of it, the Alex Katz book didn’t include the dimensions either, but at least in the preface of the book the author stated that all the artwork in that exhibition was works 24 x 36 inches or smaller.

This Wayne Thiebaud book was still nice and well worth $15, even though it’s a paperback.

Wayne Thiebaud: Fifty Years of Painting
104 pages, 43 color plates, 12 x 9 inches, ISBN: 1-891246-09-7, Library of Congress Control Number: 2003103927, published 2003, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art