One of the real pleasures in art this year has been learning about Arkansas-born quilter/artist Rosie Lee Tompkins.
Born Effie Mae Martin in Gould on Sept. 9, 1936, she moved to Richmond, Calif., at age 22. As her quilts began to gain popularity, she took the name Rosie Lee Tompkins to separate her personal life from her quiltmaking.
Celebrated as a brilliant artist whose vibrant quilts were seemingly improvisational (as in jazz), Tompkins was praised as having "no equal" by a New York Times story that ran in this Style section earlier this year.
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, which has many of her works in its permanent collection, organized the exhibition "Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective," which opened briefly in February. It closed due to the pandemic, which continues to wreak havoc with the exhibition schedule. It was scheduled to close in December, but the museum has extended its run through July 18.
Thankfully, there is this brilliant catalog: "Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective" (University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive). Tompkins' work is breathtaking and shows a stunning range of visual elements and a startling command of scale and color. Her quilts can take on the wild vibe of a street mural, usually with a spiritual context. She had an inspired, fearless ability to make unexpected juxtapositions of colors, fabrics and their embellishments. The catalog has three informative essays.
No question about it: Tompkins, who died in 2006, was a brilliant artist.
For information and to order, go to bampfa.org/store.
◼️ "Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters," edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten (Thames and Hudson, $39.95)
Vincent van Gogh wrote a lot of letters and, thankfully, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has most of them. The popularity of his art has fueled a seemingly insatiable desire to know more about the artist; as with Georgia O'Keeffe, we apparently need more — beautiful paintings don't seem enough — to forge or deepen our connection.
Some 75 or so of these letters give us an autobiography of sorts in which van Gogh ruminates on emotional and pragmatic subjects; his observations on love, art and friendship are vivid and memorable. His reflections on his complicated relationship with his brother, Theo, and the tempestuous friendship with Paul Gauguin are fascinating.
The editors add a helpful introduction and annotations that set the letters in the time, place and context in terms of his career. "A Life in Letters" also reveals the painter to be a skillful, talented writer. This belongs on the shelf with "Vincent van Gogh: The Life," the biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.
◼️ "Kusama: The Graphic Novel," Elisa Macellari (Lawrence King, $19.99)
A vibrantly drawn and written look at the Japanese artist, the graphic novel seems a particularly apt format to read about international artist/celebrity Yayoi Kusama.
Did you ever wonder where the red dots that typify her work came from?
The answer comes in the opening pages: red chrysanthemums in a field, where the young artist walks on a path. The flowers speak, Kusama says, with a voice "so loud it hurt her ears." After the voices fade, she draws and paints. Elisa Macellari's image of Kusama sitting cross-legged in her school uniform, working on her art as drawings on paper surround her, is a stunning illustration of the beginnings of an artist's passion and mental illness.
Growing up in a small Japanese town with a conservative family not supportive of her ambitions, the artist began experiencing anxiety and hallucinations. Her only comfort: art. A later correspondence with Georgia O'Keeffe led her to visit New York in 1957 and that city's avant-garde scene. As her mental state intensified, she returned home in the '70s and checked into a mental hospital, and obscurity, for some two decades.
Macellari skillfully documents Kusama's early years and her return to the art world. She fills the book with loads of details about Kusama's life and works with vivid colors (red, turquoise, lilac, coral) and the circles, curves and squares that evoke the artist's work. Now in her 90s, Kusama is one of the world's best-known artists. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has some of her work.
Clearly, art saved Kusama.
◼️ "Abstract Art: A Global History," Pepe Karmel (Thames & Hudson, $85)
This superb coffee-table work sets itself apart at once with its cover: a painting by Hilma af Klint, the Swedish artist and mystic whose pioneering abstractions predate the first purely abstract work by Kandinsky. Af Klint was rediscovered and received a major exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018. (The exhibition catalog is excellent.) Her emergence forced a reassessment of the history of modernism and abstraction.
Pepe Karmel divides abstraction into sections by subject matter: bodies, landscapes, cosmologies, architectures and signs and patterns. It's not the usual scholarly approach, but it makes the art more accessible.
As with any overview, one person's inclusions or exclusions can be argued over ad infinitum. He also states his belief that we are, at this time, in a golden age of abstract art. The excellent quality of this volume definitely raises the bar for others to follow. At the beginning, Karmel repeats the form's familiar history, bringing it into the present and embracing artists from around the world.
So is a global history possible? Maybe. Karmel makes a strong, well-written argument that it can be done.
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A number of recent books have focused on women in art history. Among them:
◼️ "Women, Art and Society" by Whitney Chadwick (Thames & Hudson, $29.95) was first published in 1990 and has been updated and reissued. It's a groundbreaking foundation for understanding female artists and their place in art history.
◼️ "Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly" by the Guerrilla Girls (Chronicle, $29.95). The Guerrilla Girls are a group of anonymous, ape-mask-wearing female artists who have called out the art world's misogyny in person and in writing since the late 1980s.
◼️ "The Short Story of Women Artists," Susie Hodge (Lawrence King, $19.99) is a guidebook of sorts that takes us through the many contributions of women in the male-dominated art movements and offers concise, rich and informative insights.
Email: ewidner@adgnewsroom.com