Book Description
Susan Rothenberg first gained critical attention in the mid-seventies when she introduced the simple, outlined image of an animal onto the austere canvas of Minimalism. Since then, her exploration of the formal tenets of painting has been manifested through increasingly complex compositions, rendered in a recognizably gestural style. This combination has in part allowed for the consistent interpretation of the artist's work as being both emotionally intense and a serious contribution to the tradition of heroic painting.

Since moving to the Southwest from New York City a decade ago, Rothenberg has created a body of work that is at once a continuation and evolution of previous concerns, and an expression of dramatic changes. Susan Rothenberg: Paintings from the Nineties, published on the occasion of a major exhibit of the artist's works from the past decade, brings together twenty of her most significant recent paintings. As these works have never been shown before as a group, this book provides the first opportunity to consider a crucial period in the career of one of our most important contemporary artists. Along with Rothenberg's haunting, evocative images, reproduced in full color, the volume includes an important critical introduction by Cheryl Brutvan, Beal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a poetic response to the artist's paintings by Robert Creeley.


About the Author
Cheryl Brutvan is Beal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Prior to her appointment in 1998 she was Senior Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. During her fifteen years there she organized several exhibitions and contributed to a number of publications, including Masterworks on Paper from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, A Distanced Land: The Photographs of John Pfahl, and The Paintings of Sylvia Plimack Mangold.

Robert Creeley has published more than sixty books of poetry, including Life & Death, Selected Poems 1945-1990, Memory Gardens, and The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975. He is also the author of more than a dozen books of fiction, essays, and interviews, as well as numerous collaborations with visual artists. His honors include the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

FROM THE PUBLISHER