Thursday's Three on Art

Today, Thursday's Three looks at two art books in the lists of spring's new titles and a third coming in September.

✭ The brilliant illustrator and artist Maira Kalman has collaborated with Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler and The Museum of Modern Art to create Girls Standing on Lawns (MoMA, 2014). The first in a planned series between Kalman and MoMA, the book combines some 40 vintage images from MoMA's photography collection, 12 original paintings by Kalman inspired by the photographs, and text by Handler. Themes of memories, childhood, nostalgia, home, family, and the act of seeing are all evoked vividly in this delightful volume.

Cover of Girls Standing on Laws

Read a sample (pdf).

The book may be purchased through the MoMA Store or via booksellers.

✭ Jackson Pollock's Mural: The Transitional Moment (Getty Publications, 2014), by Yvonne Szafran, Laura Rivers, Alan Phenix, Tom Learner, Ellen G. Landau, and Steve Martin, tells the story of Pollock's first large commission and the process of its conservation and study at the Getty Center in California. (The painting went to Getty Center in 2012; before then, it had been at the University of Iowa since its donation in the 1950s by Peggy Guggenheim for whom it was created in 1943). The book, containing 78 color and 13 black-and-white illustrations, is available through The Getty Store or via booksellers.

Cover of Jackson Pollock's Mural

Getty Publications on FaceBook

✭ And looking forward. . . A two-thousand-copy limited-edition portfolio The Prints of Paul Klee, comprising more than three dozen color and black-and-white etchings and lithographs that Klee created between 1903 and 1931 is forthcoming from the MoMA. The boxed set will be a reissue of the original 1947 limited-edition facsimile of the same name but will include a new text by MoMA's chief curator of prints and drawings Christophe Cherix. The public will be able to purchase the edition for $450 beginning September 15. See Limited Editions in Publications section of the MoMA site.

Image of Selected Contents of The Prints of Paul Klee 

See a 15-slide preview.

Paul Klee in the MoMA Collection