As Painting: Division and Displacement - Tapa dura

This volume, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Wexner Center for the Arts, offers thought-provoking perspectives on the evolution of painting in the United States and Europe since the mid-1960s. It illuminates the flexible boundaries of what can be seen or interpreted "as painting" and that medium's interrelationships with sculpture, photography, and installation, highlighting points of convergence and divergence. The featured artists include such major figures as Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Sherrie Levine, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Robert Smithson, as well as artists who are much less known, at least in the United States. Pivotal to the discussion is the work of a number of significant but relatively unfamiliar French painters, including Martin Barr , Christian Bonnefoi, Simon Hanta , Michel Parmentier, and Fran ois Rouan. The book serves as an introduction to their work while providing fresh interpretations of the more familiar artists. Also highlighted are several artists not usually thought of as "painters," among them Polly Apfelbaum, Mel Bochner, Judd, Smithson, Anne Truitt, and James Welling. The book features two extended essays, detailed commentaries on each of the 26 artists in the exhibition, and 14 additional essays by artists and commentators noted for their engagement with the issues raised here. These include a commentary on Simon Hanta by Alfred Pacquement, Director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; original essays by French critics Catherine Millet and Christian Prigent; interviews with artists Martin Barr and Mel Bochner; and a little-known set of notes by Jacques Lacan on the painting of Fran ois Rouan.

Philip Armstrong is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Studies in the Humanities, Laura Lisbon is a painter and Associate Professor of Art, and Stephen Melville is Professor of the History of Art, all at Ohio State University.