Category: Book Review

Outliers and American Vanguard Art, by Lynne Cooke. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 412 pages, 450 color plates, 2018. ISBN: 978-0226522272. Hardcover, $65 Outliers and American Vanguard Art, filling several rooms at the National Gallery of Art, is a dauntingly large-scale show. And at five pounds, 412 pages, 450-plus illustrations and a 10 x12 form factor, its catalog is even more daunting. But, despite some excess imbrications and fixed subject positions, the art and the important points being made are plenty sufficient to interest non-academic readers. Curator Lynne Cooke’s core premise is that the story of modernism is woefully incomplete absent

Mythologies, the name of the Kohler Art Center exhibit and substantial catalog, makes a holistic case for Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s brilliance.

Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma, by Daniel Wojcik. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 276 pages, 174 color illustrations, 2016. ISBN: 978-1496808066. Hardcover, $45 Can we agree that the art still sometimes known as outsider is much more interesting than what to call it? It might seem a simple enough proposition, yet arguments over the label continue to distract from the art, even among those who consider the debate mostly fruitless. Daniel Wojcik’s book is a case in point. When it’s good, it’s very good, providing sensitive, thoughful accounts of the art and its creators, with real insights into