Dan Budnik

This deluxe collection of intimate, highly compelling color and black-and-white photographs includes portraits of many of the most important and pioneering artists of the postwar period in American art. The series, which includes studies of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Isamu Noguchi, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko and many others, was, in fact, initially inspired by the work of Cartier-Bresson, from whom Budnik learned to adopt an attitude of anonymity with respect to his subjects, working -- as noted photo historian James Enyeart writes in his catalogue essay -- "at the periphery of their attentiveness to his camera." Features outstanding essays by Enyeart and Irving Sandler, America's premier chronicler of postwar American art, as well as a reprint of a little-known essay by the influential British art critic and curator David Sylvester, which was originally published alongside Budnik's photographs in 1964.