Clemente (Guggenheim Museum Publications)

Clemente's art, which lays bare his obsessions with sex, self, and spirituality and explores them with a constantly surprising range of intense color and formal invention, stands in bracing, deeply pleasurable opposition to the desiccated, design-bound, theory-driven work that has dominated so much art of the last 25 years. Art historian James Elkins has described making graduate students copy, stroke for stroke, works by Monet and other painters, to give them a feel for "What Painting Is" (as he titled his recent book). Clemente raises the stakes a notch, demonstrating what painting might be, if we were to allow ourselves to be drenched in its myriad possibilities. --Peggy Moorman

Product Description
Francesco Clemente has, since the 1980s, been a leading artist in the international revival of expressionist figure painting and sculpture. Clemente's subjects--rooted in both the physical and the surreal, spiritual worlds--create a vast body of work that appeals to diverse audiences. Clemente draws upon a pan-historic web of impulses, mediating among the myriad cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, Byzantium, Europe, India and America. Stylistically his work recalls the Italian Renaissance, Indian miniatures, European Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Clemente's widespread cultural interests and nomadic lifestyle--New York is his home but he spends part of each year in Italy, India and the New Mexico desert--have deeply affected his art. This lavishly produced catalogue accompanies the first major survey devoted to the painter.