A guide to the unique collection of Telfair's paintings, drawings, and prints donated by twenty-two artists who either were friends with or were admired by the renowned curator and Savannah native Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003). Each piece is reproduced alongside a remembrance of Varnedoe by the artist.

He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop.

Readins in high & low

Based on a symposium held in 1999 during The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective, this volume presents nine critical essays offering dramatically different ways of understanding Pollock's art and influence. The essays reveal not just the richness of Pollock's work, but also the vitality and diversity of contemporary criticism. The essays were written by Robert Storr, Pepe Karmel, James Coddington and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Kirk Varnedoe, T. J. Clark, Jeremy Lewison, Rosalind Krauss, and Anne Wagner.

Survey of important works in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.