A glorious romp through the international art world of the 1960s and
'70s
A New York Times Book Review 2019 holiday gift guide pick
The photographic duo Shunk and Kender created the defining images of the
international avant-garde of the 1960s and '70s. In late 1950s/early
1960s Paris, Shunk and Kender were close to the New Realist artists, and
as a result produced what remains probably their most famous photograph:
Leap into the Void, the portrait of Yves Klein jumping from a wall.
They also photographed Niki de Saint Phalle's famous gun performances
and the performance dinners of Daniel Spoerri. Established in New York
from 1967, Shunk and Kender photographed Andy Warhol and his Factory
entourage, recorded the performances of Yayoi Kusama, Trisha Brown and
many others, and participated in the avant-garde exhibitions of their
time, such as Pier 18 at the Museum of Modern Art (1971).
Much more than mere documentation, Shunk and Kender's photographs were
truly collaborative and participatory in spirit, and in many cases now
provide the sole evidence of the performances, happenings and other
unique events of that time.
This gorgeously produced, nearly 500-page volume from Xavier Barral
accompanies the first Shunk-Kender retrospective, held at the Centre
Pompidou, and is based on a selection of more than 10,000 vintage prints
from the Kandinsky Library, which entered into the Pompidou's collection
in 2008 through a donation from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.
Shunk-Kender: Art through the Eye of the Camera is the ultimate
account of the heady days of American and European postwar art, and a
defining example of that fascinating but rarely acknowledged
photographic genre: photography-of-art as art.
The German photographer Harry Shunk (1924-2006) and his Hungarian
partner János Kender (1938-2009) produced some of the most iconic
images of postwar European and American art. In 2013, the Museum of
Modern Art acquired over 600 works from the Shunk-Kender Photography
Collection as a gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. This donation
established a consortium across five institutions--the Getty Research
Institute, the National Gallery of Art, Centre Pompidou, Tate and
MoMA--that together received the full Shunk-Kender archive.
