When does an artist’s creation become art, and where? Does it occur in the solitary confines of an artist’s studio or does it require the context of an art gallery’s white cube? What is the relationship between these two culturally charged spaces? How does the site of art’s presentation shape the meaning and determine even the very possibility of its existence?
Studio and Cube is Brian O'Doherty’s follow-up to his seminal 1976 essays for Artforum, republished in 1999 as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. That acclaimed volume dissected the abstract, white space of the art gallery, calling it “the archetypal image of twentieth century art.” In Studio and Cube he expands his interpretation to include the artist’s studio, tracking the relationship between the artwork and the artist from Vermeer through late modernism. O'Doherty reflects on the differing work spaces of Courbet, Matisse, Rothko, Bacon, Warhol, and many others, providing essential reading in the history and issues of art and the environment in which it is produced.
