When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translatedthe three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others. O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar....

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 author Brian O'Doherty's long-awaited follow-up to his seminal 1976 essays for Artforum, republished in 1999 as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. That critically 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. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of art and the environment in which it is produced. Studio and Cube is the first in the series of FORuM Project Publications produced by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, at Columbia University....