May 2008 Editor's Letter

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We were elated when she offered to create an artwork for our May cover, but she gave us so many tempting selections—gouaches of pregnant men, voluptuous women, newborns—that we could not choose just one. So we chose four. In addition to Pregnant Woman, which appears on our cover, we are presenting a trio of new drawings by Bourgeois in an exclusive portfolio. You’ll find it at the end of Duncan MacMillan’s article on the artist’s exhibition at Inverleith House at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Inverleith is also displaying 19th-century botanical drawings made for John Hutton Balfour, the Regius Keeper of the Garden, and it is a serendipitous pairing with the Bourgeois drawings—the works talk to each other across the centuries.

This issue, in fact, is something of a showcase, with three portfolios in all. In addition to the Bourgeois, we highlight Thierry Bal’s photographic collaboration with the artist Idris Kahn, who created the cinematic public artwork Fragile, which draws inspiration from its venue, a former Royal Mail sorting facility in London called Howick Place. And we feature the photographs of Mathieu Borysevicz, who discovered an unusual form of Abstract Expressionism in the graffiti of black-market forgers in Hangzhou, China.

In our endeavor to present diverse perspectives, we invited Francine Prose to muse on Gustave Courbet’s brazen, still-shocking Origin of the World. And we asked RoseLee Goldberg, the pioneering performance-art curator and historian, to impart a cross-disciplinary reading of the exhibition phenomenon that is the Whitney Biennial. (In the spirit of seeing things differently, we also will be using different portraits of me on this page.)

On viewing the Biennial, we noticed that quite a number of the artists were familiar to us from the pages of Modern Painters: Shannon Ebner, Leslie Hewitt, Adam Putnam, Amanda Ross-Ho, Heather Rowe, and Melanie Schi have all appeared in our Introducing section over the past two years. We congratulate them on their success. In this issue, we are pleased to introduce you to the Russian-born painter Yevgeniy Fiks and the ceramist-turned-photographer Tim Roda, both of whom have a bright future, too. —Susan Morris

"May 2008 Editor's Letter" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2008 Table of Contents.