cover image Warren Brandt

Warren Brandt

Nicholas Fox Weber. Hudson Hills Press, $50 (118pp) ISBN 978-0-933920-98-9

After two haphazard decades as an abstract expressionist, Brandt, a friend of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, veered off to forge his own representational style rooted in the imagery of his idols Matisse and Cezanne. Whether he's doing languid nudes, intricate room interiors, poetic landscapes or quizzical self-portraits, this painter's goals are the same: color that grabs you without compromising artistic integrity and pictorial harmony that leaves room for the random unpredictability of life. In an insightful essay Weber, author of The Drawings of Josef Albers , places Brandt in the Romantic tradition of Keats and Byron. Indeed, Brandt's passions for flowers and the flesh, his love of complex sensations, are woven into the fabric of his canvases. With its 68 color reproductions of paintings and pastels, this album makes a solid case for the viewpoint that Brandt, despite his reputation as such, is more than a painter's painter. (August)