With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985

Wonderful text an

The book is lavishly illustrated, but the illustrations themselves don't really fully represent the works. There is no sense of the original objects' size, for which you have to flip back to an appendix and then again to the illustration to try to imagine it full-sized. Many of the works are quite large, which doesn't come across anywhere except in photos of exhibition rooms, in which case the details of each work are totally lost. Even more important, the illustrations give almost no sense of a work's tangible texture, which as the texts emphasize, is of central importance to the pieces' making and perception. Most of the illustrations look like 2-dimensional photos (which of course they are) or flat collages of unidentifiable materials. I realize that I'm asking the impossible for such a collection, but I still found the book very disappointing and unhelpful. Maybe there could have been a better balance of long shots, intense close-ups to show (for example) specific materials and techniques (e.g., different stitches that the texts emphasize), as well as the straight-on views that require greater verbal description than is given here. This would have had to be a smaller selection of works, but for me it would have deepened the experience tremendously.

great images and text