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Richard Serra

Top Ten Books

Large-scale sculptor Richard Serra, who died in March 2024, achieved success as one of America's great artists for his colossal sculptures, often made from raw steel, with a sense of movement and flow that was uniquely his own. Although he began his career as a painter, he moved towards sculpture after visiting Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” at the Prado Museum in Madrid and bumping up against the limits of his own skill. As a sculptor his work invited close contact , pulling viewers between and around and through his giant installations. Serra curated this list of his ten favorite books to One Grand Books in 2016.

Below are Richard Serra’s favorite books, available to purchase as a set or individually.
See the full list...

10

Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I read “Self-Reliance” when I was 17 as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the ‘50s. In this short essay, Emerson takes a stance against conformity and insists on trusting your own judgement, on finding your own path, on living in the present and augmenting what is unique to your own character. These are the principles that have shaped my life and work.

9

Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes

What I find interesting in Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” is the distinction he makes between studium — what anyone recognizes at first glance as the general content of a photograph — and punctum, a very personal emotion or desire evoked by a detail in that same photograph. It is a switch from the objectification of the reproduction on a piece of paper to a purely subjective connection.

8

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Italo Calvino

This small publication of Calvino’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures given at Harvard in 1985 is divided into five topics: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity. Each essay is insightful and poetic, lyrical, a joy to read and re-read, an enduring primer for me.
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Tom Perrotta
$133.94
The Autobiography of Malcom X

as told to Alex Haley
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Michael Stipe
From: $146.98
Just Kids

Patti Smith
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Isabelle Huppert
From: $160.87
Hamlet

William Shakespeare
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Kathy Najimy
From: $138.92
Yellow Silk: Erotic Arts and Letters

edited by Lily Pond and Richard Russo
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Torbjörn Flygt
$169.69
The Wall

Marlen Haushofer
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Ahilan Arulanantham
$231.69
A Bend in the River

V.S. Naipaul
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Phoenix
From: $127.85
Please Kill Me

Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil
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Christopher Guest
$157.73
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America

Garry Wills
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Eric Ripert
From: $181.89
The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus

Henry Miller