Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience by
When Irving Sandler published The Triumph of American Painting in 1970, this groundbreaking study quickly became the canonical account of Abstract Expressionism. Now, nearly 40 years later, Sandler, the preeminent chronicler of postwar American art, retu
Alice Neel by
Alice Neel liked to say that she was the century and in many ways she was. She was born into a proper Victorian family, and came of age during suffrage. The quintessential Bohemian, she spent more than half a century, from her early days as a WPA artist living in the heart of the Village, through her Whitney retrospective in 1974, until her death ten years later, painting, often in near-obscurity, an extraordinarily diverse population--from young black sisters in Harlem to the elderly Jewish twin artists, Raphael and Moses Soyer, to Meyer Schapiro and Linus Pauling, to the American Communist Party chairman Gus Hall--creating an indelible portrait of 20th century America.
Neel's hundreds of portraits portray a universe of powerful personalities and document an age. Neel painted through the Depression, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution of the 60's, feminism, and the feverish eighties. Fiercely democratic in her subjects, she portrayed her lovers, her children, her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, pregnant nudes, crazy people, and famous figures in the art world, all in a searing, psychological style uniquely her own. From Village legendJoe Gould with multiple penises to Frank O'Hara as a lyrical young poet, from porn star Annie Sprinkle gussied up in leather, to her own anxious, nude pregnant daughter-in-law, Neel's portraits are as arrestingly executed as they are relentlessly honest.
In this first full-length biography of Neel, best-selling author Phoebe Hoban recounts the remarkable story of Neel's life and career, as full of Sturm and Drang as the century she powerfully captured in paint. Neel managed to transcend her often tragic circumstances, surviving the death from diphtheria of her infant daughter Santillana, her first child by the renowned Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez, with whom she lived in Havana for a year before returning to America; the break-up of her marriage; a nervous breakdown at thirty resulting in several suicide attempts for which she was institutionalized; and the terrible separation from her second child, Isabetta, whom Carlos took back to Havana.
In every aspect of her life, Neel dictated her own terms--from defiantly painting figurative pieces at the height of Abstract Expressionism, convincing her subjects to disrobe (which many of them did, including, surprisingly, Andy Warhol) to becoming a single mother to the two sons she bore to dramatically different partners. No wonder she became the de facto artist of the Feminist movement. (When Time magazine put Kate Millet on its cover in 1970, she was asked to paint the portrait.) Very much in touch with her time, Neel was also always ahead of it. Although she herself would probably have rejected such label, she was America's first feminist, multicultural artist, a populist painter for the ages.
Phoebe Hoban's Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty tells the unforgettable story of a woman who forged a permanent place in the pantheon by courageously flaunting convention, both in her life and her work.
American Prints from Hopper to Pollock by
This is a catalogue of American printmaking in the first half of the twentieth century. It starts with John Sloan and the Ashcan School and concludes with Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism. The period covered includes the World Wars and the Depression, and the prints reflect this social and historical upheaval. An extended introductory essay sets the context and relates printmaking to art of other media being produced concurrently. The British Museum has the most important collection of American prints of this period outside the United States. Around 140 prints by 75 artists are included.
Calder by
Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography,which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. "Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This...book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen-further enrich the story."
A Century of American Printmaking, 1880-1980 by
In this sumptously illustrated history, James Watrous captures the vast panorama of American printmaking in the past century. As he traces the roots and evolution of the art, the story becomes one of prints, people and events - from the printmakers, their artistic conceptions, and works, to the curators, dealers. collectors, critics, printers, workshops, and exhibitions that played crucial supporting roles. The result, both a compelling cultural history and a seminal survey of a major American art form.
Citizen 13660 by
Mine Okubo was one of 110,000 people of Japanese descent - nearly two-thirds of them American citizens - who were rounded up into ?protective custody? shortly after Pearl Harbor. Citizen 13660 , her memoir of life in relocation centers in California and Utah, was first published in 1946, then reissued by University of Washington Press in 1983 with a new Preface by the author.
With 197 pen-and-ink illustrations, and poignantly written text, the book has been a perennial bestseller, and is used in college and university courses across the country.
Read more about Mine Okubo in the 2008 UW Press book, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef. http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/ROBMIN.html
Replaced by ISBN 9780295993546
Edward Hopper by
This expanded edition throws Edward Hopper's art and life into sharp new perspective. Its focus is the laconic, introverted painter's stormy 43-year marriage to outspoken and gregarious Josephine Nivison, herself an artist. The text is illustrated throughout, including photographs and reproductions of his paintings and drawings.
Edward Hopper by
In his works, Hopper poetically expressed the solitude of man confronted with the American way of life as it developed in the 1920s. Inspired by the movies and particularly by the various camera angles and attitudes of characters, his paintings expose the alienation of mass culture. Done in cold colours and inhabited by anonymous characters, Hopper’s paintings also symbolically reflect the Great Depression. Through a series of different reproductions (etchings, watercolours, and oil-on-canvas paintings), as well as thematic and artistic analysis, the author sheds new light on the enigmatic and tortured world of this outstanting figure.
Final Light by
The motivating force behind Final Light was to document Snow's "visual language"--forged early in his career from abstract expressionist influences typified by Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Franz Kline, among others. Final Light represents the first book to examine the legacy of this significant Utah educator and painter. Renowned scholars, writers, and activists who are familiar with Snow's work--many of whom were his close friends--recount personal experiences with the artist and delve into his motives, methods, and reputation. The volume not only offers their commentaries, but also contains more than 80 exquisite full-color reproductions of Snow's paintings, dating from the 1950s until 2009, when he died in an auto accident at the age of eighty-two.
A nationally recognized artist, Snow chose to stay in Utah where, when not teaching at the University of Utah, he roamed the southern Utah desert gaining inspiration from the red rock formations, especially the Cockscomb outside his studio near Capitol Reef National Park. Snow said, "Every artist probably wonders if he or she made the right decision to dig in to a certain place." He dug into the landscape in and around Southern Utah and never regretted it. Just as "Tennessee Williams's South, William Faulkner's Mississippi, [or] John Steinbeck's West Coast, formed their work," the desert lands of the Colorado Plateau formed Snow's. Their sense of place, "without provincialism," said Snow "is what gives their art its enduring power." Final Light will appeal to art historians and art lovers, especially those interested in abstract expressionism and the art of Utah, the West, and the Southwest.
Chosen by 15 Bytes , Utah's art magazine, as the most exceptional art book for 2014.
Jackson Pollock by
Pollock's life, one of anger and depression, alcoholism and suicide attempts, was also full of vitality and imagination; despite bruised feelings, spurned generosity, and disruption to their lives, his friends acknowledged his need both to provoke and to be forgiven. This study, the result of seven years' research and 2000 interviews, is a strange combination of biographical research, art historical analysis, and pop psychology, with a touch of ``soon to be a major motion picture'' thrown in for good measure. Although events and conversations are substantially annotated, this enormous body of facts fails to go beneath the first layer in the life of this complex artist; the novellike prose seems to duplicate Pollock's familiar style of ``show and conceal.'' Still, this work--a cultural history as well as a biography--makes for interesting reading.-- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Joan Mitchell by
"Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead." --New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s
She was a steel heiress from the Midwest--Chicago and Lake Forest (her grandfather built Chicago's bridges and worked for Andrew Carnegie). She was a daughter of the American Revolution--Anglo-Saxon, Republican, Episcopalian.
She was tough, disciplined, courageous, dazzling, and went up against the masculine art world at its most entrenched, made her way in it, and disproved their notion that women couldn't paint.
Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world, painters making their way in the second part of America's twentieth century.
As a young girl she was a champion figure skater, and though she lacked balance and coordination, accomplished one athletic triumph after another, until giving up competitive skating to become a painter.
Mitchell saw people and things in col∨ color and emotion were the same to her. She said, "I use the past to make my pic[tures] and I want all of it and even you and me in candlelight on the train and every 'lover' I've ever had--every friend--nothing closed out. It's all part of me and I want to confront it and sleep with it--the dreams--and paint it."
Her work had an unerring sense of formal rectitude, daring, and discipline, as well as delicacy, grace, and awkwardness.
Mitchell exuded a young, smoky, tough glamour and was thought of as "sexy as hell."
Albers writes about how Mitchell married her girlhood pal, Barnet Rosset, Jr.--scion of a financier who was head of Chicago's Metropolitan Trust and partner of Jimmy Roosevelt. Rosset went on to buy Grove Press in 1951, at Mitchell's urging, and to publish Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, et al., making Grove into the great avant-garde publishing house of its time.
Mitchell's life was messy and reckless: in New York and East Hampton carousing with de Kooning, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Jane Freilicher, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and others; going to clambakes, cocktail parties, softball games--and living an entirely different existence in Paris and Vétheuil.
Mitchell's inner life embraced a world beyond her own craft, especially literature . . . her compositions were informed by imagined landscapes or feelings about places.
In Joan Mitchell , Patricia Albers brilliantly reconstructs the painter's large and impassioned life: her growing prominence as an artist; her marriage and affairs; her friendships with poets and painters; her extraordinary work.
Joan Mitchell re-creates the times, the people, and her worlds from the 1920s through the 1990s and brings it all spectacularly to life.
Lee Krasner: A Biography by
Perhaps best known as the long-suffering wife of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner is now, finally, being recognized as one of the 20th century's modernist masters. In Lee Krasner, author Gail Levin gives us an engrossing biography of the painter--so memorably portrayed in the movie Pollack by actor Marcia Gay Harden, who won an Academy Award for her performance--a firebrand and trailblazer for women's rights as well as an exceptional artist who led a truly fascinating life.
Letters Like the Day (Georgia O'Keefe) by
Georgia O'Keeffe mistrusted words. She claimed color as her language. Nevertheless, in the course of her long life, the great American painter wrote thousands of letters'more than two thousand survive between her and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, alone. Jennifer Sinor's Letters Like the Day honors O'Keeffe, her modernist landscapes, and, crucially, the value of letter writing. In the painter's correspondence, we find an intimacy with words that is all her own. Taking her letters as a touchstone, Sinor experiments with the limits of language using the same aesthetic that drove O'Keeffe's art. Through magnification, cropping, and juxtaposition'hallmarks of modernism?Sinor explores the larger truths at the center of O'Keeffe's work: how we see, capture, and create. Letters Like the Day pursues the highest function of art'to take one's medium to the edge and then push beyond.
Listening to Stone: the art and life of Isamu Noguchi by
Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel monuments to the elegant Akari lamps, Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant struggle-as both an artist and a man-was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "It's only in art," he insisted, "that it was ever possible for me to find anyidentity at all."
In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature. As a boy in Japan, Noguchi would collect wild azaleas and blue mountain flowers for a little garden in front of his home. As Herrera writes, he also included a rock, "to give a feeling of weight and permanence." It was a sensual appreciation he never abandoned. When looking for stones in remote Japanese quarries for his zen-like Paris garden forty years later, he would spend hours actually listening to the stones, scrambling from one to another until he found one that "spoke to him." Constantly striving to "take the essence of nature and distill it," Noguchi moved from sculpture to furniture, and from playgrounds to sets for his friend the choreographer Martha Graham, and back again working in wood, iron, clay, steel, aluminum, and, of course, stone.
Noguchi traveled constantly, from New York to Paris to India to Japan, forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Wherever he went, his needy disposition and boyish charm drew women to him, yet he tended to push them away when things began to feel too settled. Only through his art-now seen as a powerful aesthetic link between the East and the West-did Noguchi ever seem to feel that he belonged.
Combining Noguchi's personal correspondence and interviews with those closest to him-from artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers-Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Herrera has written a rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu. Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."
Mark Rothko by
Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is generally considered, along with Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the preeminent artist of his generation. He is closely identified with the New York School, a group of painters that emerged during the 1940s and re-invented American art. Their radical and unique contribution to modern art became known as Abstract Expressionism. Rothko was one of the most prominent pioneers of abstract color painting, and, during a career that spanned five decades, he became America's foremost colorist. During his retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, Rothko was asked how long it took him to paint a particular painting that seemed to consist of merely a few large, formless blotches of color on canvas. Rothko dryly responded, "I'm 57 years old and it took me all my life to do it." So how did a 10-year old Russian immigrant boy named Marcus Rothkowitz, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1913 with his mother, become Mark Rothko, one of the greatest American abstract painters? Readers of The Essential Mark Rothko will learn that: In his youth, he wanted to be an actor, and that the theater remained his first love; He was largely self-taught; He painted figuratively for more than half of his life.
Ninth Street Women by
Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting--not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come. Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future."--Inside dust jacket.
Off the Wall: a portrait of Robert Rauschenberg by 
Pollock and After: The Critical Debate by 
Robert Rauschenberg by 
See with Your Eyes - Hear with Your Heart by
"Through art LaVar Steel had the ability to communicate until the day before he died with Alzheimer's disease. His purposeful expressions were startling because it was easy to assume that he was no longer aware. He was simply trapped by the limitations of a disease. His beautiful drawings are his outreach. I assembled this last body of work to share his message. It's my loving tribute to a wonderful husband."--Marian Steel, PhD
In the Spirit of the Ancestors by
In the Spirit of the Ancestors celebrates the vitality of contemporary Pacific Northwest Coast art by showcasing a selection of objects from the Burke Museum's collection of more than 2,400 late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Native American works.
Essays focus on contemporary art while exploring the important historical precedents on which so many artists rely for training and inspiration. Margaret Blackman reflects on building one of the largest collections of Northwest Coast serigraphs, and Joe David reminisces about his artistic journey through mask-making. Shaun Peterson, Lisa Telford, and Evelyn Vanderhoop discuss the historical precedents for working in styles that were kept alive only by a few critical artists and are now making a comeback. Robin K. Wright explores the history of box drums and their revival. Emily Moore discusses the repatriation of two stolen house posts and proposes a new concept of "propatriation" to describe the resulting commissioning of contemporary posts to take their place. Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse explores the power of adornment and how clothing, jewelry, and personal adornments like tattooing express tribal and personal identity in ways both connected to the past and grounded in the present.
The diversity of approaches presented by these contributors speaks to artists, collectors, academics, tribal communities, and all those interested in Pacific Northwest Coast art. Splendid color photographs of works never before published will delight everyone.
Modernism in the Pacific Northwest by 
Northwest Mythologies by 
Dark Light: the ceramics of Christine Nofchissey McHorse by 
Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25 by
"Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25 explores the first twenty-five years of a remarkable nonprofit printmaking and traditional arts studio based on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon, the only such center located on a reservation community in the United States. Art historian Prudence Roberts, drawing from conversations with CSIA founder, the artist James Lavadour, narrates the institute's history from its beginnings through the establishment of a professional quality printmaking program and an international reputation. Native American art scholar heather ahtone and curator Rebecca Dobkins trace the development of indigenous printmaking in North America, further contextualizing this story. Over sixty color plates illustrate selected work from the dozens of artists, indigenous and non-indigenous, who have completed residencies at CSIA since its founding, including luminaries of contemporary Native American art Rick Bartow, Joe Feddersen, Jeffrey Gibson, Edgar Heap of Birds, James Lavadour, Lillian Pitt, Wendy Red Star, and Marie Watt."
Paintings of the Southwest by 
US painter, printer, and illustrator. One of the foremost American realists, and the most famous exponent of New Realism in the 20th century, he is often associated with American Scene painting.
Keith Haring by
This one-of-a-kind book explores the life and art of Keith Haring from his childhood through his meteoric rise to fame. It sheds light on this important artist's great humanity, his concern for children, and his disregard for the establishment art world. Reproductions of Keith's signature artwork appear in scenes boldly rendered by Robert Neubecker. This is a story to inspire, and a book for Keith Haring fans of all ages to treasure.
Photographer, born in Springfield, Ohio, USA.
From France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History
