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Showing 121 - 140 of 1095 items
By F. Darrell Munsell. 2015
Seeking adventure and inspiration in western Colorado, artist Jack Roberts masterfully captured frontier characters in secluded cow camps and boisterous…
saloons. His flamboyant personality and zest for life became topics of local stories. But sobriety and commitment offered new themes and goals. Indians, traders, pioneers and entrepreneurs--he captured them all on canvas with a blend of creativity and authenticity. His paintings, cartoons and personal observations reflect his convictions and his desire to create works of significance. With over seventy full-color paintings, author F. Darrell Munsell traces Roberts's career from early apprenticeship with Harvey Dunn through his many changes in lifestyle and subject to celebrate this respected artist of the American West.By Stanley Plumly. 2018
A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book…
Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.By Samuel S. Bak. 2001
At my first sight of a painting by Samuel Bak, I had the keen sense that he was telling me…
stories with his brush. Now that at long last he has written this book, I find it no wonder that he has painted with his pen.... Among the tens and hundreds of books I have read about the pre-Shoah and post-Shoah period... Bak's book is unique. Despite being suffused with a sense of loss, horror, degradation, and death, it is ultimately a sanguine, funny book, full of the love of life, rocking with an almost cathartic joy. At times I found myself bursting out laughing... a marvelous ode, a colorful hymn to the forces of life, love, creation, and the joys of the senses. --From the Foreword by Amos OzIn Painted in Words internationally renowned artist Samuel Bak sets aside his brushes to narrate the stories of his life--as a child in Nazi-occupied Vilna, as a youth in European refugee camps, and as a maturing artist in Israel, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. With gentle humor, the child prodigy of the faraway past and the accomplished artist of today engage in a spirited dialogue from which emerges a self-portrait of "The Artist as a Young--and middle-aged and aging--Survivor." The brilliance, vision, and virtuosity that Bak brings to his painting are equally in evidence in his writing. This deeply touching work is an important contribution to Holocaust literature and art history.By Marina Abramovic. 2016
"I had experienced absolute freedom--I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn't matter, that nothing…
mattered at all--and it intoxicated me."In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović's MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito's regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother's abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor--all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story--a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe--a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China. Marina's story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.From the Hardcover edition.By Michael White. 1974
The Last Impresario--the most famous person you've never heard of--is now the subject of a major motion picture, directed by…
Gracie Otto. Michael White is one of the most inspirational producers of our time, responsible for changing the face of Britain's cultural scene in the 1970s. White has been involved in an amazingly wide range of shows, many of them hits, some of them disastrous failures, all of them unusual. His career encompasses the plays of Athol Fugard, Joe Orton's Loot, Oh! Calcutta!, the catastrophic Jeeves, the money-spinning Sleuth, The Threepenny Opera, starring Vanessa Redgrave, The Rocky Horror Show, and movies ranging from My Dinner with Andre to Monty Python cannot, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, be dubbed conventional. In this autobiography, originally published as Empty Seats in 1984, Michael White tells many marvelous stories and asks some wonderful questions. Why did Orson Welles make a one-armed Peter Daubeny carry his suitcases? What really happened during a performance of The Dirtiest Show in Town? What did Peter Sellers do to Spike Milligan's roast chicken? What were Kenneth Tynan, Joe Orton, and Dame Edna Everage really like? The reader discovers how a play is put on, what kind of money is involved, what techniques are used. "You, too," White seems to say, "can be a producer. And this is how you set about it." Drawing on all too many experiences he might prefer to forget, White would no doubt add, "And that way madness lies."By Jeffrey Meyers. 2006
In 1920, at the age of thirty-five, Amedeo Modigliani died in poverty and neglect in Paris, much like a figure…
out of La Bohéme. His life had been as dramatic as his death. An Italian Jew from a bourgeois family, "Modi" had a weakness for drink, hashish, and the many women-including the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova-who were drawn to his good looks. His friends included Picasso, Utrillo, Soutine, and other important artists of his day, yet his own work stood apart, generating little interest while he lived. Today's art world, however, acknowledges him as a master whose limited oeuvre-sculptures, portraits, and some of the most appealing nudes in the whole of modern art-cannot satisfy collectors' demand. With a lively but judicious hand, biographer Jeffrey Meyers sketches Modigliani and the art he produced, illuminating not only this little-known figure but also the painters, writers, lovers, and others who inhabited early twentieth-century Paris with him.By Melvin Kalfus. 1990
Frederick Law Olmsted is famous for his urban landscape designs: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and Franklin…
Park in Boston. Olmsted devoted much of his later life to this work. What was the source of this creative energy and imagination in his fascinating years? Melvin Kalfus is the first author to examine Olmsted's troubled, sometimes tragic childhood and adolescence in a search for the inner sources of his creative imagination. Kalfus argues that Olmsted's distressing early experiences fired his ambition and led him so obsessively to seek the world's esteem through his works. Kalfus also looks at Olmsted's varied early career during which he worked as an apprentice merchant, a seaman, a farmer, a manager of a mining plantation in California, a journalist, and author of three istorically important books on slavery, and as the General Secretary of the Civil War's Sanitary Commission, and enormous project organized to provide medical aid to Union soldiers.By Patricia Bosworth. 2005
Bosworth's remarkable look at the life of Diane Arbus, one of the most acclaimed and provocative photographers of her time…
Diane Arbus became famous for her intimate and unconventional portraits of twins, dwarfs, sideshow performers, eccentrics, and everyday "freaks." Condemned by some for voyeurism, praised by others for compassion, she was nonetheless a transformative figure in twentieth-century photography and hailed by all for her undeniable genius. Her life was cut short when she committed suicide in 1971 at the peak of her career. In the first complete biography of Arbus, author Patricia Bosworth traces the arc of Arbus's remarkable life: her sheltered upper-class childhood and passionate, all-consuming marriage to Allan Arbus; her roles as wife and devoted mother; and her evolution from fashion photographer to critically acclaimed artist--one who forever altered the boundaries of photography.By Marina Abramovic. 2016
"I had experienced absolute freedom--I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn't matter, that nothing…
mattered at all--and it intoxicated me."In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović's MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature. The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito's regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother's abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor--all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story--a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe--a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China. Marina's story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.From the Hardcover edition.By Alexander Dumbadze. 2013
On July 9, 1975, Dutch-born artist Bas Jan Ader set sail from Chatham, Massachusetts, on a thirteen-foot sailboat. He was…
bound for Falmouth, England, on the second leg of a three-part piece titled "In Search of the Miraculous. " The damaged boat was found south of the western tip of Ireland nearly a year later. Ader was never seen again. aSince his untimely death, Ader has achieved mythic status in the art world as a figure literally willing to die for his art. Considering the artistOCOs legacy and concise oeuvre beyond the romantic and tragic associations that accompany his peculiar end, Alexander Dumbadze resituates AderOCOs art and life within the conceptual art world of Los Angeles in the early 1970s and offers a nuanced argument about artistic subjectivity that explains AderOCOs tremendous relevance to contemporary art. a"Bas Jan Ader "blends biography, theoretical reflection, and archival research to draw a detailed picture of the world in which AderOCOs work was rooted: a vibrant international art scene populated with peers such as Ger van Elk, William Leavitt, and Allen Ruppersberg. Dumbadze looks closely at AderOCOs engagement with questions of free will and his ultimate success in creating art untainted by mediation. The first in-depth study of this enigmatic conceptual artist, "Bas Jan Ader" is a thoughtful reflection on the necessity of the creative act and its inescapable relation to death. "By Jed Perl. 2017
The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of…
letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. 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 beautifully written, deeply researched 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.By Marilyn M Litvak. 1995
From 1876 to 1915, Edward James Lennox was a formidable force in Toronto’s architectural community. Many of his buildings are…
still landmarks in a city that continues to evolve.Born and educated in Toronto, Lennox looked to the past for inspiration but was never captured by it. His prototypical Annex houes on Madison Avenue, Old City Hall, and Casa Loma bear witness to his technical expertise and aesthetic sensibilities. Through text and illustrations, this volume tells the story of the a resolute architect whose vision helped shape an emerging city, and who in his time was called the "builder of Toronto."Edward James Lennox, "Builder of Toronto" is the first volume in the Canadian Master Architect series. Each publication will profile the work of an individual Canadian architect. The series editor is Marilyn M. Litvak.By Helen Mclean. 2001
The biggest surprise - and disappointment - that life holds is that it is over so fast The golden…
tomorrow to which most people usually women put off their hopes rarely appears This is the lesson learned by Helen McLean in her memoir Details from a Larger Canvas is about a woman with the expectations of her time and class heavy upon her shoulders in short she is supposed to be much the same woman as her Rosedale matron mother-in-law whose life was bound up in sets of rules and whose life had little expression except in the form of materialistic acquisition and censure Instead Helen creates her own life - and while painting a portrait of Margaret Laurence finds a woman with whom she has common groundBy Allan Boss. 2010
The enigmatic, obscured figure behind many of the most important moments in building Canada's theatrical and cultural landscape has largely…
been ignored by history. In this groundbreaking study of his work, Allan Boss re-locates Moore in Canada's cultural history. Moore may be a jack of all trades, but Boss exposes a historical record that seems to conceal Moore's work, challenging the conventions of recorded theatre history in Canada. Painting a picture of Moore's identity and legacy through his theatrical and artistic work and through an assortment of his literary contributions to the theatre, Boss creates an astounding account of a cultural giant who's been lost to history.By Witold Rybczynski. 2002
Palladio is the Bible Thomas Jefferson once said You should get it and stick to it…
With his simple gracious perfectly proportioned villas Andrea Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form during the late sixteenth century -- and his influence is still evident in the ample porches columned porticoes grand ceilings and front-door pediments of America today In The Perfect House bestselling author Witold Rybczynski whose previous books have transformed our understanding of domestic architecture reveals how a handful of Palladio s houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe More than just a study of one of history s seminal architectural figures The Perfect House reflects Rybczynski s enormous admiration for his subject and provides a new way of looking at the special landscapes we call home in the modern worldBy Zeese Papanikolas. 2015
The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on…
Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists,and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challengedand new values had yet to be created. InAn American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and entertaining story of a diverse group of figures in the arts and sciences who inhabited this new America. Just as ragtime composers subverted musical expectations by combining European march timing with African syncopations, so this book's protagonists--who range from Emily Dickinson toThorstein Veblen and from Henry and William James to Charles Mingus--interrogated the modern American world through their own "syncopations" of cultural givens. The old antebellum slave dance, the cakewalk, with its parody of the manners and pretensions of the white folks in the Big House, provides a template of how the tricksters, shamans, poets, philosophers, ragtime pianists, and jazz musicians who inhabit this book used the arts of parody, satire, and disguise to subvert American cultural norms and to create new works of astonishing beauty and intellectual vigor.By Fred R. Kline. 2016
A single sketch becomes an all-consuming quest to understand and identify a work by Leonardo da Vinci himself--the first new…
drawing by the great master to have surfaced in over a century. Fred Kline is a well-known art historian, dealer, connoisseur, and explorer who has made a career of scouring antique stores, estate sales, and auctions looking for unusual--and often misidentified--works of art. Many of the gems he has found are now in major museum collections like the Frick, the Getty, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this book is about the discovery of one piece in particular: About ten years ago, when Kline was routinely combing through a Christie's catalog, a beautiful little drawing caught his eye. Attributed to Carracci, it came with a very low estimate, but Kline's every instinct told him that the attribution was wrong. He placed a bid and the low asking price and bought the drawing outright. And that was the beginning of how Kline discovered Leonardo da Vinci's model drawing for the Infant Jesus and the Infant St. John. It is the first work by da Vinci to have surfaced in over a century. Leonardo's Holy Child chronicles not only the story of this amazing discovery, from Kline's research all over the world to how exactly attributions work with regards to the old masters (most of their works are unsigned). Kline also sheds light on the idea of "connoisseurship," an often-overlooked facet of art history that's almost Holmesian in its intricacy and specificity.By Philip Gefter. 2015
Biography on a grand cultural level, here is the long-awaited story of Sam Wagstaff and his indelible influence on the…
world of late-twentieth-century art. Sam Wagstaff, the legendary curator, collector, and patron of the arts, emerges as a cultural visionary in this groundbreaking biography. Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable--and largely overlooked--influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended both Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s. Accordingly, Wagstaff became a curator, in 1961, at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, where he mounted both "Black, White, and Gray"--the first museum show of minimal art--and the sculptor Tony Smith's first museum show, while lending his early support to artists Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. Later, as a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he brought the avant-garde to a regional museum, offending its more staid trustees in the process. After returning to New York City in 1972, the fifty-year-old Wagstaff met the twenty-five-year-old Queens-born Robert Mapplethorpe, then living with Patti Smith. What at first appeared to be a sexual dalliance became their now historic lifelong romance, in which Mapplethorpe would foster Wagstaff's own burgeoning interest in contemporary photography and Wagstaff would help secure Mapplethorpe's reputation in the art world. In spite of their profound class differences, the artistic union between the philanthropically inclined Wagstaff and the prodigiously talented Mapplethorpe would rival that of Stieglitz and O'Keefe, or Rivera and Kahlo, in their ability to help reshape contemporary art history. Positioning Wagstaff's personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form and the simultaneous formation of the gay rights movement, Philip Gefter's absorbing biography provides a searing portrait of New York just before and during the age of AIDS. The result is a definitive and memorable portrait of a man and an era.By Deirdre David. 2007
A ForeWord magazine Book of the Year for 2007Charismatic, highly intelligent, and splendidly talented, Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was a Victorian…
celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic as an actress and member of the famous Kemble theatrical dynasty, as a fierce opponent of slavery despite her marriage to a wealthy slave owner, as a brilliantly successful solo performer of Shakespeare, and as the author of journals about her career and life on her husband's Georgia plantations. She was, in her own words, irresistible as a "woman who has sat at dinner alongside Byron . . . and who calls Tennyson, Alfred."Touring in America with her father in the early 1830s, Kemble impulsively wed the wealthy and charming Philadelphia bachelor Pierce Butler, beginning a tumultuous marriage that ended in a sensational divorce and custody battle fourteen years later. At the time of their marriage, Kemble had not yet visited the vast Georgia rice and cotton plantations to which Butler was heir. In the winter of 1838, they visited Butler's southern holdings, and a horrified Kemble wrote what would later be published on both sides of the Atlantic as Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation. An important text for abolitionists, it revealed the inner workings of a plantation and the appalling conditions in which slaves lived. Returning to England after her divorce, she fashioned a new career as a solo performer of Shakespeare's plays and as the author of memoirs, several travel narratives and collections of poems, a short novel, and miscellaneous essays on the theater. For the rest of her life, she would divide her time between the two countries.In the various roles she performed in her life, on stage and off--abolitionist, author, estranged wife--Kemble remained highly theatrical, appropriating and subverting nineteenth-century prescriptions for women's lives, ever rewriting the roles to which she was assigned by society and inheritance. Hers was truly a performed life, and in the first Kemble biography in twenty-five years to examine that life in its entirety, Deirdre David presents it in all its richness and complexity.By Honor Moore. 2009
"A striking portrait of a woman artist's struggle for life." --Arthur Miller Margarett Sargent was an icon of avant-garde art…
in the 1920s. In an evocative weave of biography and memoir, her granddaughter unearths for the first time the life of a spirited and gifted woman committed at all costs to self-expression.