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Baudelaire's famous description of "the best criticism" as "entertaining and poetic, not coldly analytic," lives in the essays of Peter Schjeldahl. Schjeldahl self-consciously continues the modern tradition of art criticism crafted by poet-critics, providing a sharp perspective on individual artists, their work, art-world events, and new creative directions. He challenges established views, and his infectious passion for art continually engages the reader. In essays on Rothko, Munch, Warhol, Dubuffet, Nauman, Sherman, Salle, de Kooning, Guston, Ruscha, and Koons, Schjeldahl skillfully juggles theory and analysis in exploring cultural context and technique. His writings, free of the contortions of some critical prose and characterized by a sustained focus on works of art, map the contemporary art scene in New York (with occasional forays to Los Angeles and elsewhere), cataloguing the colorful personalities, cultural attractions, and ethical hazards of the art world. It's a fast, fun trip, with arguments that fold back upon themselves in surprising revelations and reversals of the author's opinion. There is never a dull moment for those with an eye on contemporary art.
Brilliant and controversial, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote copiously about American and European art and the shaping of American culture during the decades from 1890 to 1910. Jane Weaver has recovered and assembled over fifty of Hartmann's critical writings from influential, though often obscure, turn-of-the-century journals. These reviews and theoretical essays not only provide some of the earliest known criticism of important artists and photographers of the period, but also make Hartmann's fundamental—and uniquely American—definition of modernism available to students of art and cultural history. A most useful adjunct to the text is a complete bibliography of Hartmann's writings on art, as well as an annotated checklist of all the artists treated by Hartmann in this book. Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), half German, half Japanese, learned the American cast of mind and heart as a beloved young disciple of the aged Walt Whitman. Reflecting the poet's zealous vision, Hartmann's piercing commentaries on the art centers of Boston and New York offer unparalleled documentation of the years before and after 1900.
Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity. Moving beyond the static "either/or" categories of racial identification found within typical insular conversations about mixed-race peoples, Shape Shifters explores these mixed-race identities as fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. This volume expands our understandings of how individuals and ethnic groups identify themselves within their own sociohistorical contexts. The essays in Shape Shifters explore different historical eras and reach across the globe, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, the Native people...
This is the first full-length biography of the American artist Arthur B. Davies, who played a major role in twentieth-century American art's coming-of-age. It was Davies who made possible the landmark exhibitions of The Eight and The Rockwell Kent Independent, and in 1913 he emerged as the mastermind behind the Armory Show, the first large-scale display of European modern art in the United States. Dozens of the country's best-known collectors purchased their initial avant-garde acquisitions at this show, and U.S. artists, in turn, could no longer be kept in check by the conservative National Academy after viewing works by Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, and others. Drawing on extensive archival r...
Late in the nineteenth century, many Americans were troubled by the theories of Charles Darwin, which contradicted both traditional Christian teachings and the idea of human supremacy over nature, and by an influx of foreign immigrants, who challenged the supremacy of the old Anglo-Saxon elite. In response, many people drew comfort from the theories of philosopher Herbert Spencer, who held that human society inevitably develops towards higher and more spiritual forms. In this illuminating study, Kathleen Pyne explores how Spencer's theories influenced a generation of American artists. She shows how the painters of the 1880s and 1890s, particularly John La Farge, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Dewing and the Boston school, and the impressionist painters of the Ten, developed an art dedicated to social refinement and spiritual ideals and to defending the Anglo-Saxon elite of which they were members. This linking of visual culture to the problematic conditions of American life radically reinterprets the most important trends in late nineteenth-century American painting.
"Focusing on the key historical criticism and art-works, Brennan shows how the identities of all five Stieglitz circle artists were presented in terms of the masculinity and femininity, and the heterosexuality and homosexuality, thought to be embedded in their work. Brennan also discusses Stieglitz's relation to competing artistic and critical movements, including Thomas Hart Benton's regionalist art and Clement Greenberg's reformulation of formalism."--Jacket.
Throughout his life Peters depicted the ordinary places and people of America. From Rochester to Rockport, Peters made an amazingly coherent group of fascinating, masterful American pictures.
Camera Works is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artists and writers, these new media offered hope of new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in a kind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new media introduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence of the senses. For the avant-garde, the challenges of the new media were the modern in its most concentrated form, but even for aesthetically unadventurous writers they constituted an element of modern experience that could hardly be ignored. Camera Works thus traces some of the more utopian projects of transatlantic avant-garde, includin...
Drawing on extensive interviews with artists and their assistants as well as close readings of artworks, Jones explains that much of the major work of the 1960s was compelling precisely because it was "mainstream" - central to the visual and economic culture of its time.
Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people. Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.