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An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World
Par 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.Leonardo's Holy Child: A Connoiseur's Search for Lost Art in America
Par 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.Wagstaff: A Biography
Par 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.Fanny Kemble
Par 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.The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter
Par 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.Leonardo Da Vinci: Young Artist, Writer, and Inventor
Par George E. Stanley. 2005
This book is a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, best known as the Renaissance painter who created the "Mona Lisa"…
and "The Last Supper" and also made great contributions as a sculptor, architect, engineer and scientist.Between Lives: An Artist and Her World
Par Dorothea Tanning. 2001
The life and times of one of our most enchanting artists; a twentieth-century fairy tale, lovingly remembered and luminously told.…
Fourteen years ago, the artist Dorothea Tanning published Birthday, a collection of reminiscences. Now she has expanded it into a memoir of her journey through the last century as confidant, collaborator, and muse to some of its most inspired minds and personalities: a diverse assemblage that ranges from the fathers of dada and surrealism to Virgil Thompson, George Balanchine, Alberto Giacometti, Dylan Thomas, Truman Capote, Joan Miró, James Merrill, and many more. At its center is the relationship, tenderly rendered, between Tanning and her famed husband, the enigmatic surrealist Max Ernst. Whether recalling the poignant presence of her friend Joseph Cornell or simply marveling at the facades along a Venice canal, "their filmy reflections fluttering in the dirty canal like fragile altar cloths hung out to dry," Tanning's writing is beguiling, wry, and shot through with the same eye for pregnant detail and immanent magic that marks her art.Herndon Davis
Par Thomas J. Noel, Craig Leavitt. 2016
"Herndon Davis, an artist and journalist, dedicated his life to depicting the major landmarks and personalities of Colorado in watercolor,…
oil, pen, and pencil. Best known for the Face on the Barroom Floor, the portrait of an alluring woman on the floor of the Teller House Hotel barroom in Central City, Colorado, Davis was a prolific artist whose murals, sketches, and portraits can be found all over the state, from the Sage Room of the Oxford Hotel on Seventeenth Street to the Denver Press Club poker room. Despite his numerous contributions, his work was never showcased or exhibited in the traditional manner.In this biography and first-ever collection featuring most of his life's work, authors Craig Leavitt and Thomas J. Noel provide a detailed look into Davis's life and career and include a catalog of almost 200 photographs of his work from Colorado and around the country. They also put his work into the broader context of the time through comparison with such contemporary Colorado artists as Muriel Sibell Wolle, Allen Tupper True, Charles Waldo Love, and Juan Menchaca.Published to coincide with the Denver Public Library's 2016 exhibition--the only public display of Davis's work to date--and bringing deserved attention to this overlooked figure, Herndon Davis: Painting Colorado History, 1901-1962 is an important contribution to Colorado's cultural history.This book and the accompanying exhibit are sponsored by the Western History/Genealogy Department at the Denver Public Library. Publication originated and supported in part by Diane B. Wunnike."26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest
Par Greg Vandy, Daniel Person. 2016
In 1941, Woody Guthrie wrote 26 songs in 30 days--including classics like "Roll On Columbia" and "Pastures of Plenty"--when he…
was hired by the Bonneville Power Administration to promote the benefits of cheap hydroelectric power, irrigation, and the Grand Coulee Dam. Timed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of this project, KEXP DJ Greg Vandy takes readers inside the unusual partnership between one of America's great folk artists and the federal government, and shows how the American folk revival was a response to hard times.26 Songs In 30 Days plunges deeply into the historical context of the time and the progressive politics that embraced Social Democracy during an era in which the United States had been severely suffering from The Great Depression. And though this is a musical history of a vibrant American musical icon and a specific part of the country, it couldn't be a better reminder of how timeless and expansive such topics are in today's political discourse.From the Hardcover edition.Akiane: Her Life, Her Art, Her Poetry
Par Akiane Kramarik. 2006
Ten-year-old prodigy Akiane Kramarik shares her artwork, poetry, and the fascinating story surrounding her talent.Growing up in a home with…
an atheistic mother and a non-participating Catholic father did not stop four-year-old Akiane Kramarik from finding God. This girl's dreams began a conversation in the home that has eventually brought them all to Christianity and the world's attention. Akiane: Her Life, Her Art, Her Poetry is a collection of the best of Akiane's full-color paintings and poetry created from ages 4 to 10, along with details of her family and the amazing stories that surround each unique artwork. Already a media professional, Akiane has been interviewed on programs such as Oprah, World News Tonight, Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN, and Schuller's Hour of Power. Akiane will be one of twenty visual artists participating in the October "Listen" event raising money for the world's needy children. Today Akiane's art is available online at www.artakiane.com.Thomas Nast
Par Fiona Deans Halloran. 2003
Thomas Nast (1840-1902), the founding father of American political cartooning, is perhaps best known for his cartoons portraying political parties…
as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast's legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly magazine. Throughout his career, his drawings provided a pointed critique that forced readers to confront the contradictions around them. In this thoroughgoing and lively biography, Fiona Deans Halloran focuses not just on Nast's political cartoons for Harper's but also on his place within the complexities of Gilded Age politics and highlights the many contradictions in his own life: he was an immigrant who attacked immigrant communities, a supporter of civil rights who portrayed black men as foolish children in need of guidance, and an enemy of corruption and hypocrisy who idolized Ulysses S. Grant. He was a man with powerful friends, including Mark Twain, and powerful enemies, including William M. "Boss" Tweed. Halloran interprets Nast's work, explores his motivations and ideals, and illuminates Nast's lasting legacy on American political culture.Dangerous Dossiers
Par Herbert Mitgang. 2013
Dangerous Dossiers is as powerful and relevant today as it was when it first made worldwide headlines 25 years ago:…
a chilling reminder of the dangers of unfettered government intrusion into the lives and beliefs of private citizens, whether famous or not. This shocking account by award-winning author and former New York Times cultural reporter Herbert Mitgang provided hard evidence for the first time of the decades-long cultural war waged by the FBI and other federal intelligence-gathering agencies against scores of the world's most renowned writers and artists. Using the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose actual surveillance files kept by the FBI, Mitgang documented that the targets of government snooping included a who's-who of the literary and artistic worlds whom J. Edgar Hoover and his red-baiting legions suspected of communist leanings or outright disloyalty, usually with no basis whatsoever. They included: Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, Carl Sandburg, Norman Mailer, Robert Frost, and Allen Ginsburg; and artists including Alexander Calder, Georgia O'Keefe, and Henry Moore. Called "a fascinating, illuminating and above all, morally decent book" by The New York Times, and "first-class journalism" by The Associated Press, this exposé and the many "dangerous dossiers" it contains reveal no evidence of guilt on the part of the targets of the FBI witch-hunts. But Mitgang finds plenty of proof of the paranoia, political bias, and cultural illiteracy of those who controlled the nation's most powerful investigative agencies.M Train
Par Patti Smith. 2015
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey into the mind of this legendary artist, told…
through the prism of cafés and haunts she has visited and worked in around the world. M Train is a journey through seventeen "stations." It begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. We then travel, through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations: from Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico, to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; from the ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith buys just before Hurricane Sandy hits, to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation, alongside signature memories, including of her life in Michigan with her husband, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith, whose untimely death was an irremediable loss. For it is loss, as well as the consolation we might salvage from it, that lies at the heart of this exquisitely told memoir, one augmented by stunning black-and-white Polaroids taken by Smith herself. M Train is a meditation on endings and on beginnings: a poetic tour de force by one of the most brilliant, multi-platform artists at work today.Citizen Keane
Par Cletus Nelson. 2014
Teary, big-eyed orphans and a multitude of trashy knockoffs epitomized American kitsch art as they clogged thrift stores for decades.When…
Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane-the credited artist of the weepy waifs, for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992-he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a con man than an artist, and that he forced his wife Margaret to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result, those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.Parfrey's story was reprinted in Juxtapoz magazine and inspired a Margaret Keane exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. And now director Tim Burton is filming a movie about the Keanes called Big Eyes, and it's scheduled for release in 2014. Burton's Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp, was based upon the Feral House book edited and published by Parfrey about the angora sweater-wearing B-film director.Citizen Keane is a book-length expansion of Parfrey's original article, providing fascinating biographical and sociological details, photographs, color reproductions, and appendices with legal documents and pseudonymous essays by Tom Wolfe inflating big eye art to those painted by the great masters.Frank's Home
Par Richard Nelson. 2011
"A thoroughly invigorating, tightly focused piece of Chekhovian drama, wherein chatter about work and art . . . fail to…
mask deep vulnerability."-Chicago TribuneA play about Frank Lloyd Wright set in the summer of 1923, when the great architect has recently left Chicago for California, hoping to mend his relationship with his adult children. Richard Nelson brings to life two great architectural demigods, Wright and Louis Sullivan, only to show their all-too-human frailties.Richard Nelson's plays include Rodney's Wife, Goodnight Children Everywhere, Some Americans Abroad, Franny's Way, New England, and James Joyce's The Dead (with Shaun Davey), winner of the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical.Wang Wei the Painter-Poet
Par Dorothy Brush Walmsley, Lewis Calwin Walmsley. 1966
This Chinese art history book is a study of a single poet-artist--Wang Wei--perhaps the most influential of antiquity.This eighth-century genius,…
whose versatility is comparable to that of the great Italian Leonardo da Vinci, lived during the Tang Dynasty when the most brilliant cultural period in Chinese history was at its height.Whatever he attempted--as artist, poet, musician, doctor and official--he performed with a master's touch. As a poet he earned the title of "Great." He is acknowledged as the father of pure Chinese landscape painting., destined to become classic throughout the world. Wang's initiative in monochromes and his advanced skills in techniques were harbingers of different types of paintings.Greatest of all his innovations is the long horizontal Chinese scroll, reaching a length, in some instances, of over twenty feet.Mark Rothko
Par Annie Cohen-Solal. 2015
Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in…
1903. He immigrated to the United States at age ten, taking with him his Talmudic education and his memories of pogroms and persecutions in Russia. His integration into American society began with a series of painful experiences, especially as a student at Yale, where he felt marginalized for his origins and ultimately left the school. The decision to become an artist led him to a new phase in his life. Early in his career, Annie Cohen-Solal writes, "he became a major player in the social struggle of American artists, and his own metamorphosis benefited from the unique transformation of the U.S. art world during this time." Within a few decades, he had forged his definitive artistic signature, and most critics hailed him as a pioneer. The numerous museum shows that followed in major U.S. and European institutions ensured his celebrity. But this was not enough for Rothko, who continued to innovate. Ever faithful to his habit of confronting the establishment, he devoted the last decade of his life to cultivating his new conception of art as an experience, thanks to the commission of a radical project, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Cohen-Solal's fascinating biography, based on considerable archival research, tells the unlikely story of how a young immigrant from Dvinsk became a crucial transforming agent of the art world--one whose legacy prevails to this day.A Key to the Louvre: Memoirs of a Curator
Par Mark Polizzotti, Michel Laclotte. 2007
An art world insider provides a witty and penetrating account of fifty years at the center of international culture.Art historian,…
curator, and museum director Michel Laclotte has been at the forefront of French cultural life over the past half century. This informal autobiography sheds light on his brilliant career with warmth and directness. Highlights include twenty years as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Musée du Louvre, heading the team that created the Musée dOrsay, and taking the reins of the Louvre to lead the effort that culminated in the museums transformation into the "Grand Louvre," one of the worlds preeminent cultural attractions.Raising the curtain on fifty years of Western art scholarship, intrigue, and achievement, Laclotte introduces an extraordinary cast of characters who set Frances cultural direction in the postwar period from Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux in the 1950s to François Mitterand in the 1980s and 1990s. His story overlaps with virtually every major scholarly figure in French art history of the last half-century, as well as Laclottes mentors and colleagues throughout and beyond Europe, from Roberto Longhi and Anthony Blunt to Sir John Pope-Hennessy and Millard Meiss. An incomparable testament to a period of seismic change in the museum world, this volume will be essential reading for art world afficianados and all students of art and modern culture.Love Made Visible: Scenes from a Mostly Happy Marriage
Par Jean Gibran, Charles Giuliano, Katherine French. 2014
Jean Gibran's Love Made Visible is the moving story of a marriage, of Boston's South End, and the Boston Expressionist…
art scene that first flourished there in the 1930s and '40s. A teacher in the Boston public schools, she was for fifty years married to Kahlil Gibran, sculptor and artisan, and cousin of the noted poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran. She reflects lucidly on her role as spouse of a gifted artist in the decades spanning the 1950s to 2008. In retracing the course of her at times stormy marriage, she reflects on tests and joys of embracing another culture in a relationship, raising a child in the household of a working artist, and enabling her husband's prolific work as a sculptor and craftsman. At the same time, she recalls to life forgotten, underappreciated artists of the Boston School and decades of artistic ferment that found a welcome home in the South End. Constant throughout this diary is her perseverance in the face of loss and bereavement, comforted by an enduring sense of place. Like the "mostly happy marriage" and the fiercely local and independent artistic movement to which she pays homage, Gibran's idiosyncratic memoir confronts the costs-and reaffirms the value-of creative commitment, in art and in life.Opposite Contraries
Par Emily Carr, Susan Crean. 2003
Collected from Emily Carr's private and public writings, these previously unpublished pieces reveal the outspoken artist at her most forthright.…
Expurgated sections from Carr's journals detail her anguished meditations on her spiritual mission, musings about Native culture and the white community's reaction to it, and thoughts about her family. Her groundbreaking 1913 "Lecture on Totems", her first recorded writing on Native art and people, is also included, as are some of her most fascinating letters to friends and colleagues.