Alfred Stieglitz is perhaps best known for his spiritually rich photographs of his surroundings, family, friends, and the many women he loved, including his second wife, painter Georgia O'Keeffe. But his influence went beyond his own individual artistry. At his gallery 291 he presented the first American exhibitions of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rousseau. His militant advocacy of photography as art won widespread acclaim for the medium. View More...
This book, in the grand tradition of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, looks at the extraordinary world of ideas known as Bohemia. It takes the reader to a party on the Rive Gauche of 1950s Paris to meet William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, to sit in a Tel Aviv coffee-house just after the Six Day War, sipping expresso and arguing politics and stumble across a troupe of LSD-inspired street actors in San Francisco at the height of the 1960s. View More...
Pissarro's weekly letters to his son Lucien, covering the dramatic period of Impressionism from 1883 to the painter's death in 1905, form what might be called a diary of the Impressionist school. In these wise, reflective, warmhearted missives, Pissarro, called the father of Impressionism, presents the growth and development of Impressionism and the struggles of its practitioners, as well as pungent and evocative observations on the politics, literature, and daily life of France in the late 19th century. But more than anything, these letters reveal an artist elucidating the inner resources of ... View More...
Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true "painter's painter" whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s. The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten yea... View More...
A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.--Mary... View More...
This acclaimed autobiography by one of the twentieth century's greatest satirical artists is as much a graphic portrait of Germany in chaos after the Treaty of Versailles as it is a memoir of a remarkable artist's development. Grosz's account of a world gone mad is as acute and provocative as the art that depicts it, and this translation of a work long out of print restores the spontaneity, humor, and energy of the author's German text. It also includes a chapter on Grosz's experience in the Soviet Union-omitted from the original English-language edition-as well as more writings about his twen... View More...
In this engaging and thoroughly researched biography, Charles Nicholl uncovers the man behind the myth of the great Renaissance master. At times a painter, sculptor, inventor, draftsman, and anatomist, Leonardo's life cannot easily be summarized. And yet, Nicholl skillfully traces the artist's early days as an illegitimate child in Tuscany; his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in Florence; his service with some of the most powerful Renaissance families; his relationships with Michelangelo and Machiavelli; and his final days at the French royal court. In addition, Nicholl looks beyond the well-kn... View More...
Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesNovelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall's work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to "narrate" the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus ... View More...
Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare is not the first full-length biography of Duchamp, but it is the first to present him in all his human contradictions and to take a refreshingly objective look at his real contribution to modern art. The well-known facts are explored here: Duchamp's myriad personal relations (with family, lovers, collectors and artists ranging from Man Ray, Picabia and Breton to the Stettheimer sisters and the Arensbergs); the creation of major works such as the "readymades" and the "Large Glass"; his passion for chess and supposed abandonment of art. But beyond this,... View More...
One of the most important German artists of the twentieth century, Max Beckmann is known for the depth and sensuous force of his works, but little is known about his personal life. Self-Portrait in Words reveals Beckmann's experience of life from the first years of his career in Berlin and Paris through his final years in the United States. This collection of Beckmann's writings serves as a companion to his art and a testament to the complexities of his life. Barbara Copeland Buenger . . . has done an excellent job of editing and annotating Beckmann's voluminous private and public writings.--A... View More...
Judy Chicago is America's most dynamic living artist. Her works comprise a dizzying array of media from performance and installation to the glittering table laid for thirty-nine iconic women in The Dinner Party (now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum), the groundbreaking Birth Project, and the meticulously researched Holocaust Project. She designed the monumental installation for Dior's 2020 Paris couture show and, in 2019, established the Judy Chicago Portal, which will help to accomplish her lifelong goal of overcoming the erasure that has eclipsed the achievements of so many women.Th... View More...
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE In this brilliant second and final volume of the definitive biography of Lucian Freud--one of the most influential, enigmatic and secretive artists of the twentieth century--William Feaver, the noted art critic, draws on years of daily conversations with Freud, on his private papers and letters and on interviews with his friends and family to explore the intimate life of Freud, from age forty-five to his death in 2011 at the age of eighty-nine. The final forty years of Freud's life were a period of increasing recognition and fame, and of prodigious... View More...
Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life. At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal "Fountain" and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By reco... View More...
