Download or read book Forrest Bess written by Chuck Smith and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Painter, fisherman, pseudo-hermaphrodite—Forrest Bess lived his life in obscurity at an isolated bait camp off the east coast of Texas. From 1949 through 1967, Bess showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, alongside superstar artists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Rediscovered after his death in 1977, Bess's small visionary paintings are now prized by museums and collectors for their primal beauty, and can fetch over $200,000 apiece. Bess's treasured canvases were only part of a grander theory—based on alchemy, Jungian philosophy, and aboriginal rituals—that proposed that hermaphrodism was the key to immortality. As an artist, Bess could never equivocate, and in 1960 he underwent an operation to become a pseudo-hermaphrodite. For the first time ever in print, Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle combines the beauty of Bess's art with the drama and tragedy of his personal life. Using Bess's own hauntingly sincere words (in letters to Betty Parsons, Meyer Schapiro, and others) the book traces the life and logic of this forgotten artist and explains how a love of beauty and a desire for wholeness lead Bess to self-surgery and, ultimately, a mental hospital. Forrest Bess: Key to the Riddle is a fascinating look at one of America's most notorious cult visionaries—a man who truly believed that art could save his life.
Download or read book FORRSET BESS PB written by John Doe and published by . This book was released on 2019-02 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published on the occasion of the first Forrest Bess solo exhibition in the United Kingdom at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London (3 October - 1 December 2018).This catalogue includes a broad selection of paintings dating from 1948-1970 and representing all four of the decades that define the 'visionary' period for which Bess has come to be known.Accompanying the works is a new essay by Professor Mark Turner, King's College London, on Bess's life, his theories and art.Frequently relegated to the peripheries of art history, both as a Texas native and a rarely understood queer man, Bess might nevertheless be re-located at the heart of American Modernism.Between 1949 and 1967 he showed at least five times at Betty Parsons' New York gallery, on the same walls that debuted Barnett Newman, Richard Tuttle, Ellsworth Kelly, and other focal figures of twentieth-century abstraction.Simultaneously he engaged in correspondence with sociologists, psychotherapists, art historians, and even NASA, to communicate a series of radical medico-mystical theories he had devised that were, he believed, of critical importance to Mankind.
Download or read book Midcentury Modern Art in Texas written by Katie Robinson Edwards and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was Texas, where artists absorbed and interpreted the latest, most radical formal lessons from Mexico, the East Coast, and Europe, while still responding to the state's dramatic history and geography. This barely known chapter in the story of American art is the focus of Midcentury Modern Art in Texas. Presenting new research and artwork that has never before been published, Katie Robinson Edwards examines the contributions of many modernist painters and sculptors in Texas, with an emphasis on the era's most abstract and compelling artists. Edwards looks first at the Dallas Nine and the 1936 Texas Centennial, which offered local artists a chance to take stock of who they were and where they stood within the national artistic setting. She then traces the modernist impulse through various manifestations, including the foundations of early Texas modernism in Houston; early practitioners of abstraction and non-objectivity; the Fort Worth Circle; artists at the University of Texas at Austin; Houston artists in the 1950s; sculpture in and around an influential Fort Worth studio; and, to see how some Texas artists fared on a national scale, the Museum of Modern Art's "Americans" exhibitions. The first full-length treatment of abstract art in Texas during this vital and canon-defining period, Midcentury Modern Art in Texas gives these artists their due place in American art, while also valuing the quality of Texan-ness that subtly undergirds much of their production.
Download or read book The Artist s Reality written by Mark Rothko and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Rothko’s classic book on artistic practice, ideals, and philosophy, now with an expanded introduction and an afterword by Makoto Fujimura Stored in a New York City warehouse for many years after the artist’s death, this extraordinary manuscript by Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was published to great acclaim in 2004. Probably written in 1940 or 1941, it contains Rothko’s ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of “American art,” and much more. In his introduction, illustrated with examples of Rothko’s work and pages from the manuscript, the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, describes the discovery of the manuscript and the fascinating process of its initial publication. This edition includes discussion of Rothko’s “Scribble Book” (1932), his notes on teaching art to children, which has received renewed scholarly attention in recent years and provides clues to the genesis of Rothko’s thinking on pedagogy. In an afterword written for this edition, artist and author Makoto Fujimura reflects on how Rothko’s writings offer a “lifeboat” for “art world refugees” and a model for upholding artistic ideals. He considers the transcendent capacity of Rothko’s paintings to express pure ideas and the significance of the decade-long gap between The Artist’s Reality and Rothko’s mature paintings, during which the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb were unleashed upon the world.
Download or read book Bamboo in Japan written by Nancy Moore Bess and published by Kodansha International. This book was released on 2001-05-18 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a fully illustrated guide to the art, craft and design of bamboo, as demonstrated by the Japanese. It demonstrates how to use inexpensive materials to create sophisticated effects in the home and garden. A list of bamboo collections, gardens and research sources is included. For centuries, bamboo has fascinated legions of craftspeople, plant lovers and devotees of the handcrafted object. And nowhere is bamboo used more elegantly and distinctly than in Japan. Its presence touches every part of daily life-art, crafts, design, literature, and food. Its beauty
Download or read book The Education of Little Tree written by Forrest Carter and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2001-08-31 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Education of Little Tree has been embedded in controversy since the revelation that the autobiographical story told by Forrest Carter was a complete fabrication. The touching novel, which has entranced readers since it was first published in 1976, has since raised questions, many unanswered, about how this quaint and engaging tale of a young, orphaned boy could have been written by a man whose life was so overtly rooted in hatred. How can this story, now discovered to be fictitious, fill our hearts with so much emotion as we champion Little Tree’s childhood lessons and future successes? The Education of Little Tree tells with poignant grace the story of a boy who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee during the Great Depression. “Little Tree,” as his grandparents call him, is shown how to hunt and survive in the mountains and taught to respect nature in the Cherokee Way—taking only what is needed, leaving the rest for nature to run its course. Little Tree also learns the often callous ways of white businessmen, sharecroppers, Christians, and politicians. Each vignette, whether frightening, funny, heartwarming, or sad, teaches our protagonist about life, love, nature, work, friendship, and family. A classic of its era and an enduring book for all ages, The Education of Little Tree continues to share important lessons. Little Tree’s story allows us to reflect on the past and look toward the future. It offers us an opportunity to ask ourselves what we have learned and where it will take us.
Download or read book My 1980s and Other Essays written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new book of essays by the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin"--
Download or read book Outliers and American Vanguard Art written by Lynne Cooke and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some 250 works explore three distinct periods in American history when mainstream and outlier artists intersected, ushering in new paradigms based on inclusion, integration, and assimilation. The exhibition aligns work by such diverse artists as Charles Sheeler, Christina Ramberg, and Matt Mullican with both historic folk art and works by self-taught artists ranging from Horace Pippin to Janet Sobel and Joseph Yoakum. It also examines a recent influx of radically expressive work made on the margins that redefined the boundaries of the mainstream art world, while challenging the very categories of "outsider" and "self-taught." Historicizing the shifting identity and role of this distinctly American version of modernism's "other," the exhibition probes assumptions about creativity, artistic practice, and the role of the artist in contemporary culture. The exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke, senior curator, special projects in modern art, National Gallery of Art.--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Wild Children of William Blake written by John Yau and published by . This book was released on 2017-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nearly fifty essays collected in The Wild Childrenof William Blake, John Yau explores the careers of a wide range of poets and artists who are, like the nineteenth century poet, dissenters from consensus--Wallace Berman, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Jay DeFeo, Hilma af Klint, Katherine Bradford, Barbara Takenaga, Forrest Bess, Emmet Gowin, Sophia Al-Maria, and Simon Gouverneur, to name but a few. Yau locates and defines a shared sensibility among his subjects whose work is often set at an oblique angle to the larger culture. He probes the reasons for this stance and its aesthetic consequences and, most provocatively, inspects the how and why behind the impulse to deflect their importance. For instance, he asserts that Jay DeFeo's masterwork, The Rose, "calls many assumptions into question and challenges canonical thinking about what constitutes a major achievement in postwar art." This questioning marks each essay in the collection, a volume that sets out to reorder, if not outright dismantle, the exclusionary hierarchies that have dominated cultural discourse for decades. Blake's "wild children" are alive and well, and in Yau's nimble, intelligent prose their dissonance is exactingly parsed and joyously celebrated.
Download or read book Neo Avantgarde and Culture Industry written by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-02-28 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years, each looking at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. Some critics view the postwar avant-garde as the empty recycling of forms and strategies from the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others view it, more positively, as a new articulation of the specific conditions of cultural production in the postwar period. Benjamin Buchloh, one of the most insightful art critics and theoreticians of recent decades, argues for a dialectical approach to these positions.This collection contains eighteen essays written by Buchloh over the last twenty years. Each looks at a single artist within the framework of specific theoretical and historical questions. The art movements covered include Nouveau Realisme in France (Arman, Yves Klein, Jacques de la Villegle) art in postwar Germany (Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), American Fluxus and pop art (Robert Watts and Andy Warhol), minimalism and postminimal art (Michael Asher and Richard Serra), and European and American conceptual art (Daniel Buren, Dan Graham). Buchloh addresses some artists in terms of their oppositional approaches to language and painting, for example, Nancy Spero and Lawrence Weiner. About others, he asks more general questions concerning the development of models of institutional critique (Hans Haacke) and the theorization of the museum (Marcel Broodthaers); or he addresses the formation of historical memory in postconceptual art (James Coleman). One of the book's strengths is its systematic, interconnected account of the key issues of American and European artistic practice during two decades of postwar art. Another is Buchloh's method, which integrates formalist and socio-historical approaches specific to each subject.
Download or read book A Fine Example of Art written by John Lurie and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wildly insightful look at the hilarious and haunting paintings of one of downtown New York's most renowned painters. John Lurie alternatively exposes or addresses the larger, enduring myths of culture through sketches of seemingly lost childhood reveries and cryptic symbolism.
Download or read book Deviant Desires written by Katharine Gates and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2017-12-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can there still be anything new to say about the erotic, sexy play, and desire? YES, because what drives each of us to any sexual fixation-from feet or fat to latex or ponyplay-may hold mysteries, but can never be inexplicable. YES, because even the most seemingly unusual kinks and fetishes, like trample and crush, cannibal play, quicksand and male pregnancy, derive from such universal themes as power and transformation. YES, because when some taboos crumble, others emerge, with often surprising, delightful, and even disturbing consequences for our psyches and libidos. YES, because as human culture evolves, we newly discover sexual excitement and fulfillment from scenarios (such as car accidents) and objects (like gas masks and medical equipment) that never existed before. YES, because wherever there is darkness, secrecy, and silence, what's most essential is light, revelation, and ever better communication.
Download or read book Cy Twombly written by Michelle White and published by Menil Foundation. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A breathtaking exploration of one of Twombly's largest paintings, the second version of his Treatise on the Veil One of the most important American postwar artists, Cy Twombly (1928-2011) engaged with mythological and poetic source material, setting him apart from other artists of his generation. In 1970, Twombly revisited his 1968 painting Treatise on the Veil and, in a short period of focused creativity, produced a painting--Treatise on the Veil (Second Version)--on a single, 33-foot canvas along with more than a dozen related drawings. This handsomely produced oversize book features three essays that examine these works in relation to Twombly's oeuvre, contemporaneous explorations of time, the Orpheus myth, and a musical composition that Twombly cited as an influence. Large images and details bring us in close to Twombly's magnificent meditation on time and space. Distributed for The Menil Collection
Download or read book Allora and Calzadilla Specters of Noon written by Michelle White and published by Menil Foundation. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautiful presentation of a new suite of works made for the Menil Collection by Allora & Calzadilla The Puerto Rico-based collaborative duo Allora & Calzadilla created Specters of Noon as a group of seven large-scale works specifically for the Menil Collection. The ensemble is orchestrated around the idea of solar noon, a notion derived from Surrealist texts by Caillois, Césaire, and others that probe the transcultural mythology of noon--a time when shadows vanish and delirious visions momentarily reign. The works include light projections, guano, ship engines, live vocal performance, and coal. Using the Menil's Surrealist holdings as a point of departure, Specters of Noon is infused throughout with a Caribbean perspective that addresses the instability of environmental and colonial politics; one work is a power transformer damaged in Hurricane Maria that is half-sheathed in bronze. Filled with stunning installation photography and insightful texts both commissioned and reprinted, this volume captures the spirit of Jennifer Allora (b. 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla's (b. 1971) deeply researched and multifaceted work.
Download or read book Transitions and Exits written by Ari Marcopoulos and published by powerHouse Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interview by Louise Neri and Edited by Diego Cortez '...delivers of the private moments and personal signifiers of the professional snowboarder's life with the inventiveness of a freestyler and the silent stillness of a mountain's virgin snow' - Paper magazine Following the seasons to keep up with the 21st century's newest tribe of nomads, Marcopoulous here captures the snowboarding lifestyle, from the excitement and awesome tricks to the injuries and bad-weather boredom. With 230 full-colour photos.
Download or read book Robert Gober written by Hilton Als and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. In the years since, his reputation has continued to grow, commensurate with the rich and complex body of work he has produced. Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive large-scale survey of the artists career to take place in the United States, this publication presents his works in all mediums, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments, as well as a distinctive selection of drawings, prints, and photographs. Prepared in close collaboration with the artist, it traces the development of a remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform the artists work today. An essay by Hilton Als, and an in-depth chronology with extensive input from the artist himself, foregrounds images from Gobers archives, including many neverbefore- published photographs of works in progress.
Download or read book Art and Queer Culture written by Catherine Lord and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
