Download or read book The Drawings and Watercolors of Lewis Mumford written by Vincent DiMattio and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than half a century the distinguished critic, humanist, and historian Lewis Mumford accumulated sketches and watercolors that he executed while engaged in exploratory rambles through cities and landscapes. He also sketched notable people associated with his early education and career as a nationally recognized writer, which resulted in the National Medal of Freedom and The National Medal of Art. His hundreds of drawings lay buried in folders in Amenia, New York until the 1980's. Now they can be sampled and enjoyed as a hitherto unknown extension of a literary career that lasted more than 70 years. The authors are uniquely qualified to assemble this volume. They spent many hours with Mumford and his wife, Sophia, until his death in 1990, and secured custody of all the drawings and watercolors for their institution, Monmouth University. Dr. Stunkel is a historian and has written on Mumford's thought. Professor DiMattio is an exhibiting artist and curator of the Mumford collection. This volume is focused on Mumford as a gifted but unintentional artist. The Preface was supplied by Sophia Mumford before her death in 1997. watercolors came to light, Mumford's strengths as an untrained amateur with pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor, and his intimate connections with art as a critic. The volume features 38 of the drawings and watercolors reproduced from the original works, with two photographs of Mumford in the 1920's and 1970's. Cross-referenced pages containing commentary on each piece and apt quotations from Mumford's books accompany the images. Following the images and commentary is a catalogue raisonne of 321 drawings and 16 rare photographs. The volume concludes with works cited and a bibliographical essay.
Download or read book Mumford on Modern Art in the 1930s written by Lewis Mumford and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Superbly crafted little essays, Lewis Mumford's New Yorker pieces called 'The Art Galleries' well deserve this handsome republication. They offer supremely tasteful guided tours of the galleries and museums of Manhattan at the time when the canon of Western art, including modernism, was being secured, against a background of tension between abstraction and realism and between aestheticism and social commitment. The essays are a gift for our own troubled times from one of the great humane and versatile critics of the twentieth century; they offer the reassurance of urbanity, poise, and commitment to art as a primary social necessity."—Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Grey Emeritus Professor of English, Yale University
Download or read book Up from the Depths written by Aaron Sachs and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A double portrait of two of America’s most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between them—and their uncanny relevance to our age of crisis Up from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the most important writers in American history—the novelist and poet Herman Melville (1819–1891) and one of his earliest biographers, the literary critic and historian Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). Deftly cutting back and forth between the writers, Aaron Sachs reveals the surprising resonances between their lives, work, and troubled times—and their uncanny relevance in our own age of crisis. The author of Moby-Dick was largely forgotten for several decades after his death, but Mumford helped spearhead Melville’s revival in the aftermath of World War I and the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, when American culture needed a forebear with a suitably dark vision. As Mumford’s career took off and he wrote books responding to the machine age, urban decay, world war, and environmental degradation, it was looking back to Melville’s confrontation with crises such as industrialization, slavery, and the Civil War that helped Mumford to see his own era clearly. Mumford remained obsessed with Melville, ultimately helping to canonize him as America’s greatest tragedian. But largely forgotten today is one of Mumford’s key insights—that Melville’s darkness was balanced by an inspiring determination to endure. Amid today’s foreboding over global warming, racism, technology, pandemics, and other crises, Melville and Mumford remind us that we’ve been in this struggle for a long time. To rediscover these writers today is to rediscover how history can offer hope in dark times.
Download or read book The Drawings and Watercolors of Thomas Moran 1837 1926 written by Thomas Moran and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Understanding Lewis Mumford written by Kenneth R. Stunkel and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a readable exposition of Lewis Mumford's views on dozens of issues with continuous, selective reference to his published works. Elucidates Mumford's thoughts about history and its meaning, human nature and its development, science and technology, cities, art, architecture, and more. Preface; Lewis Mumford was a writer who ranged freely across the landscapes of history, literature, architecture, technology, civilization, environmentalism, public life, and the human mind. Malcolm Cowley called him the last of the great humanists. He considered himself a generalist, and deliberately took on the big picture in many of his works, which is anathema to many today. Though his organic vision appears throughout his work, it may not always be apparent how the thread connects between his works. in the culture of the machine? Or that art can be a surer touchstone of reality than science? Or that cities should be conceived as bio-regions? Or that we have been busily building a suicidal power complex as deadly to life, and especially human life, as it is vulnerable to sudden collapse like a house of cards? Consider Mumford's 1970 criticism of the World Trade Center, made as it was still being built: ...a characteristic example of the purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism that are eviscerating the living tissue of every great city...But Dinosaurs were handicapped by insufficient brains and the World Trade Center is only another Dinosaur. Thirty years later the tragedy of the September 11, 2001 attack was showed how vulnerable the power complex can be, and how deadly that building handicapped by insufficient brains proved itself to be for thousands of people it entombed.
Download or read book Technics and Civilization written by Lewis Mumford and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-10-30 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934—before television, the personal computer, and the Internet even appeared on our periphery. Drawing upon art, science, philosophy, and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explained the origin of the machine age and traced its social results, asserting that the development of modern technology had its roots in the Middle Ages rather than the Industrial Revolution. Mumford sagely argued that it was the moral, economic, and political choices we made, not the machines that we used, that determined our then industrially driven economy. Equal parts powerful history and polemic criticism, Technics and Civilization was the first comprehensive attempt in English to portray the development of the machine age over the last thousand years—and to predict the pull the technological still holds over us today. “The questions posed in the first paragraph of Technics and Civilization still deserve our attention, nearly three quarters of a century after they were written.”—Journal of Technology and Culture
Download or read book Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America s First Museum of Modern Art written by Pamela Carter-Birken and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He was born to privilege and sought the world of art. She lived at the center of that world—a working artist encouraged by the famous artists in her extended family. Together, Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips founded The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the first museum of modern art in America. It opened in the grand Phillips family home in 1921, eight years before New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and only a few weeks after they wed. Duncan took the lead in developing the collection and showcasing it. Marjorie kept space and time to paint. Duncan considered Marjorie a partner in the museum even though she was not directly involved in all purchasing and presentation decisions. To him, her influence was omnipresent. Although Duncan’s writings on artists and art history were widely published, he chose not to provide much instruction for visitors to the museum. Instead, he combined signature methods of displaying art which live on at The Phillips Collection. Phillips had viewers in mind when he hung American art with European art—or art of the past with modern art, and he frequently rearranged works to stimulate fresh encounters. With unfettered access to archival material, author Pamela Carter-Birken argues that The Phillips Collection’s relevancy comes from Duncan Phillips’s commitment to providing optimal conditions for personal exploration of art. In-depth collecting of certain artists was one of Phillips’s methods of encouraging independent thinking in viewers. Paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Jacob Lawrence, and Mark Rothko provide testament to the power of America’s first museum of modern art.
Download or read book Lewis Mumford a Life written by Donald L. Miller and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malcolm Cowley called Lewis Mumford the last of the great humanists, and indeed, in more than six decades of writing, Mumford made contributions to history, philosophy, literature, art, architectural criticism, and urban planning. The author of some thirty books, Mumford produced a body of work almost unequaled in the twentieth century for its range and richness. A New York Times Notable Book, Donald Miller's engagingly written biography reveals Mumford's full and fascinating life. Based on ten years of research and unprecedented access to original and private papers, Miller penetrates Mumford's reserved public persona and takes in the complete man, his works as well as his days, as he struggles to transform the world -- and his own life -- in decades marked by unparalleled change. Miller is an excellent critical guide to Mumford's voluminous writing. -- The New Yorker A gracefully written biography. -- Francesca McKeon, San Francisco Chronicle With this large, large-spirited life of Lewis Mumford ... Miller takes his place in the first rank of contemporary American biographers. -- David McCullough
Download or read book Meanings of Abstract Art written by Paul Crowther and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense—the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). Abstract art takes many different forms, but there are shared key structural features centered on two basic relations to nature. The first abstracts from nature, to give selected aspects of it a new and extremely unfamiliar appearance. The second affirms a natural creativity that issues in new, autonomous forms that are not constrained by mimetic conventions. (Such creativity is often attributed to the power of the unconscious.) The book covers three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.
Download or read book What was Contemporary Art written by Richard Meyer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as though it were a radically new phenomenon unmoored from history. Yet all works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them. In What Was Contemporary Art? Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, exploring episodes in the study, exhibition, and reception of early twentieth-century art and visual culture.
Download or read book Charles Burchfield written by Colleen Lahan Makowski and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For scholars exploring the career of American artist Charles Burchfield and the period in which he worked (1893-1967), this book provides access to listings of his exhibitions and museum collections where his art can be found along with books, articles, films, and exhibition catalogs.
Download or read book Sticks and Stones written by Lewis Mumford and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wild Exuberance written by Rebecca Foster and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-16 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augmented by scholarly essays on aspects of Weston's painting, this catalog offers over 100 colour plates of his work.
Download or read book Irene Rice Pereira written by Karen A. Bearor and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2011-07-06 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artist Irene Rice Pereira was a significant figure in the New York art world of the 1930s and 1940s, who shared an interest in Jungianism with the better-known Abstract Expressionists and with various women artists and writers seeking "archetypal" imagery. Yet her artistic philosophy and innovative imagery elude easy classification with her artistic contemporaries. In consequence, her work is rarely included in studies of the period and is almost unknown to the general public. This first intellectual history of the artist and her work seeks to change that. Karen A. Bearor thoroughly re-creates the artistic and philosophical milieu that nourished Pereira’s work. She examines the options available to Pereira as a woman artist in the first half of the twentieth century and explores how she used those options to contribute to the development of modernism in the United States. Bearor traces Pereira’s interest in the ideas of major thinkers of the period—among them, Spengler, Jung, Einstein, Cassirer, and Dewey—and shows how Pereira incorporated their ideas into her art. And she demonstrates how Pereira’s quest to understand something of the nature of ultimate reality led her from an early utopianism to a later interest in spiritualism and the occult. This lively intellectual history amplifies our knowledge of a time of creative ferment in American art and society. It will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the modernist period.
Download or read book More Drawings written by Heinrich Kley and published by Dover Publications. This book was released on 1962 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Drawing Us In written by and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2001-04-13 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Contributions by Dorothy Allison, John Berger, Mark Doty, Mary Gordon, bell hooks, Alfred Kazin, August Wilson, and others For the contributors to Drawing Us In, visual art makes us see what we haven't seen before; it surprises, transforms, and comforts us. Dorothy Allison explains how a painting in a Baptist church taught her as a child that art connects people from disparate backgrounds. Alfred Kazin reflects on his wanderings around New York's museums as a teenager. Mary Gordon finds that Bonnard's still lifes put in perspective her mother's struggle with illness and aging. For anyone who has felt moved by the visual, this collection offers a delightful range of views on how and why art matters in our psychic, social, and political lives.
Download or read book Art and Technics written by Lewis Mumford and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lewis Mumford was the author of more than thirty influential books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with technics. This text provides the essence of Mumford's views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture.
