Download or read book Noguchi s Imaginary Landscapes written by Martin Friedman and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes is an exhibition of 80 sculptures, 119 photo panels, and 33 charts installed in the Special Exhibitions Gallery.
Download or read book The Life of Isamu Noguchi written by Masayo Duus and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-05 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two cultures. His personal struggles--as well as his many personal triumphs--are vividly chronicled in The Life of Isamu Noguchi, the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist. Published in connection with the centennial of the artist's birth, the book draws on Noguchi's letters, his reminiscences, and interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his youth, his creativity, and his relationships. During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract sculpture. Noguchi's private life was no less passionate than his artistic career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anaïs Nin. Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider. "With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my home?" he once wrote. "Where were my affections? Where my identity?" Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he inevitably returned to his father's homeland, where he had spent a troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi's lifelong journey across these artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal identity.
Download or read book Sorted Books written by Nina Katchadourian and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2013-02-08 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A witty and thought-provoking collection of visual poems constructed from stacks of books. Delighting in the look and feel of books, conceptual artist Nina Katchadourian’s playful photographic series proves that books’ covers—or more specifically, their spines—can speak volumes. Over the past two decades, Katchadourian has perused libraries across the globe, selecting, stacking, and photographing groupings of two, three, four, or five books so that their titles can be read as sentences, creating whimsical narratives from the text found there. Thought-provoking, clever, and at times laugh-out-loud funny (one cluster of titles from the Akron Museum of Art’s research library consists of: Primitive Art /Just Imagine/Picasso/Raised by Wolves), Sorted Books is an enthralling collection of visual poems full of wry wit and bookish smarts. Praise for Sorted Books “Katchadourian’s project . . . takes on a weight beyond its initial novelty. It’s a love letter to books, book collecting and the act of reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As a longtime fan of [Katchadourian’s] long-running Sorted Books project I’m thrilled for the release of Sorted Books—a collection spanning nearly two decades of her witty and wise minimalist mediations on life by way of ingeniously arranged book spines. . . . In an era drowned in periodic death tolls for the future of the physical book, her project stands as a celebration of the spirit embedded in the magnificent materiality of the printed page.” —Brain Pickings “Katchadourian’s stacks possess an understated sophistication; they are true to the intimate nature of books and yet reveal their dramatic features and unexpected potential.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Revenge of the Philistines written by Hilton Kramer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the works of a variety of modern artists including Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson, Chuck Close, and Julian Schnabel.
Download or read book Southwestern Art written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Listening to Stone written by Hayden Herrera and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi was a vital figure in modern art. From interlocking wooden sculptures to massive steel monuments to the elegant Akari lamps, Noguchi became a master of what he called the "sculpturing of space." But his constant struggle—as both an artist and a man—was to embrace his conflicted identity as the son of a single American woman and a famous yet reclusive Japanese father. "It's only in art," he insisted, "that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all." In this remarkable biography of the elusive artist, Hayden Herrera observes this driving force of Noguchi's creativity as intimately tied to his deep appreciation of nature. As a boy in Japan, Noguchi would collect wild azaleas and blue mountain flowers for a little garden in front of his home. As Herrera writes, he also included a rock, "to give a feeling of weight and permanence." It was a sensual appreciation he never abandoned. When looking for stones in remote Japanese quarries for his zen-like Paris garden forty years later, he would spend hours actually listening to the stones, scrambling from one to another until he found one that "spoke to him." Constantly striving to "take the essence of nature and distill it," Noguchi moved from sculpture to furniture, and from playgrounds to sets for his friend the choreographer Martha Graham, and back again working in wood, iron, clay, steel, aluminum, and, of course, stone. Throughout his career, Noguchi traveled constantly, from New York to Paris to India to Japan, forever uprooting himself to reinvigorate what he called the "keen edge of originality." Wherever he went, his needy disposition and boyish charm drew women to him, yet he tended to push them away when things began to feel too settled. Only through his art—now seen as a powerful aesthetic link between the East and the West—did Noguchi ever seem to feel that he belonged. Combining the personal correspondence of and interviews with Noguchi and those closest to him—from artists, patrons, assistants, and lovers—Herrera has created an authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most important sculptors. She locates Noguchi in his friendships with such artists as Buckminster Fuller and Arshile Gorky, and in his affairs with women including Frida Kahlo and Anna Matta Clark. With the attention to detail and scholarship that made her biography of Gorky a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Herrera has written a rich meditation on art in a globalized milieu. Listening to Stone is a moving portrait of an artist compulsively driven to reinvent himself as he searched for his own "essence of sculpture."
Download or read book Isamu Noguchi written by Isamu Noguchi and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Isamu Noguchi written by Ana Maria Torres and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ancient environments of leisure and ritual and the ceremonial spaces of past cultures--the Samrat Yantra Observatory in India, the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio, Egyptian pyramids, Zen mediation gardens--served as important and enduring sources of inspiration. Noguchi's Japanese-American heritage--and his ongoing exploration of this dual identity--also infused his designs with a unique understanding of both Eastern and Western traditions. More than seventy-five projects are presented in archival photographs--many showing Noguchi's beautiful bronze and plaster models--as well as plans and other drawings created especially for this book.
Download or read book Errand into the Maze written by Deborah Jowitt and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the legendary dance critic Deborah Jowitt, Errand into the Maze is the definitive biography of the visionary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. “Deborah Jowitt chronicles a life passionately, artfully lived. An essential read about a true legend.” —Mikhail Baryshnikov In the pantheon of American modernists, few figures loom larger than Martha Graham. One of the greatest choreographers ever to live, Graham pioneered a revolutionary dance technique—primal, dynamic, and rooted in the emotional life of the body—that upended traditional vocabulary and shaped generations of dancers and choreographers across the globe. Over her sweeping career, she founded what is now the oldest dance company in the country and produced nearly two hundred ballets, many of them masterpieces. And along the way, she engaged with the major debates, events, and ideas of the twentieth century, creating works that cut to the core of the human experience. Time magazine’s “Dancer of the Century,” and the first dancer and choreographer to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Graham was a visionary artistic force and an international cultural figure: hers was the iconic face of what came to be known as modern dance. From the renowned dance writer and former longtime critic for The Village Voice Deborah Jowitt, Errand into the Maze draws on more than a decade of firsthand research to deliver the definitive portrait of this titan. Beginning with Graham’s childhood in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and her early studies at the Denishawn School; weaving in her offstage adventures, including her relationship with her dancer and muse Erick Hawkins; and chronicling her retirement from dancing at age seventy-five and her remarkably productive final years, this elegant, empathetic biography portrays the artist in all her passionate complexity. Most important, Jowitt places Graham’s creations at the heart of her story. Her works, brimming with raw intensity, are intimately linked with their creator, who played the heroine in almost all that she choreographed: Joan of Arc, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, and Judith, among others. In this volume, Graham is centerstage once more, and Jowitt casts a brilliant spotlight on her life and work.
Download or read book Art in the Encounter of Nations written by Bert Winther-Tamaki and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art in the Encounter of Nations is the first book-length study of interactions between the Japanese and American art worlds in the early postwar years. It brings to light a rich exchange of opinions and debates regarding the relationship between the art of the two nations. The author begins with an examination of the Japanese margins of American Abstract Expressionism. Taking a contrapuntal approach, he investigates four abstract painters: two Japanese artists who moved to the United States (Okada Kenzo and Hasegawa Saburo) and two European Americans whose work is often associated with Japanese calligraphy (Mark Tobey and Franz Kline). He then looks at the work of two young scions of the calligraphy and pottery worlds of Japan -- Morita Shiryo and Yagi Kazuo -- and argues that their radical innovations in these ancient arts were, in part, provoked by their sense of a threat posed by Euro-American modernity. The final chapter is devoted to the career of Japanese American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi, whose feeling of affiliation was directed to both the U.S. and Japan in shifting ratios through a series of public and private places, each posing unique opportunities for exploring national distinctions.
Download or read book Dancing on Violent Ground written by Arabella Stanger and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of theater dance is commonly theorized in relation to bodily freedom, resistance, agitation, or repair. This book questions those utopian imaginaries, arguing that the visions and sensations of canonical Euro-American choreographies carry hidden forms of racial violence, not in the sense of the physical or psychological traumas arising in the practice of these arts but through the histories of social domination that materially underwrite them. Developing a new theory of choreographic space, Arabella Stanger shows how embodied forms of hope promised in ballet and progressive dance modernisms conceal and depend on spatial operations of imperial, colonial, and racial subjection. Stanger unearths dance’s violent ground by interrogating the expansionist fantasies of Marius Petipa’s imperial ballet, settler colonial and corporate land practices in the modern dance of Martha Graham and George Balanchine, reactionary discourses of the human in Rudolf von Laban’s and Oskar Schlemmer’s movement geometries; Merce Cunningham’s experimentalism as a white settler fantasy of the land of the free, and the imperial amnesia of Boris Charmatz’s interventions into metropolitan museums. Drawing on materialist thought, critical race theory, and indigenous studies, Stanger ultimately advocates for dance studies to adopt a position of “critical negativity,” an analytical attitude attuned to how dance’s exuberant modeling of certain forms of life might provide cover for life-negating practices. Bold in its arguments and rigorous in its critique, Dancing on Violent Ground asks how performance scholars can develop a practice of thinking hopefully, without expunging history from their site of analysis.
Download or read book A Dictionary of the Avant Gardes written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes recognizes that change is a driving force in all the arts. It covers major trends in music, dance, theater, film, visual art, sculpture, and performance art--as well as architecture, science, and culture.
Download or read book Meanings of Abstract Art written by Paul Crowther and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature. Traditional picturing and sculpture are based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract works, in contrast, adopt alternative modes of visual representation, or break down and reconfigure the mimetic conventions of pictorial art and sculpture. Obviously this means that abstract art takes many different forms. However, this diversity should not mask some key structural features; these center on two basic relations to nature (understanding nature in the broadest sense to comprise the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). The first involves abstracting from nature, to give selected aspects of it a new and extremely unfamiliar appearance. The second involves abstract art as the affirmation of a relatively unconstrained 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 contains three categories of essays: 1) those on classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction), 2) those on post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments), and 3) those of a broader art historical and philosophical scope"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi 1924 1979 written by Nancy Grove and published by Scholarly Title. This book was released on 1980 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Isamu Noguchi written by Valerie J. Fletcher and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the most versatile artists of the modern era, Isamu Noguchi explored many areas of art and design. Both Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor and the exhibition of the same name, which this book accompanies, focus on his sculpture as the nexus of his creativity. From the late 1920s through the mid-1980s, Noguchi changed direction frequently and delighted in exploring diametrically opposed ideas and styles. In her essay, Valerie J. Fletcher examines Noguchi's use of many different materials and explores the reasons underlying his diverse practice. Situating his sculptures within their historical and art-historical contexts, Dr. Fletcher seeks to dispel the previous limited interpretation of Isamu Noguchi as a Japanese American artist, instead redefining him as one of the first truly global artists of the modern era. Noguchi worked in modes inspired by many cultural sources - he became familiar with utopian ideals while working in Paris, studied traditional calligraphic drawing in Beijing, and learned to model clay sculptures in Kyoto. During World War II, the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment precipitated a period of seclusion and introspection. He adopted some of the principles of Surrealism and created the remarkable Lunars, which have rarely been seen, followed by his delicate, interlocking compositions in slabs of slate and marble. After the war Noguchi again traveled around the world, finding inspiration in monuments of all kinds, ranging from Stonehenge in England to Hindu architecture in India. From the 1960s onward, Noguchi maintained studios in the United States and in Japan, while also working on garden environments and urban monuments in many cities. In his late sculptural works he achieved subtle and sophisticated syntheses of nature with artifice, the organic with the geometric, intuition with intellect. His sculptures express his passionate conviction that art can enrich ordinary lives and transcend national, religious, and ethnic barriers." --
Download or read book Listening to Stone written by Hayden Herrera and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From the author of Arshile Gorky, a major biography of the great American sculptor that redefines his legacy"--
