From formative years in Toronto and Philadelphia, MacAgy became the catalyst for the advent of American abstraction, the spirit behind the modern art movement, the introducer and interpreter of European and Russian art to America, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the installer of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He was on the cutting edge of modern art movements from American abstract expressionism to conceptualism and fought as an independent educator against the forces using art for political ends. “MacAgy has a place in history,”—George Rickey.
Founded by Ansel Adams, directed by Minor White, and staffed by such luminaries as Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, and Edward Weston, the first fine-art photography department in the United States was created in 1946 at the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute). Under White's leadership and against a backdrop of revolutions in photography as an art form, this dynamic faculty developed the modern photography curriculum, bringing a new academic pedigree to the medium and establishing the future of photography education. The Moment of Seeing is much more than a history of the program and those who comprised it. Including White's never-before-published writings on the teaching of photography, it is also a rich gallery of iconic images by both renowned faculty members and the dedicated students they taught.-publisher description.
Winner, Award of Merit for Non-Fiction, The Philosophical Society of Texas, 2015 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.
150 p., 154 illus. 74 in color, Soft cover. ISBN 0-915317-10-9 $10 “This eminently readable, vivid account of the American artist, Clay Edgar Spohn (1898-1977) provides numerous revelations about modern art, isms, and art institutions.... By 1948 Abstract Expressionism became a recognized "School" and Marcel Duchamp's anti-art was being transcended by Spohn's Assemblage-art, and ‘Discovered Objects.’... This portrait mirrors again the fate of artists who "follow their own direction" without compromise to the establishment of the day or the market, and present a challenge to contemporary society,” Maria Maryniak. “... Spohn’s, The Ballet of the Elements (front cover). San Francisco art critic Tom Albright described this painting exhibited with the best works of West Coast painters, “...with its stripe-like allusions to landscape under a ‘sky’ of fluid, shorthand squiggles, is altogether unique in this context (i.e. the projection still of the fervor, the desperation, the iconoclasm and ethical commitment etc. that went into them) and perhaps for that reason stands out as the exhibition’s most monumental single masterpiece."
This publication contains a survey of female abstract expressionist artists, revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work and the movement as a whole as well as highlighting the lack of critical attention they have received to date.
In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Parks resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionisms thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence.
“You will find a lovely little book that explores through the eyes of a young man what a few of us have already learned and the rest of us will learn over the rest of our lives. That life really is like a river, and that the adventures to be had around each turn are as much a part of that river as are the rocks and the water. So when you hang your literal paddles up for the season, pick up this book and enjoy a little literary paddle. Lynne White, The Ripple. “If you have kids interested in adventure, this will make a fine gift, and you’ll probably like it too,“ Joe Slater, the Paddler.
In 1959, Alan Jarvis - the brilliant and charismatic director of the National Gallery of Canada - was forced to resign following a disagreement with the government over the purchase of works by European Old Masters. He never fully recovered from this dismissal, or the public humiliation that followed, succumbing to alcoholism in a little over a decade.
An account of a major international art movement originating in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which anticipated key aspects of information aesthetics. New Tendencies, a nonaligned modernist art movement, emerged in the early 1960s in the former Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country. It represented a new sensibility, rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and socialist realism in an attempt to formulate an art adequate to the age of advanced mass production. In this book, Armin Medosch examines the development of New Tendencies as a major international art movement in the context of social, political, and technological history. Doing so, he traces concurrent paradigm shifts: the change from Fordism (the political economy of mass production and consumption) to the information society, and the change from postwar modernism to dematerialized postmodern art practices. Medosch explains that New Tendencies, rather than opposing the forces of technology as most artists and intellectuals of the time did, imagined the rapid advance of technology to be a springboard into a future beyond alienation and oppression. Works by New Tendencies cast the viewer as coproducer, abolishing the idea of artist as creative genius and replacing it with the notion of the visual researcher. In 1968 and 1969, the group actively turned to the computer as a medium of visual research, anticipating new media and digital art. Medosch discusses modernization in then-Yugoslavia and other nations on the periphery; looks in detail at New Tendencies' five major exhibitions in Zagreb (the capital of Croatia); and considers such topics as the group's relation to science, the changing relationship of manual and intellectual labor, New Tendencies in the international art market, their engagement with computer art, and the group's eventual eclipse by other “new art practices” including conceptualism, land art, and arte povera. Numerous illustrations document New Tendencies' works and exhibitions.
