This substantial volume is the first major resource on the life and work of Gordon Onslow Ford (1912-2003), the British-born painter who was the youngest member of André Breton's surrealist group in Paris, and who spent more than 50 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Marked by an initial interest in automatist techniques, Onslow Ford's painting gradually developed through studies of Eastern philosophy, mysticism and ecology resulting in complex and varied works that incorporated cosmic charts and biomorphic abstraction. In this superb publication, a series of thoroughly researched essays, previously unpublished archival material and over 200 color illustrations trace Onslow Ford's time spent in Paris, stints in New York and Mexico, culminating in his move in 1947 to the Bay Area. Organized and published by the Lucid Art Foundation (cofounded by Onslow Ford in 1998), this is a long-overdue and impressively executed survey.
Ur-Surrealist Yves Tanguy belonged to the inner circle of the 1920s Parisian avant-garde, alongside such figures as Salvador Dal', Max Ernst, and Alberto Giacometti, making essential contributions to Surrealist manifestoes, magazines, and exhibitions. Tanguy's artistic obsession was the world of imagination, of dreams and reveries, and his cryptically codified imagery continues to perplex audiences today. His paintings seem to exist in a hazy, oddly beautiful limbo dimension beyond time and space, a world at once vertiginous and calm, disturbing and breathtaking. The central focus of Yves Tanguy and Surrealism is the Surrealist mode, to which Tanguy dedicated himself like no other painter of his time, cementing the movement's place in the history of visual art. On the basis of previously unpublished documents and works, authors discuss Tanguy's otherworldly oeuvre in all its aspects--from his development as an artist to the reception of his work in the United States. With stunning reproductions in full color as well as black and white, Yves Tanguy and Surrealism is an extensive overview of the work of an artist whose forays into the creative unknown continue to resonate.
A stunning collection of homes and studios of 15 extraordinary artists, from painter Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home and sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s Japanese retreat to new discoveries such as Gordon Onslow Ford’s California haven. Noted photographer Leslie Williamson’s latest book presents the homes and studios from a group of renowned artists, ranging from Barbara Hepworth to Joan Miró. Documented in her inimitable atmospheric style, the images capture how these artists lived and worked. Williamson’s images reveal not only these artists’ creative process as viewed through their studios, but also shows how they manifested their creativity in the stylish interiors and the personal touches in the spaces they called home. The spaces featured range from Vanessa Bell’s proto–shabby chic home Charleston in southern England to Andrew Wyeth’s Yankee-chic farmhouse in Pennsylvania. Taken together, Still Lives is a must-have document to inspire and illuminate for art lovers, interiors enthusiasts, and the cultured reader.
Consists of essays about the avant-garde journal Dyn, which was produced in Mexico in the 1940s - and its editor, Austrian painter and theorist, Wolfgang Paalen.
This innovative book offers a holistic approach to one of the most fascinating and puzzling aspects of human experience: dreaming. Advocating the broad-ranging vision termed "integral" by thinkers from Aurobindo to Wilber, Fariba Bogzaran and Daniel Deslauriers consider dreams as multifaceted phenomena in an exploration that includes scientific, phenomenological, sociocultural, and subjective knowledge. Drawing from historical, cross-cultural, and contemporary practices, both interpretive and noninterpretive, the authors present Integral Dream Practice, an approach that emphasizes the dreamer's creative participation, reflective capacities, and mindful awareness in working with dreams. Bogzaran and Deslauriers have developed this comprehensive way of approaching dreams over many years and highlight their methods in a chapter that unfolds a single dream, showing how sustained creative exploration over time leads to transformative change.
Wolfgang Paalen was a central figure in internationalist surrealist circles in the late 1930s. Artist and intellectual, he was a European whose fascination with archaic cultures led him finally to Mexico, where he founded the influential magazine DYN in 1941. In the bold texts from DYN that make up Form and Sense, we encounter a unique artistic mind and an oracular voice. Paalen’s book is an intellectual delight with essays on cubism, surrealism, the universality of forms in architecture, and the relationships that exist between art and science. He weaves together the new ideas and archaic inspirations in twentieth-century painting and sculpture. His nuanced and original considerations of some key figures—Mondrian, Kandinsky, Picasso—marked Paalen in turn as a significant thinker in the world of modern art. This painter’s book, illustrated with carefully chosen examples of the art he examines, makes us not only understand but also experience the rich interplay between idea and image that informs the art of our own time. A new introduction by the scholar Martica Sawin examines Paalen’s career, particularly his influential writing on surrealism and abstraction.
For too long Australians have been dominated by European gardening trends. Gordon Ford, like no other landscape designer before him, mastered the natural Australian style. Gordon Ford was early influenced by the English natural style landscape school of the eighteenth century. But his great skill has been to work with Australia's natural elements and to develop gardens that not only honoured the rugged beauty of the Australian landscape, but did so in a way that captured its apparent timelessness -- his gardens look as if they have always been there. In shaping our visual world, Gordon Ford focused on the essential balance between mass and void in his designs. His balance of the natural elements of rocks, water, trees and other plants achieves a timeless harmony -- we feel totally satisfied but uncertain as to where Mother nature stars and Gordon Ford finishes.
When the occult came to the American West: individualism and magic in the art of California, from Agnes Pelton to Jess "It is in America that the transformation will take place, and has already silently commenced." With these words, written in The Secret Doctrine in 1888, occultist philosopher Helena Blavatsky drew a direct connection between the Theosophical Society and the dynamic energy of 19th-century Americanism. Blavatsky and her successors identified the American West as the perfect site for a rebirth and re-enchantment of humanity, drawing those seeking spiritual fulfilment outside of organized religion to the dramatic landscapes of California, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico--places which have long beckoned searchers of all kinds. The syncretic nature of Theosophy allowed for and even encouraged individualism in belief, making Theosophy a good fit for the notions of freedom and personal agency that characterized the American West in the popular imaginary. Among those drawn to the American West seeking spiritual answers in the early 20th century were artists. In 2014, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum at Utah State University staged the first exhibition to explore artistic responses to this confluence of enchanted thought and the American West. Building on this precedent, Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West is the first publication devoted to studying these relationships in art and music. Through a series of color plates, contextual essays, interviews and interpretations of individual works by artists such as the Dynaton group (Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, Lee Mullican), Oskar Fischinger, Emil Bisttram, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, Agnes Pelton, Wolfgang Paalen, Beatrice Wood, Dane Rudhyar and Jess, Enchanted Modernities explores the role of Theosophical thought in redefining the relationship between enchantment and modernism, and fostering lively cultural networks in a region that that has long captured the world's imagination.
Stephen Robeson Miller, the acknowledged expert on Kay Sage and highly respected curator, author, and academic, has finally released his long anticipated and meticulously researched chronology of her life. Drawn from The Stephen Robeson Miller Research Papers about Kay Sage, held at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and revised and supplemented, this volume contains a wealth of previously unknown and unpublished information. It is strictly limited to 1000 hand signed and numbered copies and is further enhanced by the inclusion of Kay Sage's four surrealist one-act plays, three of which have never been published before.
