Traces the life and career of the enigmatic American artist, discusses his unusual painting technique, and looks at his literary and artistic influences.
This volume (the first to appear on the artist in 30 years) presents new information about Ryder's technique and materials, based on current scholarship and advanced methods of conservation. The paintings are discussed individually with comparative illustrations, including X-rays, autoradiographs, and related examples by other artists. Paper edition ($29.95) not seen by RandR. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Borrowing its name from the ancient sewer in Rome, Belgian conceptualist Wim Delvoye's new and improved "Cloaca" is a room-sized shit-making machine whose bowels process two meals a day, serving up a mouthful of complex themes: scatalogy and disgust, high and low culture, man as machine and vice-versa, and the inversion of art semiotics. Many of these same concerns are processed in Delvoye's other work, like the life-sized carved walnut replica of a cement truck, the wood cabinet stocked with 32 circular saw blades painted with scenes in Delft China blue, and a herd of pigs tatooed by Antwerp's finest needle-men. Feces and other anal subjects are parsed in accompanying essays by such luminaries as Milan Kundera, Gerardo Mosquera, Dan Cameron, Georges Bataille and Salvador Dali.
A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world. At the height of his fame in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming its youngest winner. His influence on major figures—including Freud and William James—was pervasive and profound. But in recent decades Kipling’s reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem “If—” is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes, and ordinary readers alike, his unabashed imperialist views have come under increased scrutiny. In If, scholar Christopher Benfey brings this fascinating and complex writer to life and, for the first time, gives full attention to Kipling's intense engagement with the United States—a rarely discussed but critical piece of evidence in our understanding of this man and his enduring legacy. Benfey traces the writer’s deep involvement with America over one crucial decade, from 1889 to 1899, when he lived for four years in Brattleboro, Vermont, and sought deliberately to turn himself into a specifically American writer. It was his most prodigious and creative period, as well as his happiest, during which he wrote The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. Had a family dispute not forced his departure, Kipling almost certainly would have stayed. Leaving was the hardest thing he ever had to do, Kipling said. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” he lamented, “Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.” In this fresh examination of Kipling, Benfey hangs a provocative “what if” over Kipling’s American years and maps the imprint Kipling left on his adopted country as well as the imprint the country left on him. If proves there is relevance and magnificence to be found in Kipling’s work.
American Art to 1900 presents an astonishing variety of unknown, little-known, or undervalued documents to convey the story of American art through the many voices of its contemporary practitioners, consumers, and commentators. The volume highlights such critically important themes as women artists, African American representation and expression, regional and itinerant artists, Native Americans and the frontier, and more. With its hundreds of explanatory headnotes, this book reveals the documentary riches of American art and its many intersecting histories. -back cover.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, along with Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, is recognized as one of the great “ancestors” of American painting, although he was largely unknown in his own time. Twentieth-century taste discovered him and his mystical pictures have had a profound effect on modern abstract art. Lloyd Goodrich is Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art under whose auspices his definitive biography of Thomas Eakins was published in 1933. For many years Mr. Goodrich has been carrying on research in the life and work of Albert P. Ryder, in preparation for a definitive biography. Since Ryder’s work has been widely forged, with the forgeries outnumbering the genuine pictures about eight to one, this study has involved examination of hundreds of paintings, using x-rays and other scientific methods. The present volume, originally published in 1959, has the advantage of these years of thorough study.
Tales from the Easel features seventy full-color reproductions that convey the expressive, allusive powers of narrative painting. Though they range widely in subject and setting, all of the paintings gathered here are rendered in a representational, or realistic, style. Carrying moral, social, or patriotic messages, the paintings are meant to teach, enlighten, or inspire. Then again, the paintings can also tweak the very conventions that define them, with results that range from the delightfully idiosyncratic to the visionary. Thomas Hart Benton, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and Jacob Lawrence are just some of the household names whose work appears in Tales from the Easel. Others, like Elihu Vedder and Lilly Martin Spencer, are less well known, but still vital to the development of narrative painting. While some of the artists, including George Caleb Bingham and Paul Cadmus, were classically trained, self-taught painters such as Carlos "Shiney" Moon and Thomas Waterman Wood are also represented. American rivers, cities, and battlefields are among the native surroundings shown in many of the paintings. However, artists also looked elsewhere for settings--to Europe, the Holy Land, or even some imagined realm. Charles C. Eldredge's essay discusses the rich and varied sources of American narrative painting--from literature and history to childhood and domestic life--and an essay by William Underwood Eiland provides a discussion of the southern tale-telling tradition. Artist biographies by Reed Anderson and Stephanie J. Fox appear opposite the paintings, adding further context. Tales from the Easel, a companion volume to the national touring exhibit of the same name is a stunning reminder of a tradition in American painting that has endured across two centuries and numerous art movements.
With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers. The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s. With its fittingly dramatic design, Courbet and the Modern Landscape accompanies the first major museum exhibition specifically to address Gustave Courbet's extraordinary achievement in landscape painting. Many of these carefully selected works produced from 1855 to 1876--gathered from Asia, Europe, and North America--will be new to readers. The catalogue--which accompanies an exhibition at the Getty Museum to be held from February 21 to May 14, 2006--highlights the artist's expressive responses to the natural environment. Essays by the curators examine Courbet's distinctly modern practice of landscape painting. Mary Morton's essay situates his landscapes in relation to his work in other genres, his critical reputation, and his role in establishing a new pictorial language for landscape painting. Charlotte Eyerman's essay investigates how later generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists responded to Courbet's example. The catalogue also includes an essay by Dominique de Font-Reaulx, curator of photographs at the Musee d'Orsay, on the relationship between Courbet's work and landscape photography of the 1850s and 1860s.