"Modernist sculptor Alexander Archipenko, (born 1887, Kiev; died 1964, New York City) has been called the "Picasso of Sculpture" for the Cubist elements he introduced to create a new way of looking at the human figure. This deeply personal biography written by his artist wife during his last eight years, casts a new light on this extremely productive, innovative, but little-known period of his career."--Site Web de l'éditeur
A thoughtfully curated collection in a stunning package that recognizes and celebrates the birthdays of famous, infamous, and often-overlooked designers and architects. The gift book for design and architect professionals and students they didn’t know they needed but will no longer be able to live without. Drawn from architect James Biber's epic Instagram project in which he posted a birthday bio of a famous (or less famous) designer or architect every day for a (mid-pandemic) year, The Architect and Designer Birthday Book is filled with personal, opinionated, and humorous observations on fascinating design and architect figures past and present. The minibiographies and birthday profiles in the book cover a range of international architects and designers, as well as artists, including: Architects from the Aaltos (Aino and Alvar) to Zumthor Rivals Bernini and Borromini Photographers Lee Miller, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Vivian Maier, Dody Weston Thompson, Margaret Morton, and Judith Turner Midcentury modernists Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, and Florence Knoll Charlotte Perriand, Lilly Reich, Anne Tyng, and Denise Scott Brown More anecdotal histories than authorized biographies, these daily profiles are not only fun to read but provide spot-on commentary for anyone interested in how designers and architects relate to each other as well as their place in history. It is the intersection of Biber’s life and the history of architecture and design.
The first biography of visionary artist Agnes Martin, one of the most original and influential painters of the postwar period Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin’s austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be associated in turn with Minimalist, feminist, and even outsider artists. She moved through some of the liveliest art communities of her time while maintaining a legendary reserve. “I paint with my back to the world,” she says both at the beginning and at the conclusion of a documentary filmed when she was in her late eighties. When she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century. No substantial critical monograph exists on this acclaimed artist—the recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts—who was championed by critics as diverse in their approaches as Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Alloway, and Rosalind Krauss. Furthermore, no attempt has been made to describe her extraordinary life. The whole engrossing story, told here for the first time, Agnes Martin is essential reading for anyone interested in abstract art or the history of women artists in America.
Ukraine is at a historic crossroads, with the nations complex cultural identity at stake. Curator Alisa Lozhkina provides an authoritative overview of the countrys art, artists and movements from the dawn of Modernism to the Soviet period, to post-Soviet times and Russias invasion of Ukraine in 2022. She discusses Ukrainian art and artists within historical and political contexts as well as showing how they have contributed to, and interacted with, Ukrainian culture and identity as the nation transformed from provincial status on the periphery of the Russian Empire, to a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, through to independence and the challenges of its most recent history. Arranged broadly chronologically and fully illustrated throughout, The Art of Ukraine offers a powerful opportunity to explore the rich and complex Ukrainian artistic tradition.
A “moving, astounding, and totally unsettling” (Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author) literary debut following two patients in recovery after an experimental memory drug warps their lives. Lucien moves to Los Angeles to be with his grandmother as she undergoes an experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s using the new drug, Memoroxin. An emerging photographer, he’s also running from the sudden death of his mother, a well-known artist whose legacy haunts him. Sophie has just landed the lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet Company. She still waitresses at the Chateau Marmont during her off hours, witnessing the recreational use of Memoroxin—or Mem—among the Hollywood elite. When Lucien and Sophie meet at The Center, founded by an ambitious yet conflicted doctor to treat patients who’ve abused Mem, they have no memory of how they got there—or why they feel so inexplicably drawn to each other. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from “before”? “Contemplative and wonderfully evocative, finishing The Shimmering State is like waking from a dream, where you reenter the world with fresh eyes and wonder at the frailty of your own memories” (Jessica Chiarella, author of The Lost Girls).
One of America’s leading curators, “a woman of resilience and vision, a writer of clarity and ardor” (Chicago Tribune), takes you on a personal tour of the world of modern art. In the Depression-era climate of the 1930s, Katharine Kuh defied the odds and opened a gallery in Chicago, where she exhibited such relatively unknown artists as Fernand Léger, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Ansel Adams, Marc Chagall, and Alexander Calder. Her extraordinary story reveals how and why America became a major force in the world of contemporary art.
Archaism, an international artistic phenomenon from early in the twentieth century through the 1930s, receives its first sustained analysis in this book. The distinctive formal and technical conventions of archaic art, especially Greek art, particularly affected sculptors—some frankly modernist, others staunchly conservative, and a few who, like American Paul Manship, negotiated the distance between tradition and modernity. Susan Rather considers the theory, practice, and criticism of early twentieth-century sculpture in order to reveal the changing meaning and significance of the archaic in the modern world. To this end—and against the background of Manship’s career—she explores such topics as the archaeological resources for archaism, the classification of the non-Western art of India as archaic, the interest of sculptors in modem dance (Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis), and the changing critical perception of archaism. Rather rejects the prevailing conception of archaism as a sterile and superficial academic style to argue its initial importance as a modernist mode of expression. The early practitioners of archaism—including Aristide Maillol, André Derain, and Constantin Brancusi—renounced the rhetorical excess, overrefined naturalism, and indirect techniques of late nineteenth-century sculpture in favor of nonnarrative, stylized and directly carved works, for which archaic Greek art offered an important example. Their position found implicit support in the contemporaneous theoretical writings of Emmanuel Löwy, Wilhelm Worringer, and Adolf von Hildebrand. The perceived relationship between archaic art and tradition ultimately compromised the modernist authority of archaism and made possible its absorption by academic and reactionary forces during the 1910s. By the 1920s, Paul Manship was identified with archaism, which had become an important element in the aesthetic of public sculpture of both democratic and totalitarian societies. Sculptors often employed archaizing stylizations as ends in themselves and with the intent of evoking the foundations of a classical art diminished in potency by its ubiquity and obsolescence. Such stylistic archaism was not an empty formal exercise but an urgent affirmation of traditional values under siege. Concurrently, archaism entered the mainstream of fashionable modernity as an ingredient in the popular and commercial style known as Art Deco. Both developments fueled the condemnation of archaism—and of Manship, its most visible exemplar—by the avant-garde. Rather’s exploration of the critical debate over archaism, finally, illuminates the uncertain relationship to modernism on the part of many critics and highlights the problematic positions of sculpture in the modernist discourse.
