A landscape for modern sculpture

Sample

Annie Cohen-Solal

"Mark Rothko was not only one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century; he was a scholar, an educator, and a deeply spiritual human being. Born Marcus Yakovlevich Rotkovitch, he emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States at age ten, already well educated in the Talmud and carrying with him bitter memories of the pogroms and persecutions visited upon the Jews of Latvia. Few artists have achieved success as quickly, and by the mid-twentieth century, Rothko's artwork was being displayed in major museums throughout the world. In May 2012 his painting Orange, Red, Yellow was auctioned for nearly $87 million, setting a new Christie's record. Author Annie Cohen-Solal gained access to archival materials no previous biographer had seen. As a result, her book is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of Rothko the man and the artist, an uncommonly successful painter who was never comfortable with the idea of his art as a commodity"--

Sample

conceived and curated by Sandra S. Phillips

Profiles the homesteads of the Hudson River artists, including Thomas Cole, Frederic E. Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Asher B. Durand

Sample

Meryle Secrest

The widely admired biographer of Bernard Berenson and of Kenneth Clark gives us now a complete and complex portrait of an American titan, Frank Lloyd Wright. Meryle Secrest shows us Frank Lloyd Wright in full scale - the brilliant, outrageous, fascinating man; the giant who changed modern architecture; the standard-bearer for the new, quintessentially American vision; the artist who never, during a seventy-year career, abandoned his principles of design; the radical, the. Bohemian - the visionary who was one of the central figures of twentieth-century American culture, society and politics. We see Frank Lloyd Wright's Midwestern boyhood - the son of a Harvard-educated preacher/musician/circuit rider ... his seven-year apprenticeship with the great Louis Sullivan ... his three marriages - the first at twenty-one to a Chicago society woman and dutiful wife; the second to a woman slightly mad; the third to a fiercely independent woman: an. Acolyte of Gurdjieff, a dancer, a woman who was Wright's counterpart and peer. We see Wright's evolution from impeccably dressed young architect, living in the right suburb, cultivating rich clients, to true bohemian living by his own rules. Meryle Secrest follows the course of Wright's struggle against all that was middlebrow in America - his opposition to the architectural trend that resulted in "coffin-like houses and topless towers" and his insistence on expressing. The unique in human experience. We see Wright creating his famous and seminal houses, among them the Winslow house he designed at age twenty-seven ... his long-dreamed-of Taliesin (when it burned to the ground, set blaze by an insane servant, Wright rebuilt it on the same spot) ... the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (the only building left standing after the 1923 earthquake) ... the famous Fallingwater ... the mammoth and idiosyncratic Guggenheim Museum in New York ... Meryle Secrest is. The first biographer to have full access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Her life of the architect, more than five years' work and illustrated with 121 photographs, is a stunning feat of biographical narrative, sustained analysis and compassionate insight. With her extraordinary grasp of the man and his art, she gives us Frank Lloyd Wright close up - a creature of boundless energy and indomitable appetite for experience, a man whose limitless belief in his own. Rightness carried him through bankruptcy, arrest, fire, divorce and years of social ostracism. A riveting portrait of a genius.

Sample

Katherine Hoffman

"Katherine Hoffman presents a comprehensive and provocative study of the life and work of the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, focusing on the period from 1915 to his death in 1946, with some introductory material related to his early years. His work as photographer, editor, writer, and gallery director are explored in relationship to his personal biography and cultural milieu, presenting the complex tapestry that was Stieglitz's life and work.This book focuses on the American work, issues of identity, and the rise of Modernism in America. There is discussion of some of his photographs that are rarely illustrated or discussed, that give added dimension to an understanding of Stieglitz's total oeuvre. The newly opened letters along with the many other letters Stieglitz wrote, reveal him to be a man of "letters", as well as a man with a camera. His work as editor and writer of short articles, along with his letters illustrate a strong literary side of Stieglitz discussed in the book, that balanced his visual work.. Stieglitz's life and work may be seen as a significant continuum that progressed from his early European work to his final photographic images taken at Lake George, and in New York City. Stieglitz was a complicated and complex man, revered and idolized by a community of loyal followers, and at the same time despised and hated by some. As the critic Robert Hughes, has written of StieglitzBeyond the personality and the myths that have grown up around Stieglitz, some self-made, some through the power of the press,it is in the end, " the work," that is perhaps most important and enduring, It is that work, along with its fundamental ideas and inspirations, that is the focus of this book, illustrating that Stieglitz has, indeed, left a lasting legacy of light"--