American author houses, museums, memorials, and libraries

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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

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Jay Boyer

Sidney Lumet, director of landmark motion pictures such as The Pawnbroker, Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, and Network, has proven to be one of America's most enduring and diversified film directors. His singular career as a filmmaker - spanning more than forty years - has embraced both purely commercial projects and ones of enormous complexity and challenge. Lumet has distinguished himself as visionary while tackling every imaginable type of film. In this exhaustive new study of Lumet, Jay Boyer presents the most up-to-date and inclusive analysis yet of the director's films - moving far beyond the limited analyses previously published. Boyer employs an eclectic approach in his appraisal of Lumet, with a strong emphasis toward auteur methods of criticism. An extensively detailed examination of individual films from Lumet's early, middle and recent periods incorporates discussion of technique (camera placement, mise en scene, editing, etc.) in relation to the narrative idea. This probing of the relationship between form and idea is the essence of Boyer's study. He argues convincingly that while Lumet does not see himself as an auteur he is someone who has made a significant mark on motion picture art by making films with recurring ideas and motifs, while employing a restrained cinematic style that permits itself to remain subservient to the film narrative. Boyer also astutely observes and builds a case for Lumet as a director whose finest achievements place him inside a circle of filmmakers who belong to the New York School of Filmmaking. Along with those of his contemporaries John Frankenheimer, Delbert Mann, and Martin Scorsese, Lumet's films are often marked by their gritty, urban feel and air of authenticity. Boyer's study is frank in its appraisal of both the distinguished achievements and the shortcomings of Lumet's life work. Highly readable and lucid, it belies the critical assumptions generally applied to Lumet's films to enable a fuller appreciation of his worth.

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text by John Beardsley

"Great book featuring the Storm King Art Center outdoor public sculpture garden. 100 color and black and white illustrations of works of art, sculpture, installations, abstract works. Illustrated artists include Calder, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, David Smith, di Suvero, Louis Nevelson, Trova, Bourgeois, Caro and other artists / sculptors. Includes notes / bibliography and brief biography of each artist."--Amazon.

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Bruce Altshuler

The avant-garde is a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to address a far larger audience than ever before, and it was one on whose understanding they could no longer depend. Aesthetic concerns, too, had shifted from representing visual phenomena to reconfiguring the visible world in new and complicated ways. The public was rarely amused. Indeed, as these newer forms of art were presented in now famous exhibitions, derision and anger were the customary responses of the public and the critics. Artists formed more or less cohesive groups of like-thinking individuals who styled themselves the "avant-garde," really a military term for those pathfinders who first venture into unknown or enemy territory. Through photographs of personalities, installations, and works of art, and in a lively text that recounts the artistic thinking and the gossip that surrounded each new movement, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century traces this phenomenon from its beginnings in the Fauvist Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 through such notorious events as the exhibitions of the Section d'Or (Paris) and the Blue Rider (Munich), the Armory Show (New York), the Futurist 0-10 exhibition (Petrograd), the Dada Fair (Berlin), the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich), the First Papers of Surrealism (New York), Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (New York), the Ninth Street Show (New York), the Gutai Art Association (Japan), Le Vide (Paris), Full-Up (Paris), the New Realists (New York), Primary Structures (New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern).