Author: Michael Brenson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374604037
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 579
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Book Description
“An essential account of America’s greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus.” —Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement The landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position—Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him “the greatest sculptor this country has produced.” Michael Brenson’s David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works—among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as “salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things.” This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.
Author: David Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291875
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 496
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Book Description
"This comprehensive sourcebook is destined to become a lasting and definitive resource on the art and aesthetic philosophy of the American artist David Smith (1906-1965). A pioneer of twentieth-century modernism, Smith was renowned for the expansive formal and conceptual ambitions of his broadly diverse and inventive welded-steel abstractions. His groundbreaking achievements drew freely on cubism, surrealism, and constructivism, profoundly influencing later movements such as minimalism and environmental art. By radically challenging older conventions of monolithic figuration and refuting arbitrary distinctions between painters and sculptors, Smith asserted sculpture's equal role in advancing modern art. A compilation of Smith's poems, sketchbook notes, essays, lectures, letters to the editor, reviews, and interviews, these previously unpublished texts underscore the varied ways in which his writing functioned as a means to examine and articulate his private identity and to promote the social ideals that made him a key participant in contemporary discourses surrounding modernism, art and politics, and sculptural aesthetics. All the documents in David Smith: collected writings, lectures, and interviews have been newly corrected against the original manuscripts, typescripts, and audiotapes. Each text in this collection is annotated with historical and contextual information that reflects Smith's own process of continually reviewing and revising his writings in response to his evolving aspirations as a visual artist."--Provided by publisher.
Author: Sarah Hamill
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520280342
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
How does photography shape the way we see sculpture? In David Smith in Two Dimensions, Sarah Hamill broaches this question through an in-depth consideration of the photography of American sculptor David Smith (1906Ð1965). Smith was a modernist known for radically shifting the terms of sculpture, a medium traditionally defined by casting, modeling, and carving. He was the first to use industrial welding as a sustained technique for large-scale sculpture, influencing a generation of minimalists to come. What is less known about Smith is his use of the camera to document his own sculptures as well as everyday objects, spaces, and bodies. His photographs of his sculptures were published in countless exhibition catalogs, journals, and newspapers, often as anonymous illustrations. Far from being neutral images, these photographs direct a pictorial encounter with spatial form and structure the public display of his work. David Smith in Two Dimensions looks at the sculptorÕs adoption of unconventional backdrops, alternative vantage points, and unusual lighting effects and exposures to show how he used photography to dramatize and distance objects. This comprehensive and penetrating account also introduces SmithÕs expansive archive of copy prints, slides, and negatives, many of which are seen here for the first time. Hamill proposes a new understanding of SmithÕs sculpture through photography, exploring issues that are in turn vital to discourses of modern sculpture, sculptural aesthetics, and postwar art. In SmithÕs photography, we see an artist moving fluidly between media to define what a sculptural object was and how it would be encountered publicly.
Author: Rebecca Foster
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815608349
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
Augmented by scholarly essays on aspects of Weston's painting, this catalog offers over 100 colour plates of his work.
Author: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art
Publisher: Hudson Hills
ISBN: 9781555951986
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
"Amon G. Carter (1879-1955) is one of the legendary men of Texas history. Born in a log cabin, he was self-made, becoming Fort Worth's leading citizen and champion. He developed an interest in the art of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell through his friendship with Will Rogers. Carter's will provided for the establishment of a museum in Fort Worth devoted to the art of the American West. While the museum holds the most significant collection anywhere of works by Remington and Russell and is a pioneer in the field of western studies, it has evolved into one of the great museums of American art as a whole, focusing on artists working on successive frontiers, aesthetic as well as geographic. Its photography collection alone has grown to nearly one-quarter of a million objects." "The museum, designed by noted architect Philip Johnson, opened to the public in 1961. On the occasion of its fortieth anniversary, a substantially expanded building, also designed by Mr. Johnson, was inaugurated. This volume relates the museum's history and presents color and duotone illustrations of 125 of its masterworks dating from 1822 to 1998 (paintings, sculpture, prints, watercolors, pastels, drawings, and photographs), with an essay about each and a biography of each artist. It includes a number of landmark works recently added to the collection and unveiled here for the first time: paintings by John Singer Sargent, Stuart Davis, and Marsden Hartley; sculpture by Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson; a daguerreotype by Southworth and Hawes; and photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, David Smith, Robert Adams, and Linda Connor."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Robert Slifkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691194262
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.
Author: Candida N. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780960627059
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Looks at David Smiths sculptural work
Author: David J. Getsy
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030019675X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.
Author: Willem De Kooning
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art
ISBN: 0870707973
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
This publication offers an unparalleled opportunity to appreciate the development of the artist's work as it unfolded over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s.
Author: Mark Byers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192542729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
This volume situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910-1970) at the centre of the early post-war American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson's work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson's published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early post-war American modernism. The development of Olson's work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage, Charles Olson and American Modernism offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of post-war American modernism.
