Rebels on Eighth Street

Rebels on Eighth Street PDF Author: Avis Berman
Publisher: Atheneum Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 600

Get Book Here

Book Description
A champion of artists, the first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a pivotal influence on the way American art has been perceived and received, Juliana Force was a creative and flamboyant personality who dominated the New York art world for decades. Yet her life, an American success story of the most classic type, has never been chronicled. In this authoritative biography, Avis Berman focuses long-overdue attention on a dynamic woman who claimed as her raison d'être the very development of American art.

Rebels on Eighth Street

Rebels on Eighth Street PDF Author: Avis Berman
Publisher: Atheneum Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 600

Get Book Here

Book Description
A champion of artists, the first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a pivotal influence on the way American art has been perceived and received, Juliana Force was a creative and flamboyant personality who dominated the New York art world for decades. Yet her life, an American success story of the most classic type, has never been chronicled. In this authoritative biography, Avis Berman focuses long-overdue attention on a dynamic woman who claimed as her raison d'être the very development of American art.

Rogues' Gallery

Rogues' Gallery PDF Author: Michael Gross
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767924894
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 578

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime.” With these words as a starting point, Michael Gross, leading chronicler of the American rich, begins the first independent, unauthorized look at the saga of the nation’s greatest museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this endlessly entertaining follow-up to his bestselling social history 740 Park, Gross pulls back the shades of secrecy that have long shrouded the upper class’s cultural and philanthropic ambitions and maneuvers. And he paints a revealing portrait of a previously hidden face of American wealth and power. The Metropolitan, Gross writes, “is a huge alchemical experiment, turning the worst of man’s attributes—extravagance, lust, gluttony, acquisitiveness, envy, avarice, greed, egotism, and pride—into the very best, transmuting deadly sins into priceless treasure.” The book covers the entire 138-year history of the Met, focusing on the museum’s most colorful characters. Opening with the lame-duck director Philippe de Montebello, the museum’s longest-serving leader who finally stepped down in 2008, Rogues’ Gallery then goes back to the very beginning, highlighting, among many others: the first director, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, an Italian-born epic phony, whose legacy is a trove of plundered ancient relics, some of which remain on display today; John Pierpont Morgan, the greatest capitalist and art collector of his day, who turned the museum from the plaything of a handful of rich amateurs into a professional operation dedicated, sort of, to the public good; John D. Rockefeller Jr., who never served the Met in any official capacity but who, during the Great Depression, proved the only man willing and rich enough to be its benefactor, which made him its behind-the-scenes puppeteer; the controversial Thomas Hoving, whose tenure as director during the sixties and seventies revolutionized museums around the world but left the Met in chaos; and Jane Engelhard and Annette de la Renta, a mother-daughter trustee tag team whose stories will astonish you (think Casablanca rewritten by Edith Wharton). With a supporting cast that includes artists, forgers, and looters, financial geniuses and scoundrels, museum officers (like its chairman Arthur Amory Houghton, head of Corning Glass, who once ripped apart a priceless and ancient Islamic book in order to sell it off piecemeal), trustees (like Jayne Wrightsman, the Hollywood party girl turned society grand dame), curators (like the aging Dietrich von Bothmer, a refugee from Nazi Germany with a Bronze Star for heroism whose greatest acquisitions turned out to be looted), and donors (like Irwin Untermyer, whose collecting obsession drove his wife and children to suicide), and with cameo appearances by everyone from Vogue editors Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland to Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten, Rogues’ Gallery is a rich, satisfying, alternately hilarious and horrifying look at America’s upper class, and what is perhaps its greatest creation.

New York Modern

New York Modern PDF Author: William B. Scott
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801867934
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book Here

Book Description
Handsomely illustrated and engagingly written, New York Modern documents the impressive collective legacy of New York's artists in capturing the energy and emotions of the urban experience.

Gather Up the Fragments

Gather Up the Fragments PDF Author: Mario S. De Pillis
Publisher: Other Distribution
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
Struck by the beauty of every visible object in a Shaker kitchen they chanced to visit in 1923, young Edward Deming Andrews and his wife, Faith Young Andrews, embarked on a collection that became the passion of their lives. During the following decades, at a time when the art and artifacts of the Shakers were considered "low" art and unworthy of collecting or exhibiting, the Andrewses energetically collected objects, studied sources, and eventually mounted exhibits and published books on Shaker culture. This beautiful book is the first to document their unparalleled collection, presenting some 600 photographs, most never before published. In addition, the book brings to light the extraordinary story of the Andrewses' collecting and scholarship, their relationships with members of the United Society of Believers (commonly called Shakers) and with important New York City art-world figures of the 1930s, as well as their contributions toward the birth of the field of Shaker Studies. More than passionate collectors, Edward and Faith Andrews were intent on saving a distinct culture, and their accomplishment was to preserve for future generations the most comprehensive body of knowledge ever assembled about the Shakers. Exhibition Schedule: Hancock Shaker Village, Pittsfield, MA (May, 2008 - October, 2008) Fresno Metropolitan Museum, Fresno, CA (October, 2009 - December, 2009) Frist Museum, Nashville, TN (May, 2011 - August, 2011)

The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies

The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies PDF Author: Bennard B. Perlman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438415877
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first full-length biography of the American artist Arthur B. Davies, who played a major role in twentieth-century American art's coming-of-age. It was Davies who made possible the landmark exhibitions of The Eight and The Rockwell Kent Independent, and in 1913 he emerged as the mastermind behind the Armory Show, the first large-scale display of European modern art in the United States. Dozens of the country's best-known collectors purchased their initial avant-garde acquisitions at this show, and U.S. artists, in turn, could no longer be kept in check by the conservative National Academy after viewing works by Duchamp, Matisse, Picasso, and others. Drawing on extensive archival research, including previously unavailable letters and diaries, this book covers the breadth and depth of the artist's life and career, from his boyhood in Utica in the 1860s; through his close association with such artists and collectors as Robert Henri, John Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Lizzie Bliss, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller; to his death in Italy in 1928 in the company of his mistress, with whom he had lived a secret double life as "David A. Owen" for more than twenty years. Included are 101 color and black-and-white illustrations of Davies's own work, ranging from romantic dream visions to fragmented cubist forms, as well as photographs depicting his family and friends. Davies, who worked in over twenty different media, was called "one of the foremost artists in this country" and "one of the greatest artists of our time," and his work is represented in major collections throughout the United States. The illustrations alone, many of works in private collections and available here to the public for the first time, as well as the appended chronology, exhibition checklist, and list of addresses, make this a valuable addition to the library of every art dealer, curator, and student of American art. But equally fascinating is the story of the forces, personalities, and relationships that helped shape the course of twentieth-century American art.

Rebels with Applause

Rebels with Applause PDF Author: Scott Miller
Publisher: Heinemann Drama
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author pulls back the curtain on some of the greatest, most important American musicals, taking you on a tour of the milestones in the history of musical theatre. These are musicals that broke all the old rules and created new ones, and changed the way we looked at musical theatre forever: the savage political satire of The Cradle Will Rock in 1937; the surprisingly dark sexuality of Pal Joey in 1940; the profound innovations of Oklahoma! in 1943; the absurdist social satire of Anyone Can Whistle in 1964; the convention-shattering experiment that was Hair in 1967; the intimacy and emotional power of Jacques Brel in 1968; the provocative honesty of the gay-themed Ballad of Little Mikey in 1994; the abstract sophistication of the jazz/pop/R&B-flavored Songs for a New World in 1995; the emotional immensity of the "anti-spectacle" Floyd Collins in 1995; the overwhelming influence of the 1996 rock musical Rent. Offering insightful, provocative opinions on character, plot, musical and textual themes, lyrics, subtext, motivation, backstory, and historical context, the author reveals new details about what makes each one of these musicals great.

American Rebels

American Rebels PDF Author: Nina Sankovitch
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250163293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nina Sankovitch’s American Rebels explores, for the first time, the intertwined lives of the Hancock, Quincy, and Adams families, and the role each person played in sparking the American Revolution. Before they were central figures in American history, John Hancock, John Adams, Josiah Quincy Junior, Abigail Smith Adams, and Dorothy Quincy Hancock had forged intimate connections during their childhood in Braintree, Massachusetts. Raised as loyal British subjects who quickly saw the need to rebel, their collaborations against the Crown and Parliament were formed years before the revolution and became stronger during the period of rising taxes and increasing British troop presence in Boston. Together, the families witnessed the horrors of the Boston Massacre, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill; the trials and tribulations of the Siege of Boston; meetings of the Continental Congress; transatlantic missions for peace and their abysmal failures; and the final steps that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. American Rebels explores how the desire for independence cut across class lines, binding people together as well as dividing them—rebels versus loyalists—as they pursued commonly-held goals of opportunity, liberty, and stability. Nina Sankovitch's new book is a fresh history of our revolution that makes readers look more closely at Massachusetts and the small town of Braintree when they think about the story of America’s early years.

Rogues

Rogues PDF Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385548524
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing—and one of the most decorated journalists of our time—twelve enthralling true stories of skulduggery and intrigue "An excellent collection of Keefe's detective work, and a fine introduction to his illuminating writing." —NPR “Fast-paced...Keefe is a virtuoso storyteller." —The Washington Post Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously-reported, hypnotically-engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface “They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the “worst of the worst,” among other bravura works of literary journalism. The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them.

Carl W. Peters

Carl W. Peters PDF Author: Richard H. Love
Publisher: University Rochester Press
ISBN: 9781580460248
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 960

Get Book Here

Book Description
Throughout his life Peters depicted the ordinary places and people of America. From Rochester to Rockport, Peters made an amazingly coherent group of fascinating, masterful American pictures.

Fantasies of Precision

Fantasies of Precision PDF Author: Ashley Lazevnick
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452969361
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 518

Get Book Here

Book Description
Redefining the artistic movement that helped shape American modernism In the early decades of the twentieth century, a loose contingent of artists working in and around New York City gave rise to the aesthetic movement known as precisionism, primarily remembered for its exacting depictions of skyscrapers, factories, machine parts, and other symbols of a burgeoning modernity. Although often regarded as a singular group, these artists were remarkably varied in their subject matter and stylistic traits. Fantasies of Precision excavates the surprising ties that connected them, exploring notions of precision across philosophy, technology, medicine, and many other fields. Bookended by discussions of the landmark First Biennial Exhibition of Painting at the Whitney Museum in 1932, this study weaves together a series of interconnected chapters illuminating the careers of Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth. Built on a theoretical framework of the writing of modernist poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, Fantasies of Precision outlines an “ethos of precision” that runs through the diverse practices of these artists, articulating how the broad range of enigmatic imagery they produced was underpinned by shared strategies of restraint, humility, and slowness. Questioning straightforward modes of art historical classification, Ashley Lazevnick redefines the concept that designated the precisionist movement. Through its cross-disciplinary approach and unique blend of historiography and fantasy, Fantasies of Precision offers a comprehensive reevaluation of one of the defining movements of artistic modernism.