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The social and political climate in which Wood's art flourished bears certain striking similarities to America today, as national identity and the tension between urban and rural areas reemerge as polarizing issues in a country facing the consequences of globalization and the technological revolution. Wood portrayed the tension and alienation of contemporary experience. By fusing meticulously observed reality with fables of childhood, he crafted unsettling images of estrangement and apprehension that pictorially manifest the anxiety of modern life.
"Hailed as a precursor of both pop art and contemporary abstraction, Stuart Davis captured the energy of mass culture and modern life. Beginning in 1921, a series of breakthroughs led him to develop a more abstract approach. Fusing American urban experience with European modernism, his style evolved over the next four decades to become a dominant force in postwar art. The book features some 100 works, from his 1921 paintings of tobacco packages to his abstract Egg Beater series of the late twenties, the ambitious WPA murals of the thirties, and the bold works of his last two decades, in which jagged shapes and bright colors tangle with vigorous calligraphy. The volume pays special attention to his transformative recycling of earlier works; and a chronology-drawing on previously unpublished sources-represents the most complete biography to date, painting a vivid picture of economic hardship, political activism, personal struggle, and eventual triumph"--
In June 1966, photographer John Loengard was asked by Life magazine to photograph Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico, where she had been living since the late 1930s. Georgia O'Keeffe was 79 years old at the time, Loengard was 32, and for three days he observed and photographed the private life of this pioneer artist who virtually redefined American painting. For this unique book, we selected almost fifty of the finest black-and-white pictures Loengard took of the grand, solitary woman in the desert, and juxtaposed them with selected paintings of hers. They record the course of a day in the life of Georgia O'Keeffe from sunrise to sunset, developing their own quiet, mysterious effect. It becomes clear how much the austere poetry of the landscape corresponded to the artist's own self-created world and how her artistic imagination was kindled by bleached bones and an infinite desert. Now available as a reduced size reprint.
An engaging look at three women artists' pathbreaking explorationof abstraction
Robin Veder's The Living Line is a radical reconceptualization of the development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American modernism. The author illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early-twentieth-century American culture, fundamentally altering our perceptions about art and the physical, and the degree of cross-pollination in the arts. The Living Line shows that American producers and consumers of modernist visual art repeatedly characterized their aesthetic experience in terms of kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement. They explored abstraction with kinesthetic sensibilities and used abstraction to ach...