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America is haunted. Ghosts from its violent history--the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and traumatic wars--are an inescapable and unsettled part of the nation's heritage. Not merely in the realm of metaphor but present and tangible, urgently calling for contact, these otherworldly visitors have been central to our national identity. Through times of mourning and trauma, artists have been integral to visualizing ghosts, whether national or personal, and in doing so have embraced the uncanny and the inexplicable. This stunning catalog, accompanying the first major exhibition to assess the spectral in American art, explores the numerous ways American artists have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible. ​Featuring artists from James McNeill Whistler and Kerry James Marshall to artist/mediums who made images with spirits during séances, this catalog covers more than two hundred years of the supernatural in American art. Here we find works that explore haunting, UFO sightings, and a broad range of experiential responses to other worldly contact.
One of the undisputed masters of American collage, Romare Bearden (1911-1988) once described collage-making as improvisation, likening it to the creative spontaneity of jazz and blues. Highlighting this approach, Idea to Realization features a rare group of works that blend paint, photographic images and abstracted cut-paper elements. Created as maquettes for murals, mosaics, book jackets and other projects, most of these works have never before been reproduced. The publication includes the striking maquette for "Pittsburgh Recollections," a bold modernist panorama tracing the city's development that was realized in 1984 as the famed 60-foot-long mosaic of ceramic tiles in downtown Pittsburgh. Bearden frequently collaborated with fellow artists, writers, musicians and choreographers, creating artworks for books and designing book covers, posters, costumes and stage sets, and Idea to Realization also draws attention to the important role of collaboration in Bearden's practice.
Photographer George Platt Lynes, painter Paul Cadmus, and critic Lincoln Kirstein played a major role in creating the institutions of the American art world from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The three created a remarkable world of gay aesthetics and desire in art with the help of their overlapping circle of friends, lovers, and collaborators. Through hours of conversation with surviving members with their circle and unprecedented access to papers, journals, and previously unreleased photos, David Leddick has resurrected the influences of this now-vanished art world along with the lives and loves of all three artists in this groundbreaking biography.
Between 1952 and about 1963 Romare Bearden created a large body of abstract watercolors, oil painting, and collages. Some titled, some not, they range in height from over seven feet to just under three inches. Exhibited with success at the time of their execution, these artworks are little know today, yet they directly inform the collages for which he is now best known and that he begain creating in the mid-1960's, such as Melon Season. This essay is not intended to be biographically comprehensive but rather to establish a chronology for the period during which Bearden produced the abstractions, to fill in missing factual information, and to bookend this decade of his production, front and back. Romare Bearden : Abstraction tells the story of a historically neglected but extraordinary and critically important period of time and body of work. -- from author.
This long-overdue monograph rediscovers the fifty-year career of Robert De Niro, Sr., an important New York School painter and poet. The first comprehensive monograph on painter and poet Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922-1993), a major contributor to postwar American art, known for his unique, bold style of painterly representation. De Niro was a visionary artist in the early days of Abstract Expressionism and a celebrated member of the New York School of painters, along with Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Over the course of his fifty-year career, he painted portraits, still lifes, the female nude, and interiors with a signature gestural painting style and brilliant color, whic...
Walt Kuhn (1877-1949) is best known for his bold, modernist paintings of showgirls and circus performers. He was deeply involved with theater and the circus for much of his life, and his work was informed by years of close observation. Combining a modernist impulse with a showman's instincts, Kuhn created portraits that penetrate the veneer of burlesque shows and circuses as well as vigorously rendered still lifes. Kuhn was one of the principal organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, and from about 1922 to 1925, he also turned theater professional, writing and directing satirical skits and pantomimes. In the late 1920s, his mature style emerged through a unique melding of modernist principles with an updated realism. This first major exhibition catalogue of Kuhn's work in decades, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, brings his work back into the spotlight.
Whether it was waged at Pitcairn Island, Nagasaki, or the Falkland Islands, whether during the Han Dynasty, the English Empire, or the Cold War, battles have been fought, people slaughtered, women raped, children orphaned, and so on, as the pages of history turn. The current world situation, in the very first years of the twenty-first century, is certainly no exception. The visual residue of these battles changes over time, growing more and more dense, more and more immediate. But always there have been maps, detailed cartographic evidence of what was known, what was planned, what was going to happen. For over a dozen years, Joyce Kozloff has centered her art on the theme of cartography, ble...