Product Description
This book provides a complete documentation of the New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals held initially as the 9th St. Exhibition and continued at the Sta­ble Gal­lery in New York City from 1951 until 1957.

After half a century the book plans to fulfill the desire of the Annual Organizing Committee of the New York School artists: to show the most engaged creative work on the New York scene in a book, with wide distribution and with equal importance. The contributing writers are the artists themselves by means of the reproduction of their statements.

The annuals in 1951 and 1953 showed the work of the pioneers of the New York School abstract expressionists. Artists who participated in the Ninth Street Exhibition in 1951 and in the Second Annual in 1953 are each presented with four pages, in alphabetical order in the following manner: artist s statement, two works in full page reproduction from the period (1951-1957) and the artist s biography. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Perfect overview
I'm grateful to have found this book. By covering so many lesser-known artists and giving them as much space as the usual suspects (Pollock, De Kooning et al.), Herskovic gives a much rounder idea of the American Abstract Expressionist scene than any other survey I've seen. The only drawback is its price (I would love a more affordable paperback version) but I do plan on buying her other two volumes in the near future. Highly recommended.

Almost Perfect - very important
Seems to be the first book that truly begins to cover the New York Crowd with any thoroughness...would truly like to have seen representative works by all the painters covered (perhaps in a series of addenda???) Otherwise an invaluable book for reference of that most fruitful ten years in American (and perhaps world) art history.

Best and Most Complete Study of The NY School to Date!
New York School Abstract Expressionists: Artists Choice by Artists is an important contribution to the study of Abstract Expressionism.265 artists are documented and 86 are featured.If you are like me, a bit tired of the usually featured artists of the New York School(Pollock, Rothko, Tobey, etc.) then you will be pleasantly suprised by the "Other Talented Artists" that comprised the New York School.

The starting point is the historic 9th Street Show of 1951. This is thoroughly discussed as are the subsequent New York School Artist's Annuals of 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, and 1957.Numerous charts, posters and photographs are included, showing which artists were in which shows.Scholars have pretty much neglected these significant shows which featured the best of the "New Art".

As I stated earlier, 86 artists are featured.Each of these artists have 2 works shown (full page) and an artist's statement. The reproductions are excellent.There is also a Bio, and a listing of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions for each of these artists. An amazing amount of research and love went into this new production.You can discern that there were many "greats" in the NY School.You can see that the NY School was actually a bonafide community of artists. I will list the artists with an "A" and B" last name, just to give you an idea of the breadth of this work: Aach, Abbott, Abrams, Adams, Agostini, Albers, Albert, Albizu, Alcopley, Anderson, Andrews, Arnold, Asawa, Asher, Avery, Barber, Baziotes, Beauchamp, Beck, Ben, Benton, Biala, Blaine, Bolotowsky, Booth, Bouche, Bourgeois, Brach, Brenson, Briggs, Brooks, Brustlein, Bultman, Busa, and Button.

This 393 page book was sumptuosly printed and has a 12" x 9 1/2" format. It has a black cloth binding and a handsome dust jacket with ALL the names of the NY School artists.This silver dust jacket has black and red lettering which pops-out and is a stunning tribute to the artists.

I can only hope that there will be more books on these "Other Artists of the New York School of Painters and Sculptors". ... Read more

Product Description
New York City was the site of a remarkable cultural and artistic renaissance during the 1950s and '60s. In the first monograph to treat all five major poets of the New York School - John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler - Mark Silverberg examines this rich period of cross-fertilization between the arts. Silverberg uses the term 'neo-avant-garde' to describe New York School Poetry, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Happenings, and other movements intended to revive and revise the achievements of the historical avant-garde, while remaining keenly aware of the new problems facing avant-gardists in the age of late capitalism. Silverberg highlights the family resemblances among the New York School poets, identifying the aesthetic concerns and ideological assumptions they shared with one another and with artists from the visual and performing arts. A unique feature of the book is Silverberg's annotated catalogue of collaborative works by the five poets and other artists.To comprehend the coherence of the New York School, Silverberg demonstrates, one must understand their shared commitment to a reconceptualized idea of the avant-garde specific to the United States in the 1950s and '60s, when the adversary culture of the Beats was being appropriated and repackaged as popular culture. Silverberg's detailed analysis of the strategies the New York School Poets used to confront the problem of appropriation tells us much about the politics of taste and gender during the period, and suggests new ways of understanding succeeding generations of artists and poets. ... Read more

Product Description
Statutes of Liberty was the first book on The New York School of Poets, and gave an acclaimed account of its key figures: John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. This second edition contains up-to-date material on the group and its growing influence on postmodern poetics. A new postscript focuses on the work of Ashbery, currently the most esteemed American poet since Wallace Stevens, and his prolific output in the 1990s, including his 200-page epic poem Flow Chart. ... Read more

Product Description
With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the attention of the international art world turned from Paris to New York. Dore Ashton captures the vitality of the cultural milieu in which the New York School artists worked and argued and critiqued each other's work from the 1930s to the 1950s. Working from unsifted archives, from contemporary newspapers and books, and from extensive conversations with the men and women who participated in the rise of the New York School, Ashton provides a rich cultural and intellectual history of this period. In examining the complex sources of this important movement--from the WPA program of the 1930s and the influx of European ideas to the recognition in the 1950s of American painting on an international scale--she conveys the concerns of an extraordinary group of artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and many others. Rare documentary photographs illustrate Ashton's classic appraisal of the New York School scene. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A MUST HAVE CLASSIC
This is a must read classic for anyone interested in contemporary American art. The author, Dore Ashton was one of the most highly respected authorities of the New York School. Before the New York School the art world existed in Europe. The book describes the exciting cultural environment that encouraged artists in America to create new forms of painting and sculpture that would become one of the most significent AH HA! moments in art history. This is a must have for any library of books on art.

A fine history
Dore Ashton doesn't disappoint with this interesting history of the New York school of art.Ashton has been there, done that, and writes with a clear, readable style.

This book is a must for every artist, art student, and anyone interested in art and the art world. Buy the paperback and enjoy. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR’d book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
A landmark work of cultural history--now in paperback--by one of our best critics and chroniclers: the story of how four young poets reinvented literature and turned New York into the art capital of the world.

Greenwich Village, New York, circa 1951. Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry.

A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters, The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--the poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Lehman brings to vivid life the extraordinary creative ferment of the time and place, the relationship of great friendship to art, and the powerful influence that a group of visual artisits--especially Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter--had on the literary efforts of the New York School.

The Last Avant-Garde is both a definitive and lively view of a quintessentially American aesthetic and an exploration of the dynamics of creativity.Amazon.com Review
Anyone who thinks that avant-garde movements can flourish onlyin Left Bank cafés would do well to read David Lehman's superbnew book. Lehman, an editor, essayist, and poet, zeroes in on fourextraordinary poets--John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, andJames Schuyler--who were friends, rivals, sometime collaborators, andpassionate appreciators of each other's work from the late 1940sthrough the mid 1960s. This "remarkable gang of four" was, in Lehman'sopinion, not only a true avant-garde--collective creators of new,subversive, nonmainstream art--but also "the last authenticavant-garde movement that we have had in American poetry." It's anambitious thesis, but Lehman pulls it off in a narrative compounded ofcultural history, biography, literary analysis, and great gossip.

Most fascinating are Lehman's insights into the inspiration that thepoets found in the lives and works of contemporary painters--waggeringabstract expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning and the gentler figurative painters Fairfield Porter, LarryRivers, and Jane Freilicher, who came after them. As Ashbery put it,"The artists liked us and bought us drinks and we ...felt that they... were free to be free in their painting in a way that most peoplefelt was impossible for poetry." But each poet made it possible in hisown way--Ashbery through surreal word collages, Koch through thepursuit of happiness in verse, O'Hara in witty telephonic stream ofconsciousness, and Schuyler by treating his feelings asobjects. Lehman calls his book a study of "the bliss of being aliveand young at a moment of maximum creative ferment," and that blissfairly shimmers on the page. The Last Avant-Garde, a remarkablehybrid, succeeds in being both critically acute and luminouslyexciting. --David Laskin ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

lehman's new york scool fa dummies
providin a broad cultural context fa da poets he emphasizes (ashbery, o'hara, koch, and schuyla), lehman's ang weaves togetha social istory, personal biography, literary criticism, and aesthetic appreciation in a wurk dat offers some insightful readings of specific poems, but da lastin contritubion of which is more likely to be fa da social connections lehman's erbal remedys betweun dis tight-knit group of "playfully serious aesthetes" than fa any specific ruk da book advances. he describes ashbery as a poet of obliquity, fa whom "the subject of ... poetry is consciousness," and fa whom "consciousness is is self, but a self dat is inseparable from da rush of phenomenon dat bombards it on all sides." o'hara is described as da social catalyst of da group and quintessential poet of da everyday, whose wurk, by reorientin criteria fa poetic success away from sincerity, profundity, and depf and toward uma, play, and respect fa da quotidian, established an influential new poetic paradigm. in is least insightful chapta, lehman defends da "critically undervalued" koch as a "serious comic poet," influenced by drama and writin in da tradition of rabelais, byron, lewis carroll, and oscar wilde; and schuyla lehman emphasizes as a more austere and minimal poet of "life outside is window," who "revised da lyric model of da poem as found in whitman, art crane, and william carlos williams." none of dis is particularly startlin to readers at all familiar wiv their wurk, but as a main man and co-conspirata of mostest of da poets he discusses, lehman capitaziles well on is massiv store of anecdotes and offers itherto unrecorded biographical details dat will likely fuel biographical debates fa many years. unfortutanely, is overall thesis-that da new york scool of poets constitutes "the avant-garde-the last avant-garde in american poetry" is supported mostly by impressionistic commentary and mere lists of more recent poets influenced by new york scool aesthetics.

The Four M(o)usketeers
Despite the provocative title, there's nothing especially revealing in this workmanlike overview of the New York School.If you know even a little already about Ashbery, O'Hara & Co.--great poets, all--you'll find Lehman has little new to say.If you don't, his assortment of anecdotes and biographical nuggets isn't much help in capturing the New York that electrified so many major artists in the '50s and '60s.You have to sit still for Lehman's cursory reading of the poems (a whole chapter to tell us Kenneth Koch is funny?) to get to the stories and provocative quotes that justify a book like this, more an appreciation than a study.Lehman's under the impression that the New York School poets haven't gotten their due, and he works hard to make them safe and simple for everyday readers like you and me.But his book reminded me how personal a connection each one makes in their poems, so that Lehman comes off as a genial host interrupting your private conversation with the poet to make sure you're enjoying the party.Do four friends make an avant garde?That Lehman thinks so testifies to how rare a thing literary friendships are, and how widely the circles can ripple when talent gets together, in New York or anywhere else.

Our "Season on Earth"
This bio-philisophical account is a compendium of half the origin of post-modern philosophy and procedure in art. It is admittedly vague when it comes to the Beats, the second half, but the Academics are well introduced and begin to be explained. It is better read as an introduction to post-modern alacrity than a biography. This book should be the post-modern art-history text of highschool and university classrooms. And why? What is more galvanizing than a story of four young poets who fought in a war, attended ivy league schools, lived la vie boheme, and made a literary contribution to the world? We have lost these role models today. We have celebrities that live recklessly and leave feckless leagacys behind them. We also have stiff academics who have forgotten the pleasures of life some where between Dante and Wilbur. The Last Avant-Garde is a perfect demonstration of how our "season on earth" can be both meaningful and well-lived.

nothing new under the sun
This book is fine, it's OK, it's not bad. But there's nothing new here. It's not satisfying as biography -- what we gets feels like tiny fragments -- and the critical argument of the book isn't of much interest. The fact that the author essentially disregards the worth of almost all great 20th century poetry not written by the four men that he chooses to focus on is a huge misstep; he could have easily acknowledged the worth of Barbara Guest, the Language poets, Black Mountain, the Beats, etc. but instead either damns them with faint praise or simply damns them, apparently to make his case for the four New York Schoolers stronger. These are four very important poets, yes, but the author seems to be unable to view them in the greater poetic context of the last 100 years, and this puts the book at a serious disadvantage; it may undermine the reader's belief in him as a critic, and it made me, for one, unwilling to follow him down the rather uninteresting critical paths he was mapping out. The quest to determine what is and is not "avant garde" feels misguided and beside the point; how about actually reading the work in a new or compelling way?

nothing new under the sun
This book is fine, it's OK, it's not bad. But there's nothing new here. It's not satisfying as biography -- what we gets feels like tiny fragments -- and the critical argument of the book isn't of much interest. The fact that the author essentially disregards the worth of almost all great 20th century poetry not written by the four men that he chooses to focus on is a huge misstep; he could have easily acknowledged the worth of Barbara Guest, the Language poets, Black Mountain, the Beats, etc. but instead either damns them with faint praise or simply damns them, apparently to make his case for the four New York Schoolers stronger. These are four very important poets, yes, but the author seems to be unable to view them in the greater poetic context of the last 100 years, and this puts the book at a serious disadvantage; it may undermine the reader's belief in him as a critic, and it made me, for one, unwilling to follow him down the rather uninteresting critical paths he was mapping out. The quest to determine what is and is not "avant garde" feels misguided and beside the point; how about actually reading the work in a new or compelling way? ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
The New York School of Photography refers to a loosely defined group of photographers who lived and worked in New York City during the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. Through a stunning selection of 250 photographs, along with quotes from the photographers, the author shows the New York School's distinctive style. Livingston is associate director and chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The New York positives
As this thick book hasn't been reprinted or released in paperback, since the first edition in 1992, it will explain the high price and also I like to think it's because it has come to be regarded as a first-class bit of scholarship about the subject.Author Livingston has written a fascinating study about sixteen photographers who could, by now, be considered the founders of the New York Style, though this clearly is not an established photographic genre: yet.

Out of the sixteen: Arbus; Avedon; Brodovitch; Croner; Davidson; Donaghy; Faurer; Frank; Grossman; Klein; Leiter; Levinstein; Levitt; Model; Vestal and Weegee there are some I had never heard of so the book was a useful introduction to Don Donaghy, Leon Levinstein and David Vestal.All of them are woven together in the author's eighty-eight page essay.Firstly as an overview of the period where magazines, books, galleries, movies, culture and not forgetting Cold War politics, created a climate of inward looking documentary photography, especially of shots on the streets of New York.The second part looks at individuals and their contribution to the style.Each of them also gets a biographic spread (with a photo) at the back of the book plus a really comprehensive exhibition and bibliography listing.

The first 251 pages are the photo portfolios with twelve or so from each photographer.Presented as spread and whole page bleed images or with generous margins though strangely the twelve from Don Donaghy are all six by four inches.An interesting production theme has the photos printed as duotones (with a 200 screen) on four kinds of paper from matt to semi gloss art.Alexey Brodovitch's very soft focus images from his 1945 Ballet book are on an appropriate matt creamy white while the rather hard edge Diane Arbus contributions are printed on a much whiter semi-gloss.The photo section I thought was quite remarkable because these are very personal images yet they seem to hang together, possibly because of the common subject matter, in a group style.

A common theme with several of the sixteen photographers is their involvement with the Photo League, co-founded by Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn in 1936.The organization ran a photo school and encouraged documentary photography with a social intent.I only mention this because membership was important to many of these photographers and the background to the creative aspects of the League are well covered in Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War,by Lili Corbus Bezner.Both books but especially Jane Livingston's, with some fine examples, cover a fascinating era of American photography.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

Pure Photo League!
I agree that this is a great collection of photographs, many either never or seldom published before, and supported by interesting and original text. It is amazing how little biographical information exists on so manyphotographers. I bought the book because it encompassed so many of myphotographic heroes and introduced me to some photographers I was notfamiliar with. But the reason I decided to actually write a review here wasto correct the previous reviewer who mentions that Gary Winogrand's work isincluded in the book. It's not. But it sure is nice to see more on thePhoto League. What a great group. And it's nice to see their influence sofully recognized. Thank you Ms. Livingston!

Great unpublished photos by some of the greats.
This is treat for anyone interested in photography, especially in the period leading up to Winogrand, Friedlander, etc.Most of the photographs in this book, I've never seen before.Included are interesting 35mm workby Diane Arbus, some untypical Avedon, great Robert Frank's that I haven'tseen published anywhere else, early Winogrand.However the really nicething about this book is in being able to see the work of those lesserknown, but nonetheless great, photographers such as Leon Levinstein, LouisFauer, Alexi Brodovitch, and many more.Also includes a thorough andinformative essay as well as individual profiles on the artists involved. ... Read more

Product Description
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Ms. Rooney and her class tour the Big Apple, where they see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History, visit the Bronx Zoo, and journey to the Statue of Liberty. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Good book
I used this with my children when I homeschooled.It was a good book.I wish there were more in the series.

Karen

It was a great book!
Well it was a fine book it made a little sence tothe story.Well it was about a teacher when sheasked the class to see what states they where expert on.Well a girl she tells about her aunt live in Branks,NY and thatsthe story Bye. Reader,Nicholas ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Four American women: Marcia Siegel, Deborah Jowitt, Arlene Croce and Nancy Goldner are writers who became dance critics partly by design.By showing us extensive examples from their vivid writing about dance, Diana Theodores presents a detailed and illuminating analysis of their styles and ideas from 1965 to 1985, the Golden Age of Dance in New York.For the first time, she presents these four writers as a school of dance criticism, four women who defined American dance in a key era of its recent history.
About the Author ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
In the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit—when social pressures on men to conform threatened cherished notions of masculine vitality, freedom, and authenticity—modernist paintings came to be seen as metaphorical embodiments of both idealized and highly conflicted conceptions of masculine selfhood. In Modernism's Masculine Subjects, Marcia Brennan traces the formalist critical discourses in which work by such artists as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock could stand as symbolic representations that at once challenged and reproduced such prevailing cultural conceptions of masculinity. Rejecting the typical view of formalism's exclusive engagement with essentialized and purified notions of abstraction and its disengagement from issues of gender and embodiment, Brennan explores the ways in which these categories were intertwined, historically and theoretically.

Brennan makes new use of writings by Clement Greenberg and other powerful critics describing the works of Matisse, the postwar New York School abstract expressionists, and their successors, the post-painterly abstractionists. The paintings of Matisse, she argues, were represented in part as intellectually engaged and culturally respectable centerfolds. Brennan examines de Kooning's Woman series —perhaps the most significant effort to incorporate feminine presence within abstract expressionist imagery—as extended cultural metaphors for bourgeois masculinity's conflicted relationship with its feminine "others." She also shows how the aggressive energy of Pollock's nonfigural painterly idiom became domesticated in the press by the repeated pairing of his work with images of Pollock in the studio and at home with his wife, the artist Lee Krasner. Finally, discussing the rise of the post-painterly abstractionists in the sixties, Brennan shows how, both despite and because of the critical presence of Helen Frankenthaler, formalist responses to the works of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland provided an opportunity to promote idealized conceptions of masculine creativity. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
"Her book is immediately indispensable. . ." -- American BookReview

"A first-rate cultural history, of interest to both the art historianand the general reader." -- Kirkus Reviews

The French/European story of Surrealism has been written; the story ofabstract expressionism has been told. But the connection between them,how one acted as a catalyst for the other, has been a long-missingchapter in the history of art. Martica Sawin finally provides it.

In this fascinating account of what was happening within Surrealismduring the crucial years 1938-1947, Martica Sawin documents the culturaltransfer that took place when the greater part of the prewar Surrealistgroup was transplanted to the Western Hemisphere. Eminently readable,clearly told, and biographically rich, Sawin's year-by-year narrativepieces together when and how the refugees arrived and their variouspoints of contact with the future abstract expressionists. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

How America Stole Europe's Artistic Thunder
So much art history and criticism is just a pose of knowledge instead of its communication. This book, thankfully is not one of these. Focusing on one of the pivotal points in the history of art, this work tells the story of the effect the European Surrealist painters had on the American Abstract Expressionists. Sawin communicates in clear readable prose that usually succeeds in avoiding the petentious, tautological jargon that passes for art writing elsewhere.

The interest in this story is in the way it reveals the start of a kind of artistic Munro doctrine. The European emigres with their Parisian sophistication, aloofness, and arrogance come over as Masters but then have all their best ideas stolen and Americanized before trickling back with their tails firmly between their legs to a Paris that had all but forgotten them during the War.

The period concentrated on in this book is a dividing point in the history of modern art, marking a watershed between two clear movements determined by two opposing trends, something Sawin could have perhaps emphasized more.

First there was a move towards increasing explicitness in art, which climaxed in the efforts of Surrealists like Dali, Masson, Ernst, and Matta to drag the processes of the mind out into the daylight. This tended to strip away the veils of mystery and made art almost unnecessary, so this was quickly followed by a move to mask and hide the subject of paintings as we see in the work of the abstract expressionists like Pollock, and the colorfield painters like Rothko. This was a vital and no doubt self-interested U-turn entered into by artists and the art establishment.

The view from the mind's eye....
When the 20th Century began, proto-Cubists like Cezanne and the last remnants of the Impressionist movement like Monet dominated European art. No one could foresee the rise of Surrealism. Surrealism was a reaction to it's times that exploded in France in the years following WWI and later migrated to the United States during WWII. In SUREALISM IN EXILE, Martica Sawin says surrealism was inspired by many events. Certainly the surreal literary movement led by writers such as Baudelaire affected the visual arts.Similarly, the writing of anthropologists and sociologists beginning to make "scientific" contact with traditional societies also played a role.

However, Sawin suggests it was the personal experiences of artists like Max Ernst who had served at the front with the German army in WWI and French artists like Paul Eluard who faced him on the battlefield who felt the need to explore surrealism --"Rational" realism was too narrow. Later on, others joined the movement. Onslow Ford, whose physician father had witnessed the slaughter at Gallipoli as an English medical officer and returned home bitter, became a primary player after watching his father slip into depression and madness.

Ford was to say at a later date in New York that artists needed to "tear down the veils one by one that hide the reality of our own incomprehensible universe." He and the other surrealists felt the rationalist view was too restrictive.The surrealist artist could tap into the collective unconscious described by Jung (whose book on that subject was published in 1939) and bring to light a broader view of reality. Ford said artists could escape the cubist-driven semi-abstact dead end they found themselves in by opening their third eye--the Cyclopian eye, or the mind's eye, or the inner eye, and tap into their unconscious.

Sawin's book is a history of Surrealism, a movement that borrowed and incorporated ideas from the Navaho sand painters, the Tsimshian Indians (totem poles), German fairy tales, Celtic myths, Tarot cards, and menhirs--dolmans in Brittany. From these inspirational sources the Surrealists created paintings such as "Rotary Disks" --an optical illusion comprised of revolving concentric circles; "Star, Flower, Personage, Stone' --depicting alchemical transformation; and other physical transformations of space that exploded the confines of the convential 3-D world humans see owing to their limited view of reality. Surrealist art attempted to depict time and change seen by a third eye.

SURREALISM IN EXILE is filled with photographs (black and white) of the lives and works of the Surrealists, beginning with the early works in France and ending with the later works from the New York school in the late forties.If you are interested in exploring the influences that affected the work of Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Kandinski and other modern artists this book is invaluable. I gave it 4 stars because there are no color photos. ... Read more