Evelyn Toynton’s forthcoming Icons of America biography, Jackson Pollock, explores how Pollock’s tortured and conflicted character transformed popular culture. Against a backdrop of criticism that found American art inferior to its European counterpart (Marcel Duchamp wrote that “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”), Pollock’s controversial, even rebellious, work was provocative for generations old and new.
“What are men to rocks and mountains?” Elizabeth Bennett asks her aunt in Pride and Prejudice. Although Lizzy wants to deceive herself after “disappointment” regarding certain men, some artists would wholeheartedly agree with her, at least regarding their paintings’ subjects. Rocks and mountains, as well as forests, snow, and rivers,
Michelle Stein— In The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960, Richard Longstreth documents the development of the department store as it moves from “a great, all-inclusive emporium that helped define the character and the purpose of the city” to its transformation into shopping centers and malls. Here in New York City,
Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, edited by Art Institute of Chicago curators Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas Druick to accompany an exhibition on view there until October 23, 2011, examines an art form that had been forgotten until now. The stenciled, handmade posters made by the Soviet TASS news agency during WWII are now available to the English-speaking public for the first time.
You may have caught the mention in the letters to the editor from this past weekend’s issue of the New York Times Book Review, or perhaps you read the interview with FiveBooks on the “philosophical stakes of art”, but it is unmistakable that the voice of art critic Michael Fried
When modern artists like Picasso and Matisse first started trying to sell the public on their work, the experience was extremely difficult—everyone knows just how successful Van Gogh was, after all. Sometimes it took a little extra marketing on the painter’s part in order to close a sale. In Karen
Feel like a roadtripping across the U.S. this August? Visit these iconic spots–or just find a lawn chair in the sunshine and read about them!
Everything can be modernized: this is an idea that came close to being a “dogma” in the 1930s. Architecture, businesses, and infrastructure could progress, but so could corporate branding, family life, and even the human body. The push to advance socially and technologically is familiar today, but it had a
The woman’s face is devoid of features, and she has no fingers or toes. Her legs extend from wide hips but taper into a V, and her arms taper into nothingness down her sides. Her stomach, breasts, and buttocks are full, even suggestive of steatopygous, a condition that this woman’s