Description
Book SynopsisDebra Bricker Balken offers the first ever complete biography of Harold Rosenberg's brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.
Trade Review"[This] book is a thoroughgoing, well-researched biography of Harold Rosenberg, but it’s also really an intellectual history of New York City, over six decades." * Brooklyn Rail *
"Balken’s insightful and admiring biography seeks to reclaim Rosenberg for the pantheon. Through an intellectual history, Balken skillfully recounts the range and depth of this unusual man, who sustained commitments to a panoply of subjects—art, aesthetics, criticism, poetry, Marxism—without ever succumbing to any party line. . . . Balken’s book gives a panoramic view of Rosenberg’s complex arguments, and does so unimpeded by jargon." * Dissent *
"This biography is a formidable attempt at offering us some insight into a figure who lived in a city that, after the Second World War, was on fire with ideas, power, ambition, and art." * Hyperallergic *
“[A] perfect compendium of the convoluted social and political history of the 20th century. . . As Balken’s biography beautifully illustrates, [Rosenberg's] critical insights and writing, like the virtues of painters whose work he extolled, was crafted as romantic and heroic exploration of the mysteries of personal identity, private meaning, and public commitment in action.” * Critics at Large *
"The most extensive study of the critic to date." * New York Review of Books *
"An exceptional achievement, the book is both fact-filled and nuanced." * Art & Object *
"The author's ability to decipher the entanglements of a cultural milieu that emerged from this intellectual hotbed is remarkable, and her historical precision alongside some 15 years of research is especially noteworthy. Ms. Balken's writing is compelling and evenhanded, illuminating some of the last century's most conspicuous intellectual scuffles, social convolutions, and cultural progress with stunning lucidity." * The East Hampton Star *
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Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life is a highly enjoyable read and will become a valuable reference work for any study of the New York School." * The Critic *
"Debra Bricker Balken has published the first complete biography of a New York intellectual usually associated with the promotion of abstract expressionism, for decades a presence in the city’s cultural life . . . The son of a modest Jewish tailor and a law graduate who never practiced, Rosenberg reconciled his Marxist convictions with an independence that distanced him from New York’s progressive elite, finding his best conversation companions in the world of artists." * Living Architecture *
"Well-researched. . . . Balken paints Rosenberg as an outsider by design, and recreates the people, places, and intellectual movements that influenced the fiercely independent thinker from his native Brooklyn to bohemian, leftist Manhattan in the 1930s." * Publishers Weekly *
“This thoroughly researched biography of Harold Rosenberg, America’s greatest art critic, vividly captures the Rosenberg I knew as an intellect and a friend—I couldn’t put it down.” * Jonathan Fineberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign *
“In her mesmerizing, tough-minded, and prodigiously researched intellectual biography of Harold Rosenberg, Balken tracks the legendary art critic’s extraordinary intellectual journey through almost every major esthetic and political development—and battle—in the US and France from 1930 through the 1960s. This welcome book challenges readers to consider what it is about Rosenberg that we still need and whether there might ever be another prominent working critic with his independence, culture, and engaged and poetic imagination.” * Michael Brenson, art critic and art historian *
“A most impressive achievement, Balken’s exhaustively researched biography of Harold Rosenberg constitutes a significant contribution to our knowledge of American intellectual and artistic life during this unusually fertile period.” * Charles W. Haxthausen, Williams College *
Table of ContentsPrologue 1 Never had any dreams: Borough Park 2 In the landscape of sensibility: East Houston Street 3 A capacity for action: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and The New Act 4 We write for the working class: The American Writers’ Congress 5 You would have to be recluse to stay out of it: Art Front 6 American Stuff 7 Myth and History: Partisan Review 8 Partisans and Politics 9 A Totally Different America: Washington, DC 10 The Profession of Poetry: Trance above the Streets 11 Death in the Wilderness: The OWI and the American Ad Council 12 Notes on Identity: VVV and View 13 Possibilities 14 Les Temps modernes 15 An explanation to the French of what was cooking: “The American Action Painters” 16 Guilt to the Vanishing Point: Commentary Magazine 17 A Triangle of Allegiances: Arendt and McCarthy 18 The Tradition of the New 19 Pop Culture and Kitsch Criticism 20 Play Acting: Arshile Gorky 21 Problems in Art Criticism: Artforum 22 Location Magazine and the Long View 23 The New Yorker 24 The Professor of Social Thought Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Illustration Credits Index
