Search results for ""author deborah solomon""

Norman Rockwell, as much as Walt Disney or Ronald Reagan, provided America with a mirror of its dreams and aspirations. As the star illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post for nearly half a century, Rockwell portrayed a fantasy of civic togetherness, of American decency and good cheer. Or, as Deborah Solomon writes in her authoritative new biography, he painted "a history of the American people that had never happened." Who was Norman Rockwell? Behind the folksy, pipe-smoking facade lay a surprisingly complex figure-a lonely man all too conscious of his inadequacies. Solomon describes him as an obsessive personality who wore his shoes too small, washed his paintings with Ivory Soap, and relied on the redemptive power of storytelling to stave off depression. He wound up in treatment with Erik Erikson, the influential psychotherapist. American Mirror draws on unpublished papers to explore the relationship between Rockwell's anguished creativity and his genius for reflecting American innocence. "The thrill of his work," writes Solomon, "is that he was able to use the commercial form of magazine illustration to thrash out his private obsessions." In American Mirror, Solomon, a biographer and art critic, trains her perceptive eye on both the art and the man. She also brilliantly chronicles the visual history of American journalism and the battle pitting photography against illustration.

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Marcel Dzama (*1974 in Winnipeg) is known for his prolific drawings, which are characterized by their distinctive palette and subject matter. He has recently expanded his practice to encompass film and three-dimensional works, thus developing an immediately recognizable language that draws from a diverse range of references and artistic influences, including Dada and Marcel Duchamp. Created in close collaboration with the artist, this publication presents his 2013 exhibition at David Zwirner in London, which included videos inspired by the game of chess and puppets and masks based on the characters, along with drawings, collages, dioramas, paintings, and sculptural works. Dzama utilized the architecture of the gallery itself—an eighteenth-century Georgian townhouse—by hanging puppets from a skylight above the five-story building’s central spiral staircase and placing monitors in the windows so that his videos could be viewed from the street.

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