Search results for ""Author Tom Wolf""

Japanese-born artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi's career and art evolved from innocence and early success to complexity and disillusionment. Born in Japan in 1889, Kuniyoshi arrived in the United States as a teenager and studied art in New York. He came into prominence during the 1920s through his distinctive modern figural style, original subjects, and humour. His work became more sensuous and worldly after two long stays in Paris, as he painted moody, reflective women and still lifes with unusual objects. Kuniyoshi was thoroughly integrated into American life and the art world-in 1948 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his work, the first retrospective that museum ever devoted to a living artist-but immigration law prevented him from becoming an American citizen. Classified an "enemy alien" after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he remained steadfastly on the side of his adopted country during the painful war years, working with the Office of War Information to create artworks indicting Japanese atrocities. After the war, Kuniyoshi developed a compelling late style, with bitter subjects and paradoxically bright colours. The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi is a welcome introduction to this complex artist's entire career, featuring seventy of his best works from public and private collections in America and Japan. More than half a century after his death in 1953, this is a chance for a new generation to assess and enjoy Kuniyoshi's life and art. AUTHOR: Tom Wolf is Professor of Art History, Bard College, NY. An artist, he has had paintings exhibited at Artists Space, New York; Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Koslow Gallery, Los Angeles and Art Gallery of Western Australia. He is a recipient of Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, and Winterthur Museum and Library Fellowships. 155 colour illustrations

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A major new book about Doris Lee, one of the top female artists - indeed among the top figurative artists, regardless of gender - in the American art world from the mid-1930s through the 1950s. Simple Pleasures presents the first major critical assessment of works by the artist Doris Lee (1904–1983). Lee was one of the most recognised artists in America during the 1930s and 40s, and was a leading figure in the Woodstock Artist's Colony. Her oeuvre reveals a remarkable ability to merge the reduction of abstraction with the appeal of the everyday. In so doing, she offers one of the very rare examples of a coherent visual identity that successfully bridged the various artistic "camps" that formed with the shift in the art world in the post-World War II era. Doris Lee exploded onto the national scene in 1935 when her painting Thanksgiving was awarded the Art Institute of Chicago's Logan Prize and instigated the Sanity in Art movement in protest. Two years later, her painting Catastrophe was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Simple Pleasures explores this initial national recognition in the 1930s within the context of American Scene painting, and traces the artist's thematic interest in the simple objects and scenes of the everyday through her career. It also examines the influence of the rise in abstraction during the late 1940s and 1950s, and the particular way in which this abstraction found resonance with Lee's long-held interest in, and collections of, folk and non-western art. During this post-war period, Lee, like many of her American Scene colleagues, found lucrative work in the heyday of commercial advertising. Lee's commercial commissions for patrons such as American Tobacco Company, Life magazine, Abbott Laboratories, and Associated American Artists are especially compelling in both their populist accessibility and in their deceptively sophisticated abstraction. Sixty-five works by the artist span the 1930s through the 1960s and are comprised of paintings, drawings, prints, and commissioned commercial designs in fabric and pottery. Included are advertisements by companies that commissioned images from Lee, and photographs that contextualise the artist's work within the Woodstock artist's community. AUTHORS: Barbara L. Jones is chief curator, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA, and the author of Samuel Rosenberg: Portrait of a Painter (2003). Melissa Wolfe is curator of American Art, St. Louis Art Museum, and co-editor of Reflections: The American Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art (2019). John Fagg is professor of American Studies, University of Birmingham, UK, and author of 'That Abused Word: Genre': The 1930s Genre Painting Revival in The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 (2011). Tom Wolf is professor of Art History at Bard College, NY and leading Yasuo Kuniyoshi scholar. 157 colour illustrations

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Let Secret Berlin guide you around the unusual and unfamiliar. Step off the beaten track with this fascinating Berlin guide book and let our local experts show you the well-hidden treasures of this fascinating city. Ideal for local inhabitants, curious visitors and armchair travellers alike. Wander around the hotel lobby where a glass floor reveals excavations of the old medieval town; take a seat in an amphitheatre where animal dissections once took place; let yourself be moved by the sounds of the largest pipe organ, still used today to bring silent films to life; take a break in one of the few well-preserved Baroque vaults housing coffins fitted with windows; climb onto a bunker that contained anti-aircraft guns during the Second World War and accept a Russian soldier's invitation to admire it from within; take a dip in one of the most beautiful bathing spots built during Europe's Art Nouveau movement; enjoy a stroll under the Spree river; go see the very first computer (designed by a Berliner) or the first synthesizer of East Germany; scale the mountain of rubble where a Skiing World Cup race was held; station yourself at the peak of the artificial hill where aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal made his first attempts at flight; and grab a bite on the island in the Havel river where Werner von Braun launched his first rocket. Absent from the usual "must-see" lists despite residing in the heart of the bustling capital, fascinating historical treasures can be found all over Berlin's city centre and its large surrounding neighbourhoods. Take another look and discover the hidden gems eluding those who think they know Berlin inside out.

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