Search results for ""author jed perl""

As art critic for The New Republic , Jed Perl is renowned for combining a passion for art and a skepticism about the current art establishment with an ability to write about art in the context of our larger culture. In this collection of essays, including two written especially for this book, he delivers a brilliant mixture of first-rate art criticism and politically informed insight into the true workings of the American art world.Perl offers incisive analysis into the marketing mentality that dominates today's museums, the poverty of academic criticism, and the changing expectations of the gallery-going public. He re-evaluates the old masters, and turns an avid, unprejudiced eye on the works of his contemporaries. He laments the collapse of a gallery culture that once allowed artists to develop slowly, and argues for a radical reassessment of the way art is presented to,and is viewed by,the public.

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The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor. In this beautifully written, deeply researched book Jed Perl shows how Alexander Calder became an avant-garde artist with enduring appeal. One of our most beloved modern artists, Calder is celebrated above all as the inventor of the mobile. Only now is the full story of his life being told in a gloriously illustrated biography, which features unseen photographs and is based on scores of interviews and unprecedented access to Calder's papers. Born into a family of artists, Calder forged important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century creators, including Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Martha Graham, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian and Virgil Thomson. His early years studying engineering were followed by artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to Louisa James—a great-niece of Henry James—is a richly romantic story. This transatlantic life carries readers from New York's Greenwich Village, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then to a refugee-filled London just before the War, where Calder's circle of friends included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Kenneth Clark.

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Alexander Calder was one of the most original artists of the twentieth century and a major figure in American art. Renowned for his mobiles and stabiles, he also created the beloved Calder Circus, an early performance piece now preserved at the Whitney Museum. He was a contemporary and friend of Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miró and collaborated with Martha Graham. His wife, Louisa, was a grandniece of Henry and William James, a liberal society girl from Boston who loved to entertain. Both were characters, full of joie de vivre. When they moved their family to Roxbury, Connecticut, they became a mainstay in a community that included Arthur Miller and Saul Steinberg, who would come to their parties.In this unique and beautiful work, Sandra Calder Davidson remembers growing up as the daughter of this larger-than-life pair and celebrates the family—the children and grandchildren—that grew out of their loving home. Sandra has a gift for caricaturing people as animals—her father as a circus lion, Louisa as a nippy fox—and the book is organized around these portraits, accompanied by vivid recollections and anecdotes about the subjects. The “other critters” include, besides Miller and Steinberg, other family friends and whimsical fauna she has encountered, like St. Louis Cardinal fans in full cardinal regalia or a Florida gator at a cocktail party for retirees.Celebrating family and the joyful dance of life, here is a book with the freshness and grace of a Calder mobile.

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Multum in Parvo highlights the complex relationship between scale and size in the oeuvre of Alexander Calder (1898–1976) over a period of more than 30 years. As its title--translating to “much in little”--implies, the volume features over 40 rare small-scale sculptures, ranging from the size of a thumb to 30 inches tall, all of which feature the same physical qualities as Calder’s largest mobiles in the most miniature of detail. In addition to archival material, installation photography of the sculptures in the environment designed for them by architects Santiago and Gabriel Calatrava, and original architectural sketches, the book also includes commissioned essays by Jed Perl, art historian and author currently at work on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder, and Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, as well as poems by Karl Shapiro and John Updike.

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A Painter’s Lifeis a rare glimpse into the mind of an uncompromising painter. Mari Lyons was a life-long “every-day” painter and from an early journal she kept for a short time she reveals the heartbreaks, the pain of rejection, the intense and abiding love of her work, and the quiet triumphs of a painter juggling the demanding life of a mother of four, a busy husband, constant financial pressure; she had a fierce desire to make ever-better work, and for her work to become more visible in the world. Later talks she gave at the Munson William Proctor Institute and Rider University frame the journal entries with the aesthetic concepts that animate her work. This look at her inner life is made more palpable by a selection of more than eighty-five representative paintings in color, along with sketches and photographs. Mari studied with Max Beckmann as a teenager, and later at Bard College, Yale-Norfolk, and with Stanley William Hayter. Her early work received high praise in college and from her first exhibition at the Polari Gallery in Woodstock when she was nineteen and still a student. She married at twenty-one, had three children in as many years, and then moved from the Midwest to New York City, where her fourth child was born.At first influenced by the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, she painted non-objectively but soon found the rich thingness of the world irresistible and her work developed into what she called “painterly figuration.” Her journals and notes reveal the intimate details of her long mediation between these two commitments. In time she exhibited regularly at the First Street Gallery in Chelsea and received praise in such places as The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Sun, Forbes FYI, and elsewhere. Today her paintings are in The Museum of the City of New York, The New York State Museum, Bard College, The Montana Historical Society, Mills, Wellesley, and Russell Sage colleges, The Montana Museum of Art, and many other museums and private collections.

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