Anne Middleton Wagner

00 This original and sharply obser-vant book gives new significance to three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Anne Wagner looks at their imagery and careers, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women--the main element linking the three--is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share. This original and sharply obser-vant book gives new significance to three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Anne Wagner looks at their imagery and careers, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women--the main element linking the three--is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.

Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe

Three Artists (three Women)

Anne Truitt

Thresholdis an in-depth look at a pivotal decade in the career of Anne Truitt (1921–2004): the 1970s. An authoritative essay by acclaimed art historian Anne M. Wagner delivers new insights into the artist and her work, while extensive excerpts from the artist’s writings--including some previously unpublished--open a new window on Truitt’s creative process and its preoccupation with perceptual experiences that hover along an invisible edge--a threshold, as Truitt often called it, or "the point at which the abstract nature of events becomes perceptible." In the 1970s this idea was an ongoing preoccupation, which she repeatedly attempted to define. The plates section includes generous illustrations of works from the period, including drawings, paintings and the sculptures for which she has been heralded as a key figure in postwar American art.

Threshold : Works from the 1970s

In Mother Stone Anne Middleton Wagner looks anew at the carvings of the first generation of British modernists, a group centered around Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Jacob Epstein. Wagner probes the work of these sculptors, discusses their shared avant-garde materialism, and identifies a common theme that runs through their work and that of other artists of the period: maternity. Why were artists for three turbulent decades after the First World War seemingly preoccupied with representations of pregnant women and the mother and child? Why was this the great new subject, especially for sculpture? Why was the imagery of bodily reproduction at the core of the effort to revitalize what in Britain had become a somnolent art? Wagner finds the answers to these questions at the intersection between the politics of maternity and sculptural innovation. She situates British sculpture fully within the new reality of “bio-power”—the realm of Marie Stopes, Brave New World, and Melanie Klein. And in a series of brilliant studies of key works, she offers a radical rereading of this sculpture’s main concerns and formal language.

Mother Stone: the Vitality of Modern British Sculpture

Art historian Wagner looks at the imagery and careers of three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women--the main element linking the three--is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.--From publisher description.

Anne Middleton Wagner

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