Debra Bricker Balken

Abstract Expressionism (Movements in Modern Art)

In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of Richard Nixon titled Philip Guston's Poor Richard. Produced two years before Watergate and three years before Nixon's resignation, these provocative, searing condemnations of a corrupt head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire. The drawings mock Nixon's physical attributes—his nose is rendered as an enlarged phallus throughout-as well as his notoriously dubious, shifty character. Debra Bricker Balken's book is the first book—length publication of these drawings. A visual narrative of Nixon's life, the drawings trace Nixon from his childhood, through his ascent to power, to his years in the White House. They incorporate Henry Kissinger (a pair of glasses), Spiro Agnew (a cone-head), and John Mitchell (a dolt smoking a pipe). They depict Nixon and his cohorts in China, plotting strategy in Key Biscayne, and shamelessly pandering to African Americans, hippies, and elderly tourists. As Balken discusses in her accompanying essay, these drawings also reflect a dramatic transformation in Guston's work. In response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to question the viability of a private art given to self-expression. His betrayal of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal and political meaning largely engendered the renewal of figuration in painting in America in the 1970s. These drawings not only represent one of the few instances of an artist in the late twentieth century engaging caricature in his work, they are also a witty, acerbic take on a corrupt figure and a scandalous political regime.

Philip Guston's Poor Richard

Elizabeth Hutton Turner

William C. Agee

Arthur Garfield Dove

Addison Gallery of American Art

in collaboration with William C. Agee and Elizabeth Hutton Turner The American artist Arthur Dove (1880-1946), purportedly the first artist to have produced an abstract painting, has always occupied a central place in writings on early American modernism. This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove since 1974. The exhibition, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Phillips Collection, covers the period from 1908, the year after Dove took up painting, through 1946, the year of his death. It is comprised of approximately eighty paintings, collages, pastels, and charcoal drawings.Along with Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, Dove was touted for more than three decades by photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz as an American original, one whose work was prescient in its opposition to the materialism of a newly industrialized America. Essays by Balken, Agee, and Turner discuss Dove's interactions with Stieglitz and others in his circle, including O'Keeffe, Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Paul Strand, and re-examine Dove in the context of early twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. The book contains color plates of all the works in the exhibition; the essays are profusely illustrated with black-and-white images not included in the exhibition. Apart from an out-of-print catalogue raisonné, this book is the largest and most comprehensive publication to date on Dove's work.Copublished with the Addison Gallery of American Art in association with the Phillips Collection

A Retrospective

Arthur Dove

"The biography recounts Rosenberg's full story for the first time. Art critic for The New Yorker from 1962 until 1978, Rosenberg, together with Clement Greenberg, radically reshaped the interpretation of art in the post-World-War-II period by promoting and examining abstract expression. But Rosenberg was also a social and literary critic-writing about art was just one aspect of his work. Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life weaves together Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. Rosenberg's mid-century linking of the New York School with the art establishment, together with his observations on the commodification of the artwork and the evisceration of the "self" in favor of celebrity (especially in his often-cited essay "The Herd of Independent Minds") make this book especially topical"--

A Critic‘s Life

Harold Rosenberg

Matthew McLendon

"This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition Toni Dove: Embodied Machines, on view at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, February 25/May 20, 2018."

Embodied Machines

Toni Dove

New insights into the transformative work of this visionary modern artist accompany a comprehensive documentation of his paintings and assemblages

Debra Bricker Balken

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