Bøger af Michael Brenson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) studied painting before taking up photography in his early twenties. This title includes selections from his photographs of France, Spain, America, India, Russia, Mexico and pre-revolutionary China.

"An essential account of America's greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus." -Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary SupplementThe landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position-Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him "the greatest sculptor this country has produced." Michael Brenson's David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works-among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as "salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things." This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.

"An essential account of America's greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus." -Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary SupplementThe landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position-Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him "the greatest sculptor this country has produced." Michael Brenson's David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works-among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as "salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things." This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.

Visionaries and Outcasts documents and analyzes, from hopeful creation to bitter end, the most ambitious experiment in artistic funding in American history. Through the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, this country provided financial support for visual artists without exerting the stringent controls that patronage in the past required. That all ended thirty years later, as the NEA's funding for individual artists was eliminated while the agency was at the center of a political, cultural, and moral firestorm. Michael Brenson chronicles the "NEA years" with interviews from dozens of artists and scholars with firsthand knowledge of the NEA's lightning-rod individual fellowship program.Brenson, the former New York Times art critic, vividly captures the eloquent verve with which Congress supported the public funding of artists in 1965 and contrasts that with the political climate in 1995, when fellowships to individual artists were ended and nary a person of political or cultural power came to the artists' defense. This examination of one of the most controversial government programs of our time is essential to the discussion of the place of the artist in America.

During a three-week residency at Portland, Oregon's Small A Projects in 2007, New York-based artist Corin Hewitt, born in 1971, constructed an elaborate workspace within the gallery, complete with a kitchen, photo studio and theater in which the apron-wearing artist performed a series of tasks--cooking, sculpting, eating and weaving--as gallery visitors viewed him through a peephole. Merging elements representing both the contemporary and the historic Northwest, Hewitt transformed such materials as baskets, fabric, canned food, fresh vegetables and grass--as well as elements from the first performance in this ongoing series--into hybridized objects. The 75 color photographs in this book, all taken on-site by Hewitt, document the performance. Combining the sculptural with the theatrical, the photographic with the performative, Hewitt's innovative work has also been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Seattle Art Museum and Taxter & Spengemann gallery in New York.