Debra Bricker Balken

This uniquely designed book presents the first survey of contemporary artist Toni Dove's pioneering work at the crossroads of performance, cinema, and virtual reality. Credited as one of the innovators of "interactive cinema," since the early 1990s, Toni Dove has created an oeuvre of "speculative technology" blending computer driven interactivity, live-mix performance and installation in projects which examine histories of consumer culture through evolving technologies. Dove's collaborative practice brings together visual artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, robotics engineers, computer programmers, musicians, actors, and writers-each at the vanguard of his or her own metier. Accompanying a major exhibition, this distinctively designed volume presents four of Dove's most notable works, including the debut of her newest work The Dress That Eats Souls, which exists at the forefront of computer and robotic technology.

Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in—and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas. With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg’s life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds.” An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken brings to life with vivid accounts from Rosenberg’s life. Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg’s brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

New insights into the transformative work of this visionary modern artist accompany a comprehensive documentation of his paintings and assemblages Arthur Dove (1880–1946) was a major American modernist of the early 20th century. While he is tied to a circle of artists, including John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, who were associated with the preeminent photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, Dove’s work is uniquely radical, anticipating the rise of abstract expressionism in the late 1940s. This catalogue raisonné surveys the artist’s known paintings and assemblages, or “things,” alongside an incisive essay on his work’s critical reception, an illustrated chronology, and an extensive bibliography and exhibition history. Additional essays emphasize monumental works such as Fields of Grain as Seen from Train (1931), the magisterial Sunrise series (1936), and High Noon (1944), a culmination of his ongoing preoccupation with abstracting the ephemeral in nature. Previously unpublished materials and images advance the known corpus of Dove’s work while ensuring that this is the most definitive publication on the artist to date. Elegantly and inventively designed, it is also the first book on the artist to illustrate all his extant paintings in color.Distributed for the Arthur Dove Catalogue Raisonné Project

“Hyman is awesomely consistent, brilliant, ascetic—more and more people say he is the best painter in America, and so he is.” –Robert Lowell This important publication, the first of its kind, presents the paintings and drawings of an aesthetic and mystical searcher in the tradition of William Blake, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Odilon Redon, who strove for the moment when, in his own words, “the mood is as intense as it can be made.” Hyman Bloom’s work, influenced by his Jewish heritage (whose impression on his painting he described as a “weeping of the heart”) and Eastern religions, touches on many of the themes of 20th-century culture and art: the body, its immanence and transience, abstraction and spiritual mysticism. Bloom was admired by leading figures in the art world of his time, including Alfred H. Barr Jr. and Dorothy Miller; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning hailed him as “the first Abstract Expressionist.” The poet Robert Lowell praised Bloom, writing in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop, “Hyman is awesomely consistent, brilliant, ascetic—more and more people say he is the best painter in America, and so he is.” The book’s illustrations include ten previously unpublished masterworks, plus images of the figure as powerful and provocative as the paintings by Francis Bacon that were once exhibited alongside them. Hyman Bloom (1913–2009) was born in Lithuania, now Latvia. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1920, escaping anti-Semitic persecution. He lived and worked in the Boston area until his death. His work is held in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art and others.

The first comprehensive English-language monograph on Mark Tobey in forty years, this book traces the evolution of this artist s groundbreaking style and his significant yet under-recognized contributions to abstraction and midcentury American modernism. One of the foremost American artists to emerge from the 1940s, a decade that saw the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Tobey (1890 1976) is now recognized as a vanguard figure whose work anticipated the formal innovations of New York School artists such as Jackson Pollock. Tobey s small tempera paintings composed of intricate, pale webs of delicate lines generated much interest for their daring all-over compositions. Tobey s unique form of abstraction was the synthesis of his living both in Seattle and New York, his extensive trips to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kyoto, and Europe, and his conversion to the Baha i faith. His subtle calligraphic renderings are composed of a lyrical integration of both Eastern and Western visual histories and philosophies and pan-cultural references to abstract traditions that range from Chinese scroll painting to European Cubism. Surveying the artist s career with works ranging from the 1920s to 1970, this fully illustrated volume reveals the extraordinarily nuanced yet radical beauty of Tobey s painting, affirming his significant role in the development of abstraction.

After Many Springs is the title of a Thomas Hart Benton painting that evokes nostalgia for a fertile, creative time gone by. This bold new book––taking the name of this work by Benton––examines the intersections between Regionalist and Modernist paintings, photography, and film during the Great Depression, a period when the two approaches to art making were perhaps at their zenith. It is commonly believed that Regionalist artists Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood reacted to the economic and social devastation of their era by harking back in tranquil bucolic paintings to a departed utopia. However, this volume compares their work to that of photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn and filmmakers such as Josef von Sternberg—all of whom documented the desolation of the Depression—and finds surprising commonalities. The book also notes intriguing connections between Regionalist artists and Modernists Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, countering prevailing assumptions that Regionalism was an anathema to these New York School painters and showing their shared fascination with the Midwest.Distributed for the Des Moines Art CenterExhibition Schedule:Des Moines Art Center (January 30 – May 17, 2009)

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 raisonne, 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