Irving Sandler

Over his long and successful career David Remfry MBE RA RWS has achieved a mastery of watercolour that few have matched. Unusually for the medium, he works on a large scale and often focuses on people, exploring the dance hall and the nightclub in breathtaking images that are at once beautiful and edgy. This book is the first full-length monograph devoted to the artist's watercolours. Its author, James Russell, is well known for his writing on 20th-century British artists. Russell brings his scholarship, humour and fascination for people and their lives to his study of Remfry’s career, tracing the evolution of a remarkable talent, looking in depth at the most significant works and placing Remfry in the context of both the British watercolour tradition and international contemporary painting. This is at once a glorious art book and an intimate portrait of city life. Having spent 20 years living and working at the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York, Remfry has a following on both sides of the Atlantic. New Yorkers – often in party mode – feature in many of his watercolours, and his recollections of people and places add colour to the text.

This book discusses the role of gesture painting and the sculpture related to the painting in the development of distinctive artistic tendencies by the members of the second generation of the New York School during the second part of the fifties.

FROM 1947 TO 1951, more than a dozen Abstract Expressionists achieved "breakthroughs" to independent styles. 1 During the following years, these painters, the first generation of the New York School, received growing recognition nationally and globally, to the extent that American vanguard art came to be considered the primary source of creative ideas and energies in the world, and a few masters, notably Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko, were elevated to art history's pantheon. Younger artists who entered their circle in the early fifties-the early wave of the second generation-such as Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Allan Kaprow, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Richard Stankiewicz (to list some of the better known), were also acclaimed, but with a few exceptions, their reputations had gone into decline by the end of the fifties. In the following decade, the second generation was eclipsed by a third generation, the innovators of Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual Art. (Any notion of a generation of artists is necessarily arbitrary, of course. The term "generation," as it is used here, refers to a group of artists close in age who live in the same neighborhood at the same time, and to a greater or lesser degree, know each other and partake of a similar sensibility, a shared outlook and aesthetic.)

The fourth and final installment in Irving Sandler's series on contemporary art, Art of the Postmodern Era surveys the artists, works, movements, and ideas as well as the social and cultural context of this energetic and turbulent period in art.The book begins with the late 1960s, when new directions in art emerged, ranging from diverse postminimal

Sandler's novel brings to life the New York art world from the death of Jackson Pollock in 1956 to the emergence of Andy Warhol in 1962. The setting is downtown New York. The novel follows the careers and interactions of four artists of different generations and styles--two first generation abstract expressionists and two younger painters. Other leading characters include an elder and younger critic, two art dealers, a curator, and a collector.The novel portrays competition within the self and with others for artistic recognition, as well as the soul-searching suffering for one's art. Connections are forged and betrayed. Whether relationships thrive or plummet, for business, pleasure or both, makes for an exciting, tough and dramatic world. Art theory and art history are interwoven throughout this crisp and sparkling narrative, through intriguing plot twists and dialogue.

"As a painter and as one interested in education in relation to painting and drawing, the writer has become personally interested in the problem of subject matter in art... Since there is controversy in regards to this tendency in painting, research directed toward the source of ideas involved in the work, it is felt, will help to make clear the intention of the artists. This research will deal with the attitudes of these artists toward their own work and their relation to tradition as they express it." —Robert Goodnough (1950). The absence of traditional subject matter was a primary issue for painters in mid-twentieth-century America whose imagery lacked representational references; it was also a problem for those struggling to understand modern art. Robert Goodnough (1917–2010), then a New York University graduate student and an artist deeply involved with these issues, responded to the situation in a 1950 research paper, "Subject Matter of the Artist: An Analysis of Contemporary Subject Matter in Painting as Derived from Interviews with Those Artists Referred to as the Intrasubjectivists." Goodnough's paper constitutes the first scholarly work on the artists who became known as the Abstract Expressionists and includes interviews with William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. This previously unpublished study is presented here for the first time alongside related writings by Goodnough.

Sandler discusses the major and minor artists and their works; movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles; and the social and cultural context of the period. He covers post-modernist art theory, the art market, and consumer society. American and European art and artists are included.