James Meyer

Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzim Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzim Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers", individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzim Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close. Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzim Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzim Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzim Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers," individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzim Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close. Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzim Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

A groundbreaking examination of the “double” in modern and contemporary artFrom ancient mythology to contemporary cinema, the motif of the double—which repeats, duplicates, mirrors, inverts, splits, and reenacts—has captured our imaginations, both attracting and repelling us. The Double examines this essential concept through the lens of art, from modernism to contemporary practice—from the paired paintings of Henri Matisse and Arshile Gorky, to the double line works of Piet Mondrian and Marlow Moss, to Eva Hesse’s One More Than One, Lorna Simpson’s Two Necklines, Roni Horn’s Pair Objects, and Rashid Johnson’s The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett). James Meyer’s survey text explores four modes of doubling: Seeing Double through repetition; Reversal, the inversion or mirroring of an image or form; Dilemma, the staging of an absurd or impossible choice; and the Divided and Doubled Self (split and shadowed selves, personae, fraternal doubles, and pairs). Thought-provoking essays by leading scholars Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tom Gunning, W.J.T. Mitchell, Hillel Schwartz, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Andrew Solomon discuss a host of topics, including the ontology and ethics of the double, the double and psychoanalysis, double consciousness, the doppelgänger in silent cinema, and the queer double.Richly illustrated throughout, The Double is a multifaceted exploration of an enduring theme in art, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, video, and performance.Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DCExhibition ScheduleNational Gallery of Art, Washington, DCJuly 10–October 31, 2022

More than any other decade, the Sixties captures our collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King, Jr. declaring, "I Have A Dream," or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels while staring down the National Guard, the revolutionary Sixties resonate around the world: China's communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the brutality of the Vietnam War. In this highly original work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long Sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, Cai Guo-Qiang's reconstructions of an iconic Cultural Revolution-era sculpture, and the television series Mad Men, to name only a few. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties, who are driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history, whether dark or glowingly nostalgic, never perfectly replicates time passed. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us with a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

Virginia Dwan is one of the most influential figures in the history of twentieth-century American art. Her eponymously named galleries, the first established in a Los Angeles storefront in 1959, followed by a second in New York in 1965, became a beacon for influential postwar American and European artists. She sponsored the debut show for Yves Klein in the United States, and she championed such artists as Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Sol LeWitt, and Ad Reinhardt. Her Los Angeles gallery featured abstract expressionism, neo-dada, and pop, while the New York branch became associated with the emerging movements of minimalism and conceptualism. At the same time, the gallery's influence expanded to remote locations in Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, where Dwan sponsored such iconic earthworks as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, and Walter De Maria's Lightning Field. Though Dwan was a major force in the art world of the sixties and seventies, her story and the history of her gallery have been largely unexplored until now. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art celebrating Dwan's gift to the Gallery of her extraordinary personal collection, From Los Angeles to New York: The Dwan Gallery, 1959 1971 explores her remarkable career. Alongside lush full-color images of one hundred leading artworks, the book deepens our understanding of the artistic exchanges Dwan facilitated during this age of mobility, when air travel and the interstate highway system linked the two coasts and transformed the making of art and the sites of its exhibition. James Meyer, the curator of the exhibition and the foremost authority on minimal art, contributes a essay that is a sophisticated and broad-ranging analysis of Dawn's legacy. Honoring Dwan's significant influence and impact on postwar art, From Los Angeles to New York is a rich and informative collection that will be treasured by fans of contemporary art.