Bøger af Sanford Schwartz

"For some fifty years, Sanford Schwartz has written about artists, writers, and moviemakers in a voice all his own. In conversationally written pieces that present large, synoptic views of an artist's ambitions and are frequently salted with engagingly detailed descriptions of artworks-and often surprising yet illuminating comparisons between figures-Schwartz manages to speak to artists, the art world, and the precincts of museum curators and art historians all at once. But his writing is really geared to the widest audience: people who want to more deeply experience the artworks they have encountered. Now, for Artist Stories, his third book of criticism, Schwartz has selected writings, almost all of which have appeared in The New York Review of Books, from primarily the past twenty years. Basing his observations on both major events and unheralded gallery exhibitions, he shows the period to have been a complex and dazzling time. Alongside novel considerations of Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, and Frida Kahlo, for example, Schwartz gives us living portraits of the increasingly renowned outsider artist Martâin Ramâirez and the uncategorizable moviemaking puppeteers the Quay Brothers. Fresh approaches on Orson Welles, Salvador Dalâi, and Julian Schnabel have us wondering how well we ever knew them. Artist Stories is accompanied by forty pages of full-color illustrations of works Schwartz has noted"--

"Edward Hicks (1780-1849) has long been considered our foremost folk artist. Many people recognize his name and can visualize his Peaceable Kingdom paintings, with their vision, taken from the Old Testament, of wild, predatory animals coming to an accord with tame, defenseless creatures. But Hicks himself, and especially how he and his work figure in the larger sphere of American culture, remain far from settled topics. It can be questioned whether the painter, who was a widely known Quaker minister and supported his family as a decorator of carriages and other objects, was a folk artist at all. Unlike other such figures, he never stopped developing his art. His Peaceable Kingdoms, worked on continuously for over three decades (and some sixty in number), form in effect a singular ever-changing visual diary. Taking Hicks's measure from different perspectives, Sanford Schwartz looks for the first time at ways in which Hicks is part of all nineteenth-century American art and can also be seen as an outsider artist. Schwartz understands the importance of Quakerism in Hicks's life. Yet he puts a new emphasis on the painter's passionate, contradictory character and on the expressiveness of his animal creations. Volatile, antic, or poignant in demeanor, they are shown to have emotional depths that are rarely felt in American nineteenth-century painting of any stripe"--