"The fact that most modern and contemporary art is produced with the idea of it ending up in a museum seems so natural to us that we can hardly think about the relationship between museums and artists as anything other than a kind of productive symbiosis. We tend to think that artists create, and museums as a matter of course preserve what is created. But in fact modern museums are, above all, filled with art produced against the museum. The Irascibles: Painters Against the Museum (New York, 1950) examines one of the most significant episodes in this historical dialectic between the museum and artists, through the lens of the now iconic Nina Leen photograph published by Life magazine on January 15, 1951: that of the clash between some of the painters of the New York School and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was, according to the artists, hostile to "advanced art." The Irascibles were William Baziotes, James Brooks, Fritz Bultman, Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Weldon Kees, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, and Bradley Walker Tomlin, although Bultman, Hofmann, and Kees were unable to attend the shoot. A quick glance at the history of modern art--with its succesion of salonniers and rejects--could lead us to think of this photo as a mere journalistic anecdote. But it is in fact a single frame in a much larger sequence: that of the institutional workings of modern art since the historical avant-gardes, caught in flagrante in one of the most compelling moments of those confrontations with the status quo. The Irascibles knew precisely what they were defending--the new--and they were aware that their demands would end up affecting the perception of the art of their time, and thus of the art that followed. And if they do indeed continue to affect our perception, it is--in what only appears to be a paradox--precisely because of the indisputable presence of their works in the very museum that once rejected them."--

Exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pollock's first major European exhibit. The exhibit brings together many of the 23 works from the 1950 exhibit, along with other examples from major museums and private collections from around the world. 1950 exhibit as marking the start of a transition period in Pollock's life where he began to explore the use of the action art. The current exhibition, organized by the Centro Italiano per le Arti e la Cultura and the Musei Civici Venezia, continue through June and span Pollock's career.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

Hedda Sterne's impressive art career began in the late 1930s when she exhibited with the Surrealists in Paris. She attained national prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, exhibiting with Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, and her career continues into the present. This book documents Sterne's importance to the post-war American art scene. It highlights notable periods in her artistic career, including her Machine and Spray Roads paintings, portraits, installations, and recent drawings.

In December 1950, the German Expressionist Max Beckmann set out from his Manhattan apartment to see his Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket, on view at The Met, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. Inspired by the poignant circumstances of the artist’s death, Max Beckmann in New York focuses on 40 beautifully illustrated works that Beckmann painted in the city during the last 16 months of his life, as well as earlier works in New York collections. An informative and accessible essay by art historian Sabine Rewald, as well as detailed catalogue entries for each work and generous excerpts from the artist’s letters, diaries, and ephemera, illuminate Beckmann’s difficult and tumultuous life and make this an essential volume for anyone interested in the artist.

Born in 1914 in Beatrice, Nebraska, and presumed dead in 1955 (when he apparently leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge), Weldon Kees has become one of the better-known ?unknown? American poets of the twentieth century, his fiction and poetry largely kept alive by other poets. But Kees was also that rare artist who excelled in many genres and media: a skillful painter, filmmaker, jazz musician, and composer. He was a gifted critic as well, and his criticism bears the marks of his own deep and broad engagement with the arts.øWeldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury is the first book to reflect the full range and reach of Kees?s artistic activities. Bringing together writers from various disciplines?art historians, poets, literary critics, curators, and cultural scholars, including Dore Ashton, James Reidel, Dana Gioia, and Stephen C. Foster?this volume offers a wide variety of perspectives through which to evaluate the meaning and significance of Kees?s achievement. Although the essays themselves partake of the diversity of Kees?s impact on the culture, all agree on one fundamental point: any history of postwar American culture that neglects Kees?s multifaceted contribution is ultimately incomplete.

Handsomely illustrated and engagingly written, New York Modern documents the impressive collective legacy of New York's artists in capturing the energy and emotions of the urban experience.

Covers the full scope of Gottlieb's achievement.

Winner of the Pulitizer Prize and National Book Critics Award Circle Award. An authoritative and brilliant exploration of the art, life, and world of an American master. Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, a true “painter’s painter” whose protean work continues to inspire many artists. In the thirties and forties, along with Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock, he became a key figure in the revolutionary American movement of abstract expressionism. Of all the painters in that group, he worked the longest and was the most prolific, creating powerful, startling images well into the 1980s. The first major biography of de Kooning captures both the life and work of this complex, romantic figure in American culture. Ten years in the making, and based on previously unseen letters and documents as well as on hundreds of interviews, this is a fresh, richly detailed, and masterful portrait. The young de Kooning overcame an unstable, impoverished, and often violent early family life to enter the Academie in Rotterdam, where he learned both classic art and guild techniques. Arriving in New York as a stowaway from Holland in 1926, he underwent a long struggle to become a painter and an American, developing a passionate friendship with his fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, who was both a mentor and an inspiration. During the Depression, de Kooning emerged as a central figure in the bohemian world of downtown New York, surviving by doing commercial work and painting murals for the WPA. His first show at the Egan Gallery in 1948 was a revelation. Soon, the critics Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess were championing his work, and de Kooning took his place as the charismatic leader of the New York school—just as American art began to dominate the international scene. Dashingly handsome and treated like a movie star on the streets of downtown New York, de Kooning had a tumultuous marriage to Elaine de Kooning, herself a fascinating character of the period. At the height of his fame, he spent his days painting powerful abstractions and intense, disturbing pictures of the female figure—and his nights living on the edge, drinking, womanizing, and talking at the Cedar bar with such friends as Franz Kline and Frank O’Hara. By the 1960s, exhausted by the feverish art world, he retreated to the Springs on Long Island, where he painted an extraordinary series of lush pastorals. In the 1980s, as he slowly declined into what was almost certainly Alzheimer’s, he created a vast body of haunting and ethereal late work.

When William Boyd published his biography of New York modern artist Nat Tate, a huge reception of critics and artists arrived for the launch party, hosted by David Bowie, to toast the late artist's life. Little did they know that the painter Nat Tate, a depressive genius who burned almost all his output before his suicide, never existed. The book was a hoax, and the art world had fallen for it. Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s. William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Praise for Nat Tate: "William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread-that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist-did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate."-David Bowie "A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time."-Gore Vidal