Dore Ashton Livres

Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) is recognized as one of the most crucial and intriguing figures in the early shaping of Abstract Expressionism. Gorky pioneered a complex vocabulary of forms by fusing landscapes remembered from his childhood home in Armenia with surrealist imagery and abstract plumes of color. In so doing, he helped create a distinctly new vision for painting, leading American art into one of the most experimental periods in its history. Gorky's most important paintings and drawings were executed from 1940 through 1947, powerfully expansive years that many regard as his breakthrough period. His rich, mature work of these years is the focus of this illuminating volume, the most comprehensive book on the subject. Michael Auping's valuable text provides an introduction to the life and art of Arshile Gorky as well as an insightful consideration of the grand psychological landscape The Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1944, a work pivotal to the development of Gorky's style. Dore Ashton writes a lucid account of this artist who tends to resist classification, contributing an art historical overview of Gorky's appreciation of such modern innovators of abstraction and Surrealism as Miro and Kandinsky. Matthew Spender provides biographical details of Gorky's early years, while a selection of Gorky's personal letters further sheds an intimate light on the artist and his achievements.

With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the attention of the international art world turned from Paris to New York. Dore Ashton captures the vitality of the cultural milieu in which the New York School artists worked and argued and critiqued each other's work from the 1930s to the 1950s. Working from unsifted archives, from contemporary newspapers and books, and from extensive conversations with the men and women who participated in the rise of the New York School, Ashton provides a rich cultural and intellectual history of this period. In examining the complex sources of this important movement—from the WPA program of the 1930s and the influx of European ideas to the recognition in the 1950s of American painting on an international scale—she conveys the concerns of an extraordinary group of artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and many others. Rare documentary photographs illustrate Ashton's classic appraisal of the New York School scene.

This is a biography and critical study of the Japanese-American sculptor and designer, which maps the milestones of Noguchi's career and describes how the cultures of Japan and the USA acted upon his sculptures, gardens, public spaces and stage decors.

The first monograph on the work of Harvey Quaytman (1937-2002).

The essential book on Mark Rothko for the modern art lover's library.