Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in--and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas. &nbsp; With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay "The Herd of Independent Minds." An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken portrays with vivid accounts from Rosenberg's life. Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg's brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

Harold Rosenberg: A Critic‘s Life

Arts & Photography

Balken, Debra Bricker

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of Richard Nixon titled Philip Guston's Poor Richard. Produced two years before Watergate and three years before Nixon's resignation, these provocative, searing condemnations of a corrupt head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire. The drawings mock Nixon's physical attributes—his nose is rendered as an enlarged phallus throughout-as well as his notoriously dubious, shifty character. Debra Bricker Balken's book is the first book—length publication of these drawings. A visual narrative of Nixon's life, the drawings trace Nixon from his childhood, through his ascent to power, to his years in the White House. They incorporate Henry Kissinger (a pair of glasses), Spiro Agnew (a cone-head), and John Mitchell (a dolt smoking a pipe). They depict Nixon and his cohorts in China, plotting strategy in Key Biscayne, and shamelessly pandering to African Americans, hippies, and elderly tourists. As Balken discusses in her accompanying essay, these drawings also reflect a dramatic transformation in Guston's work. In response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to question the viability of a private art given to self-expression. His betrayal of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal and political meaning largely engendered the renewal of figuration in painting in America in the 1970s. These drawings not only represent one of the few instances of an artist in the late twentieth century engaging caricature in his work, they are also a witty, acerbic take on a corrupt figure and a scandalous political regime.

Philip Guston's Poor Richard

Arthur Dove: A Retrospective

In collaboration with William C. Agee and Elizabeth Hutton Turner The American artist Arthur Dove (1880-1946), purportedly the first artist to have produced an abstract painting, has always occupied a central place in writings on early American modernism. This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove since 1974. The exhibition, organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Phillips Collection, covers the period from 1908, the year after Dove took up painting, through 1946, the year of his death. It is comprised of approximately eighty paintings, collages, pastels, and charcoal drawings. Along with Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin, Dove was touted for more than three decades by photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz as an American original, one whose work was prescient in its opposition to the materialism of a newly industrialized America. Essays by Balken, Agee, and Turner discuss Dove's interactions with Stieglitz and others in his circle, including O'Keeffe, Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Paul Strand, and re-examine Dove in the context of early twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. The book contains color plates of all the works in the exhibition; the essays are profusely illustrated with black-and-white images not included in the exhibition. Apart from an out-of-print catalogue raisonné, this book is the largest and most comprehensive publication to date on Dove's work. Copublished with the Addison Gallery of American Art in association with the Phillips Collection

Phillips Collection

Agee, William C.

Addison Gallery of American Art

Turner, Elizabeth Hutton

Phillips Academy

Dove, Arthur Garfield

Individual Artists

Mit Pr

The MIT Press

From the outset of her career, Georgia O’Keeffe credited her introduction to modernism as deriving in part from a reproduction of a pastel by Arthur Dove she saw around 1913. By this time Dove was well established as the foremost modernist artist in America, yet O’Keeffe herself would later become a source of renewal for his work.
Renowned scholar Debra Bricker Balken here offers the first investigation into the interrelationship between these two great artists. She shows that while Dove’s sensual evocations of landscape―his abstractions of nature’s undulating rhythms and forms―offered inspiration for O’Keeffe, the influence of O’Keeffe’s work on Dove was equally significant. After 1930, Dove turned to O’Keeffe’s early works for renewed aesthetic inspiration, mining, as he put it, her “burning watercolors.”
Beyond examining the impact of these mutual influences, this beautifully illustrated publication situates Dove and O’Keeffe within the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, and brings them into a fuller context within the modernist scene of the 1920s and 1930s. What emerges is a fascinating look at the first pivotal moment of modernism in America.

Dove/O'Keeffe: Circles of Influence

Clark Art Institute

Since his early work was first embraced by Alfred Stieglitz, John Marin (1870–1953) has been recognized as one of America's foremost watercolorists. During the last two decades of Marin's career, however, oil painting played a greater role in his studio practice. Marin's engagement with oil was liberating, eventually yielding a more fluid, linear, and calligraphic style. 
This beautiful publication is the first to focus exclusively on Marin's output from the 1930s through the early 1950s, a corpus of nearly seventy works, which has been generally overlooked in art historical literature. Debra Bricker Balken resituates these works within the discourses of midcentury modernism, convincingly arguing that critics—such as Clement Greenberg—saw them as important precursors to Abstract Expressionism, influencing such artists as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Marin's painted abstractions of the Maine coast and Manhattan architecture were singled out for their invention, singularity, and authority, and forecast the new language of Abstract Expressionism.

John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury

Yale University Press

John Marin : Modernism at Midcentury

Product Description 
New insights into the transformative work of this visionary modern artist accompany a comprehensive documentation of his paintings and assemblages\nArthur Dove (1880–1946) was a major American modernist of the early 20th century. While he is tied to a circle of artists, including John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe, who were associated with the preeminent photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz, Dove’s work is uniquely radical, anticipating the rise of abstract expressionism in the late 1940s. This catalogue raisonné surveys the artist’s known paintings and assemblages, or “things,” alongside an incisive essay on his work’s critical reception, an illustrated chronology, and an extensive bibliography and exhibition history. Additional essays emphasize monumental works such as 
Fields of Grain as Seen from Train (1931), the magisterial 
Sunrise series (1936), and 
High Noon (1944), a culmination of his ongoing preoccupation with abstracting the ephemeral in nature. Previously unpublished materials and images advance the known corpus of Dove’s work while ensuring that this is the most definitive publication on the artist to date. Elegantly and inventively designed, it is also the first book on the artist to illustrate all his extant paintings in color. 
 Review 
"An expanded view of ‘one of America’s most far-reaching, idiosyncratic artists.’ . . . In addition to a chronology, exhibition history, and bibliography, the book features an introductory essay [that] charts the artist’s reception through the writers who championed or disparaged him . . . But the true revelation here lies in the full-color illustrations, which track the painter through his marvels and misfires alike."—Kate Sutton, 
Bookforum\n"Balken’s volume, gorgeously printed and illustrated in full color by Yale University Press . . . promises to be an essential resource for Dove scholars"—Andrew L. Shea, 
The New Criterion\nAbout the Author 
Debra Bricker Balken is an independent scholar, writer, and curator who works on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art.

Arthur Dove: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Things

Other Distribution

Accompanying a major retrospective, this long-overdue survey establishes Mark Tobey as a pioneering champion of abstraction in America. The first comprehensive English-language monograph on Mark Tobey in forty years, this book traces the evolution of this artist’s groundbreaking style and his significant yet under-recognized contributions to abstraction and midcentury American modernism. One of the foremost American artists to emerge from the 1940s, a decade that saw the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Tobey (1890–1976) is now recognized as a vanguard figure whose work anticipated the formal innovations of New York School artists such as Jackson Pollock. Tobey’s small tempera paintings composed of intricate, pale webs of delicate lines generated much interest for their daring “all-over” compositions. Tobey’s unique form of abstraction was the synthesis of his living both in Seattle and New York, his extensive trips to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kyoto, and Europe, and his conversion to the Baha’i faith. His subtle calligraphic renderings are composed of a lyrical integration of both Eastern and Western visual histories and philosophies and pan-cultural references to abstract traditions that range from Chinese scroll painting to European Cubism. Surveying the artist’s career with works ranging from the 1920s to 1970, this fully illustrated volume reveals the extraordinarily nuanced yet radical beauty of Tobey’s painting, affirming his significant role in the development of abstraction.

Mark Tobey: Threading Light

Rizzoli Electa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Balken, Debra Bricker. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Balken, Debra Bricker

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Balken, Debra Bricker. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Harold Rosenberg: A Critic‘s Life

Philip Guston's Poor Richard

Philip Guston's Poor Richard

Arthur Dove: A Retrospective

Arthur Dove: A Retrospective

Dove/O'Keeffe: Circles of Influence

John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury

John Marin : Modernism at Midcentury

Arthur Dove: A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings and Things

Mark Tobey: Threading Light