Illustrated to convey the style and sensibility of the 1930s, this volume celebrates the events and personalities of the 1930s and the birth of American mass culture

Hopes and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times, 1929-1939

History

Marquis, Alice Goldfarb

Americas

Free Pr

Art Lessons: Learning From The Rise And Fall Of Public Arts Funding

After forty years of subsidy and billions of dollars spent, American arts institutions are no more secure financially than before. Behind the headlines about controversial grants to the arts abides a realm of conservatism, bureaucracy, and jostling special interests, Alice Goldfarb Marquis maintains. With well-established, mainstream institutions capturing the bulk of government subsidies, artistic repertoires are reaching ever further into the past while truly innovative artists languish on the sidelines. Art Lessons is a fresh look at how Americans fund the arts - and why - by a major cultural historian. Packed with anecdotes about the creation of such leading cultural institutions as Lincoln Center, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the American Film Institute, and filled with stories about politicians, artists, philanthropists, and NEA chairs, the book offers a behind-the-scenes look at our cultural elite: the early battles over whether to allow affluent Jews to be part of the fund-raising establishment ... the controversies over the influence of popular artists such as Leonard Bernstein ("Nobody liked him except the public," carped one critic) ... the monumental mistakes made in the building of Washington's Kennedy Center, which have necessitated repeated federal bailouts ... and much more. From John Kennedy's determination to bolster America's arts as part of his Cold War strategy against the Soviets, to Richard Nixon's support of the NEA's greatest expansion, to Ronald Reagan's abortive efforts to slash arts funding when Republican arts patrons and corporate funders objected, the book is filled with surprises.

World

Basic Books

Brushstroke! reveals the secret behind a cache of Old Masters hidden since World War II on display in New York's Museum of the New. Marquis tells a tale which shows that what you see in art is not always what you get.

Brushstroke!

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Penny-A-Page Press

Alfred H.Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern

Biographies & Memoirs

Ntc/contemporary+publishing Co

Marquis examines the behind-the-scenes complex that rules the contemporary art world, revealing it to be a nexus of hype, hypocrisy, gossip, greed, manipulation and secrecy. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

The Art Biz: The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museums, and Critics

Arts & Photography

Contemporary Books

Dust jacket notes: "On May 10, 1939, when the museum of Modern Art celebrated the opening of its handsome new home on Manhattan's West Fifty-third Street, it signaled the triumph of modern art and its foremost missionary and defender, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of that opening, Alice Goldfarb Marquis offers a superlatively entertaining account of MOMA's first director and guiding genius, who transformed a three-room exhibition gallery into a world-famous museum -- and in the process became perhaps the single most powerful influence in the creation of today's art establishment. Handpicked by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to head a fledgling museum dedicated to the controversial art of the twentieth century, Alfred Barr seemed an unlikely choice. The frail, bespectacled art professor from Wellesley, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was virtually unknown, had no administrative experience, and could hardly be expected to deal successfully in the rapacious, tightly interconnected arena of the international art market. But young Barr proved astonishingly capable, quickly establishing a network of contacts among artists, dealers, influential critics, wealthy patrons, and potential donors. Though limited by a minuscule buying budget, Barr had an unfailing eye for excellence and an unexpected talent for haggling, enabling him to acquire for MOMA the world's finest collection of modern art -- a catalog of masterpieces now valued in the tens of millions of dollars. Mondrian, Rousseau, Braque, Klee, Rodin, Moore, Giacometti, Arp, Picasso, Rothko, Pollock -- Barr's wide-ranging taste encompassed them all. And his carefully planned exhibitions and explanatory notes made them understandable to millions of MOMA's visitors. Nor was Barr's interest limited to the 'fine arts.' Under his direction the museum brought aesthetic standards to the materials of everyday life...."

Alfred H. Barr, Jr: Missionary for the Modern

In the years of his greatest dominance, Clement Greenberg almost single-handedly established Jackson Pollock and the New York School at the center of the American art world. His work set the tone for art criticism for half a century to come. This biography, based on unpublished and previously unavailable documents, interviews and archives, presents a riveting story of imagination and grandiosity, of vision and tragic excess. With clarity and insight, Alice Goldfarb Marquis, author of the widely acclaimed Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare (which the Washington Times called "the one indispensable Duchamp companion") and Art Lessons (named best nonfiction book of the year by the San Diego Book Awards), explores Greenberg's complex relations with numerous friends and lovers, including Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Harold Rosenberg. It also recreates the heady art scene in America from the 1940s through the 1980s, detailing the ways in which a generation of critics, with Greenberg at the helm, used personal conviction and innate notions of taste to set the course of modern art. Greenberg remains an indispensable reference in any discussion of art criticism, and Art Czar is the first biography to provide a complete, evenhanded portrait of the man, his work and his times.

Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg

Humor & Entertainment

MFA Publications/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“This book is a social history of Pop art, a group portrait of both the artists and the people who made some of them rich and famous in just a few years, while setting in motion the drastically altered way art has been marketed and appreciated―in the monetary and aesthetic sense―up to the present day.” So begins Alice Goldfarb Marquis' lively, informative and entertaining account of one of the twentieth century's most flamboyant and influential art movements. Included in this group portrait are the famous: Roy Lichtenstein and his “Blam-Pow” comics panels, Andy Warhol, shy, shrewd and tough as nails, the power couple of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend; the infamous, such as the collector Robert Scull, who bought so heavily that his own dealer deemed him “vulgar”; and a variegated cast ranging from artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and James Rosenquist to pioneering dealer Ivan Karp, controversial curator Henry Geldzahler, media guru Marshall McLuhan, author Tom Wolfe and many, many others. While shelves of books have been written about Pop art, The Pop Revolution is the first to approach it not only as an aesthetic upheaval, but also as a bellwether for the social, cultural, economic and political changes affecting America and Europe in the late twentieth century. As Marquis notes, the figures involved in creating and promoting the movement “set off the ‘culture boom' of the 1960s, and were indispensable to the success, not only of Pop art, but of all the varied approaches to art that followed.” Rich in historical insights and unpublished information, The Pop Revolution is an extremely readable account of one of art's liveliest chapters. Award-winning journalist and historian Alice Goldfarb Marquis, who died in 2009, was a visiting scholar at the University of California at San Diego. Her previous books include Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg, Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare, Alfred H. Barr, Jr: Missionary for the Modern and The Art Biz.

The Pop Revolution: How an Unlikely Concatenation of Artists, Aficionados, Businessmen, Critics, Curators, Collectors, Dealers, and Hangers-On Radically Transformed the Art World

History & Criticism

Marcel Duchamp: Eros, C'Est LA Vie: A Biography

Whitston Pub Co Inc

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