From the U.S. Navy's 1934 confiscation of a painting of sailors on shore leave to contemporary culture wars over funding for the arts, conflicts surrounding homosexuality and creative freedom have shaped the history of modern art in America. Richard Meyer's Outlaw Representation tells the charged story of this strife through pioneering analysis of the works of gay artists and the circumstances under which these works have been attacked, suppressed, or censored outright. Focusing on the careers of Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, Gran Fury, and Holly Hughes, Outlaw Representation explores how gay artists responded to the threat of censorship by producing their own "outlaw representations" of homosexuality. Instead of acquiescing to attacks on their work as indecent or obscene, these artists used the outlaw status of homosexuality to propose new forms of social, sexual, and creative life. Richly illustrated, Outlaw Representation includes close to 200 striking images, ranging from the art of celebrated figures such as Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe to physique-magazine photographs and gay liberation posters. Throughout, images that once provoked censorship now elicit close visual analysis and careful historical investigation. Engagingly written and sweepingly researched, Outlaw Representation promises to be a landmark in the study of twentieth-century American art, politics, and sexuality.

Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Ideologies of Desire)

Arts & Photography

Meyer, Richard

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory. A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surrealists, his peak moment of visibility occurred in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of his work. The exhibition was widely reviewed--though mostly reviled--by the press, who jeeringly crowned Hirshfield "Master of the Two Left Feet" for his tendency to display the female body in that unorthodox fashion. &nbsp; After the artist's death in 1946, his work was largely forgotten. In Master of the Two Left Feet, Richard Meyer rediscovers Hirshfield for twenty-first-century viewers, offering full-color reproductions that capture the eye-popping palette, vibrant patterns, and sheer visual pleasure of Hirshfield's paintings, and a catalog of works compiled by curator Susan Davidson which provides the most comprehensive documentation of the artist's paintings ever assembled. &nbsp; Ten years in the making, the book presents Hirshfield's unlikely career as a painter not only as a missing episode in the history of twentieth-century art but also as a case study of the ways in which artists go missing from historical knowledge and public memory. By looking at the ways in which Hirshfield mattered in the 1940s, Meyer demonstrates how much we have yet to learn, and to see, of the visual past. &nbsp; Exhibition American Folk Art Museum September 22, 2022-January 27, 2023

Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered

The MIT Press

Not only does contemporary art have a history, but all works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them.
Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as if the very idea of art that is contemporary is new. Yet all works of art were once contemporary. In What Was Contemporary Art? Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, and gives the contemporary its own art history. By exploring episodes in the study, exhibition, and reception of early twentieth-century art and visual culture, Meyer retrieves moments in the history of once-current art and redefines “the contemporary” as a condition of being alive to and alongside other moments, artists, and objects.
A generous selection of images, many in color―from works of fine art to museum brochures and magazine covers―support and extend Meyer's narrative. These works were contemporary to their own moment. Now, in Meyer's account, they become contemporary to ours as well.

What Was Contemporary Art?

The most widely admired paintings by Andy Warhol - and the most reviled - are his portraits. About Face, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum, presents the first overview of Warhol's portraiture to embrace all periods and media. About face refers both to Warhol's fascination with images of the human face and to his characteristic method of reversal. For example, Warhol reverses the portraitist's goal to capture the essence of a subject's individuality in his factory production of Warhol portraits. His portraits are about the creation of faces (as the public masks onto which identity is projected) rather than the revealing of a true self. Warhol's portraits, which reveal the artificial aspects of public identity, intitiate a democracy of fame and beauty, where everyone has superstar potential.

About Face: Andy Warhol Portraits

Baume, Nicholas

Wadsworth Atheneum

Crimp, Douglas

WARHOL, Andy.

Miami Art Museum of Dade County

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The Wadsworth Atheneum/The Andy Warhol Museum/MIT Press

Not only does contemporary art have a history, but all works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them.
Contemporary art in the early twenty-first century is often discussed as if the very idea of art that is contemporary is new. Yet all works of art were once contemporary. In What Was Contemporary Art? Richard Meyer reclaims the contemporary from historical amnesia, and gives the contemporary its own art history. By exploring episodes in the study, exhibition, and reception of early twentieth-century art and visual culture, Meyer retrieves moments in the history of once-current art and redefines "the contemporary" as a condition of being alive to and alongside other moments, artists, and objects.
A generous selection of images, many in color―from works of fine art to museum brochures and magazine covers―support and extend Meyer's narrative. These works were contemporary to their own moment. Now, in Meyer's account, they become contemporary to ours as well.

Mit Pr

When it first appeared in 1980, Andy Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century was adored by Jewish audiences even as it aroused antagonism from critics. Why did Warhol create this series? How did he select the figures to be portrayed? How has the passage of time reshaped the meaning of these portraits?
This handsomely illustrated book examines the history of these silk-screen paintings and prints, delving into Warhol’s refashioning of portraiture, his deep interest in repetitive art forms, and his embrace of commercialism. Richard Meyer shows how Warhol’s unorthodox approach to portrait painting was a product of both his seriousness as an artist and his avowed interest in making money, and he explains how Warhol selected ten figuresfrom Bernhardt and Buber to Freud and Kafkawho would ensure the timelessness of his series. The volume, which also includes discussions of the celebrated subjects of Ten Portraits, images of related prints, and a timeline, offers new insights into a significant series by an iconic American artist.

Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered

Jewish Museum

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and his 1945 photography book, Naked City—with its lurid tabloid-style images of Manhattan crime, crowds, and boisterous nightlife—changed prevailing journalistic practices almost overnight. In this volume, two art historians, Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer, bring markedly different outlooks on photography and modernism to their discussions of Weegee and his book. Meyer looks carefully at Weegee's pictures before and after they were collected and assesses how his practice of tabloid photography was inseparable from his own lowbrow appeal. Lee paints the vivid details of a leftist journalism world in 1930s and 1940s New York and shows how this world helped shape the photographer's vision. These essays restore the Naked City photographs to the mass circulation newspapers and magazines for which they were intended, and they trace the strange process by which the most famous of these pictures—suffused with blood, gore, and sensational crime—entered the museum.

Weegee and Naked City (Defining Moments in American Photography)

Lee, Anthony W.

Photography & Video

University of California Press

Fields: Vestiges of Young Rural Women

Fields is a compelling collection of fourteen short stories. Written through the eyes of young and middle aged women their pasts come alive with poignancy and fervor. Described as noble and stoic, Suzannas characters draw you into their own particular setting and emotions. Feel the thrill of a fledgling love affair. Revisit the place of your youth as a cherished Father passes on. Find meaning and voice in a new relationship or another career. For women who remember their own rural experiences, or those whose lives have been that of change and growth, Fields is a welcome addition to any bookshelf.

Literature & Fiction

Literary

iUniverse

Four in the Corps takes you from the famed yellow footprints of the Marine Corps Recruit Depot to the sands of Iraq, and all points in between. Though there are many books that describe a specific battle or give a broad overview of an entire war, there are few that do what this one does: give you a day-by-day account of what it's really like to go through a four-year enlistment as a United States Marine. From walking into a recruiter's office in a run-down strip mall in Austin, Texas, to getting out four years later as a combat vet with an Honorable Discharge, nothing is left out- the good, the bad or the appallingly disgusting. Just as interesting as the ambushes and firefights are the life-long friendships and intense rivalries that spring up among these men. No detail is spared, no matter how gruesome, ridiculous or embarrassing to the author it may be.

Four in the Corps: From Boot Camp to Baghdad-One Grunt's Enlistment

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Marketing is designed to provide learners with an understanding of the environment within which consumers function.

Marketing: An Active Learning Approach

Business & Money

Worsam, Mike

Barnes,Elizabeth

McClelland, Bob

Wieseholfer, Hildegard

Marketing & Sales

Wiley/Blackwell

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