Word: artes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Cloistered in his 40 acres of cypress, fir and formal garden, with the delicate profile of the Apennines behind and the valley of the Arno below, Bernard Berenson applied his gifts of lucidity and feeling to the unsolved problems of Italian art. One of his earliest and most famous feats was the creation of a hypothetical Florentine artist, Amico di Sandro (Friend of Botticelli) to account for various pictures then attributed to Pollaiuolo, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and others. Rich dealers and collectors sought the advice of "B. B." on doubtful pictures. They paid him well for it-so well that...
Berenice Abbott was one of the first U. S. photographers to conclude that the art of the camera consists in making visual records. This is a long-term point of view, involving the fact that photographs like Eugene Atget's of Paris become poignant to most people only gradually, as years pass and streets vanish. Berenice Abbott from Springfield, Ohio, learned photography in Paris in the darkroom of Stylist Man Ray. Returning to Manhattan in 1929, she was overwhelmed with a desire to document "the whole crazy city...
Private patrons put up a little money at first, but Photographer Abbott landed with the Federal Art Project in 1935. A direct girl who still talks harsh Ohio, still wears a Left Bank haircut and beret, she confesses to being scared of heights and crowds until she gets her head under the black cloth. Her dizziest shots are nevertheless sharp, hard and sense-making, though her best are meditative portraits of comely, plain old buildings, dingy shop fronts, chapfallen façades selected from the vast 19th-Century underbrush among Manhattan's skyscrapers...
...which has been leveled to the dust since Berenice Abbott photographed it in May 1938, is the almost Babylonian Old Post Office, built in 1869-78 after a fantastic architectural competition from which the Government chose not one but 15 winning designs, used the best features of all 15. Art project researchers and Writer Elizabeth McCausland collaborated on furnishing such factual tid-bits for each of the 97 pictures. Publisher and printer apparently collaborated not enough, allowing some reproductions to suffer from dandruff in the blacks...
...sort of honored ward of the Mexican Government, fat, fearless Diego Rivera still figures in many a hot political controversy. But whatever their politics, art lovers agree that Rivera is the foremost muralist of his time...