Word: artists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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TREASURY OF AMERICAN DESIGN hy Clarence P. Hornung. Introduction by Holger Cahill. 2 vols., 846 pages. Abrams. $42.50. In the autumn of 1935, the U.S. Government launched another of its many projects to relieve Depression unemployment. This time the target of its aid was the commercial artist, 300 of whom were put to work rendering some of the finest examples of native American decorative art. Over 17,000 drawings were made, and in 1950 The Index of American Design was published, using a scant 3% of these illustrations. Now the Index has been expanded into two handsome volumes that touch...
UNFORTUNATELY, NICHOLSON is threatening to become America's newest anti-mainstream cult figure. He made his reputation in Easy Rider as a boozy small town lawyer hopping across the country in a search of an alternative to urban America. In Five Easy Pieces he played the misfit artist who made an ethic out of lonely and ignored self-destruction. He was an uncritical social dropout, however, suffering from a congenital incompatibility with what happened to be a sick scene. Like it or not, his road trip was still an endorsement of Playboy America. David Staebler lacks even this vivacity...
Samaras' physical context is that of American art. He is not a "Greek" artist. He moved to New York in 1948, after a childhood spent in the atmosphere of war and civil war in Greece. He was only eleven and, as he remembers it, a "trembling, mother-clutching neurotic." But in his birthplace, he says, "I built up whatever was necessary for my unconscious. Greece became like my dreams, my sleep. America is what I am when I'm awake. My art is a curious mixture of this." With Samaras the image becomes, almost literally, an "embodiment...
...another to his body-by photography and metaphor, by testing it with textures and pains and memory-should have made a narcissist's mausoleum in the form of his Mirror Room: a twelve-foot cube lined with reflecting surfaces, an endless labyrinth in three dimensions. One imagines the artist at home in it, lying perfectly at ease on the crystal floor, his image multiplied to a gratifying infinity...
...clear in the porch shadows what art, if any, he may have seen to create such an interest in clean, abstract imagery, yet his association in these early times with such American artists as John Martin. Georgia O'Keefe, Charles Sheeler, and Marsden Hartley testifies to his following of this parallel art world and its influence is seen plainly in other works. The MFA has eloquently pointed out these connections with its juxtapositions of actual oils, drawings and sculpture by these artists. One of the most exciting comparisons is between Georgia O'Keefe's oil from 1953 at "Abiquiu Trees...