"The biography recounts Rosenberg's full story for the first time. Art critic for The New Yorker from 1962 until 1978, Rosenberg, together with Clement Greenberg, radically reshaped the interpretation of art in the post-World-War-II period by promoting and examining abstract expression. But Rosenberg was also a social and literary critic-writing about art was just one aspect of his work. Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life weaves together Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. Rosenberg's mid-century linking of the New York School with the art establishment, together with his observations on the commodification of the artwork and the evisceration of the "self" in favor of celebrity (especially in his often-cited essay "The Herd of Independent Minds") make this book especially topical"--

Harold Rosenberg was undoubtedly the most important American art critic of the twentieth century. It was he who first coined the term ”Action Painters” to refer to the American Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning. Rosenberg's seminal writings on this movement, as well as on other artists such as Newman and Rothko, appear in The Tradition of the New (1959), his first and most influential book; its effects on subsequent art criticism, and the practice of art itself, are still felt today. The essays in this book are not limited to the art world, however: He also discusses poetry, political and cultural theory, and popular culture. As wide-ranging, independent, and deeply probing as the essays of Walter Benjamin, Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New is a true classic of twentieth-century criticism.

A seminal work by an artist whose drawings in The New Yorker, LIFE, Harper's Bazaar, and many other publications influenced an entire generation of American artists and writers. Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth, first published in 1960 and long out of print, is more than a simple catalog or collection of drawings. These carefully arranged pages record a brilliant, constantly evolving imagination confronting modern life. Here is Steinberg, as he put it at the time, discovering and inventing a great variety of events: "Illusion, talks, music, women, cats, dogs, birds, the cube, the crocodile, the museum, Moscow and Samarkand (winter, 1956), other Eastern countries, America, motels, baseball, horse racing, bullfights, art, frozen music, words, geometry, heroes, harpies, etc.” This edition, featuring a new introduction by Nicholson Baker, an afterword by Harold Rosenberg, and new notes on the artwork, will allow readers to discover this unique and wondrous book all over again.

Explores the nature of contemporary art while examining the factors that separate it from commercial design

"Barnett Newman was the most original and influential artist to emerge in the United States in the decade following World War II. Following his "breakthrough" in 1948 in Onement I - a small painting with a red-orange vertical stripe centered on a red-brown ground - Newman developed his art organically and intensely, expressing his themes of creation and creativity over the next two decades in an astonishing number of true masterworks." "This abundantly illustrated volume, by the late Harold Rosenberg, dean of American art critics, brings together for the first time reproductions in color of almost every one of Newman's paintings, as well as most of the drawings, watercolors, works in mixed media, sculpture, etchings, lithographs, and architecture. Rosenberg's interpretive essay emphasizes the spirituality and metaphysical quality of Newman's art, and it shows how Newman's personae as citizen, polemicist, man of impeccable taste, and metaphysician molded his artistic personality and led to the extraordinary series The Stations of the Cross and to the superb final paintings." "More than most other American artists Newman influenced the course of art in the 1960s and 1970s. His enduring achievement - perhaps the greatest monument to artistic integrity ever created in the United States - is presented chronologically in this volume, medium by medium. Newman's statement of his life and art is fully assembled here, and his radiant paintings and colors shine forth from almost every page in a blaze of transcendent light."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved