This rich and revelatory biography of Lincoln Kirstein, cofounder of the New York City Ballet and School of American Ballet, is filled with fascinating incidents and perceptions, and is being published for Kirstein's centenary. photos.

This rich and revelatory biography of Lincoln Kirstein, cofounder of the New York City Ballet and School of American Ballet, is filled with fascinating incidents and perceptions, and is being published for Kirstein's centenary. photos.

A rich and revelatory biography of one of the crucial cultural figures of the twentieth century. Lincoln Kirstein’s contributions to the nation’s life, as both an intellectual force and advocate of the arts, were unparalleled. While still an undergraduate, he started the innovative literary journal Hound and Horn, as well as the modernist Harvard Society for Contemporary Art—forerunner of the Museum of Modern Art. He brought George Balanchine to the United States, and in service to the great choreographer’s talent, persisted, against heavy odds, in creating both the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet. Among much else, Kirstein helped create Lincoln Center in New York, and the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut; established the pathbreaking Dance Index and the country’s first dance archives; and in some fifteen books proved himself a brilliant critic of art, photography, film, and dance. But behind this remarkably accomplished and renowned public face lay a complex, contradictory, often tortured human being. Kirstein suffered for decades from bipolar disorder, which frequently strained his relationships with his family and friends, a circle that included many notables, from W. H. Auden to Nelson Rockefeller. And despite being married for more than fifty years to a woman whom he deeply loved, Kirstein had a wide range of homosexual relationships throughout the course of his life. This stunning biography, filled with fascinating perceptions and incidents, is a major act of historical reclamation. Utilizing an enormous amount of previously unavailable primary sources, including Kirstein’s untapped diaries, Martin Duberman has rendered accessible for the first time a towering figure of immense complexity and achievement.

Focused on the Lincoln Kirstein Collection of woodblock prints in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this book centres on Japan's attraction for Western novelties.

"George Tooker first came to prominence for imaginative visions that expressed the uncertainity of the Cold War era. Over the past sixty years, using his own particular blend of figuration and abstraction, he has continued to create radiantly illuminated yet disquieting images. Imbued with moral, spiritual, and sensual power, they quietly demonstrate his passion for issues of social equality, and have garnered admiration from critics and peers alike for their acuity and virtuoso technique." "This book, the first representative overview of Tooker's work for thirty years, provides a much-deserved and comprehensive examination of the scope of his art. In essays comprising new research and offering fresh insights, it explores his passion for composition, his spirituality and his exploration of identity. Featuring superb reproductions of more than eighty of the artist's timeless images, the book also enables readers to see the unexpected ways in which Tooker's work echoes what has been considered avant garde in American art and to appreciate the depth of his resonant, prescient imagery. A major new study of one of America's most influential modern painters, George Tooker celebrates the lifetime achievement of an artist whose work subtly challenges conventinal prejudices and captures the essential mystery at the heart of the human experience."--BOOK JACKET.

"Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important and multifaceted women artists, an association, however, which she spurned: Women artists. There is no such thing or person. It's just as much a contradiction in terms as "man artist" or "elephant artist". You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you. Tanning developed her extensive, exhaustive and expressive body of work between the USA and France, producing paintings, drawings, costume and set designs for ballets, "soft" sculptures, novels and poems. Her work tells stories which are etched into a personal universe she used to give meaning to modern life and, in a surreal setting - brimming with fantasy and phantoms - shaped in a space which is at once seductive and pernicious. The exhibition revolves around themed rooms drifting through the periods which were integral to Tanning's career spanning childhood and family scenes, girls dressed in Victorian clothing, baroque and bucolic nudes, red-rock deserts, and representations of flowers, highly pertinent in her mature work. Moreover, her installations include Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot [Poppy Hotel, Room 202] (1970-1973), with amorphous sculptures inviting visitors to see, feel and be part of the surreal world she inhabits. Tanning breaks down the distance between artwork and spectator, seeking to make her work an invitation to transcend rather than reflect the world. A female-dominated world of open doors and revelations brings on chaos in a traditional domestic space that pulses and arouses a strange curiosity. Do we dare to enter her fairy tale, a house with open doors, a residence inhabited by odd creatures, to move into a sunburnt landscape? In the words of the artist: "I wanted to lead the eye towards spaces that hid, revealed, transformed all at once and where there would be some never-before-seen image, as if it had appeared with no help from me".