How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York - Hardcover

Dezayas, Marius; Naumann, Francis M.

3.5

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9780262041539: How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262041537 ISBN 13: 9780262041539

Publisher: Mit Pr, 1996

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An indispensable addition to a modern art library tracing de Zayas's and Stieglitz's influence on the New York art world beginning as early as 1915. Though it seems inconceivable that Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Rodin, or Matisse ever had to be "introduced," they were in fact presented to American society and de Zayas's essays and commentary are credited with providing the intellectual foundation with which to understand and appreciate these artistic developments. Editor Naumann has done a fine job constructing several appendices detailing exhibition information, correspondence, and press reviews. The photograph selection is well-considered and features some representations of work which has been lost or destroyed. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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About the Author:

Francis M. Naumann is author of numerous articles and exhibition catalogues. In 1987 he coedited (with Rudolf E. Kuenzli) Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, and he is author of New York Dada, a book considered to be the definitive history of the movement.

From Publishers Weekly:

In 1907, de Zayas and the rest of his family was forced into exile for his father's opposition to Mexican president Porfirio Diaz. Shortly after arriving in New York, de Zayas took up his own cause: a writer, caricaturist and close associate of Alfred Stieglitz, he became a perceptive and unrepentant propagandist for the avant garde. In the late 1940s, at the urging of the Museum of Modern Art's director, Alfred Barr, de Zayas pulled together this dissection of the "hard labor" of introducing modernism to New York. His commentary, dated but still lively, emerges as though from a time capsule from an era when modernist art had the power to shock and offend. Chronological sections describing exhibits at Stieglitz's "291" Gallery and it's spinoff, de Zayas's own Modern Gallery, illustrate the initial American response to artists who have since been canonized, from Matisse and Picabia to Picasso and Cezanne. Many American critics writing for the mainstream press simply despised their work. Three decades later, de Zayas quoted from those reviews with impunity knowing that history had already vindicated his critical acumen. While some of his comments seem antiquated, the value of this book is its immediacy. De Zayas was one of the first writers to attempt to explain the tenets of modernism to the American public, and his prose reveals an insider's perspective on a seminal moment in art history. Although a more detailed introduction to this edition would have been helpful, Naumann (New York Dada) has included appendices of real historical interest, from the author's correspondence with Stieglitz to exhibition lists from the Modern and the de Zayas galleries.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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