Edna Andrade - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812247396 ISBN 13: 9780812247398

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015

Synopsis

One of the foremost artists to emerge in Philadelphia in the 1960s, Edna Andrade (1917-2008) is now recognized as an early leader in the Op Art movement. Characterized by pulsating patterns, vivid colors, and a visual immediacy that surpasses narrative meaning, her work explores symmetry and rhythm through geometric design and structures inspired by nature. Andrade sought to create "democratic art" that dispensed with the need for elite aesthetic education or intricate explanations. As a result, her accessible and appealing compositions were often repurposed for commercial art and political campaigns.

Edna Andrade takes a comprehensive look at the full range of Andrade's work, from her early surreal and figurative landscapes, through several decades of Bauhaus-inspired design and the distinctive geometric patterns of Op Art, to her late-life quasi-abstract studies of the Atlantic coastline. Accompanied by 170 illustrations, including full-color reproductions as well as photographs, drawings, sketches, and notes, the essays situate Andrade's work in the context of movements that surfaced in the United States in the 1960s, such as Minimalism and Pop Art. The first book-length study of her career as an artist and teacher, Edna Andrade examines the aesthetic influences, creative development, and enduring legacy of this dynamic twentieth-century artist.

Contributors: Debra Bricker Balken, Joe Houston

About this title

About the Author:

Debra Bricker Balken is an independent curator and author of several books on modern and contemporary art, including Abstract Expressionism and The Park Avenue Cubists.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From "Edna Andrade: The Means by Which A Line Comes Into Being," by Debra Bricker Balken:

By the early 1970s, Andrade's painting had become increasingly more lyrical, her now consistently large-scale compositions with their dense patterning less overtly mechanical and hard-edged. Op Art had spent its course internationally as well as for Andrade. Rather than repeat the bold, quivering canvases of the previous decade, she turned to the mathematics of natural formations, where her colors could operate more delicately and in harmony. The lace-like web of contoured lines in paintings like Ebbtide (1976) (plate 50), Updraught (1976) (plate 52) and Night Sea (1977) (plate 55) gently quiver, their motion more subdued, less jarring and sudden. Andrade would continue to exercise increased restraint in her abstractions, her symmetries more evident, as in Temple (1986) (plate 66), with the result that illusion and trompe l'oeil effects are tempered, subject to greater control. As she discussed in a faculty self-evaluation for the Philadelphia College of Art in 1976, rigor along with a clear aesthetic plan was what teaching and art were all about. And, in her crystalline, carefully plotted patterns, this programmatic thrust was elegantly realized for almost three decades.

From "Between Magic and Logic: The Perceptual Art of Edna Andrade," by Joe Houston:

Andrade's interest in visual perception was made emphatic in the dazzling Color Motion-64 (1964) (plate 9), a singular work that portended a dramatic shift in her practice. Despite the title, the painting is composed entirely of dramatic contrasts of black and white laid out in checkerboard fashion across the square format of her canvas (any color we may experience is a perceptual anomaly). The equivalent values of the black and white squares provide the ultimate stasis between figure and ground or positive and negative forces. Gestalt psychologists, whom Andrade was reading at the time, invoked this motif as the ultimate either/or structure: either the white squares are perceived as advancing to the foreground, or they are seen as advanced to the background; the organizing mind must choose one or the other of those possibilities at any given instant, even if it teeters back and forth between those two modes. The checked pattern was also employed in experiments in depth perception, which Andrade would have likely known about. In Color Motion-64, Andrade distorts the grid incrementally using a mathematical formula to make it appear to fold along its central axis. This disturbance of two-dimensional Euclidian space may embody concepts in astrophysics regarding the warpage of space and time. She seems to invoke Einstein when she described her desire "to make a measurable statement that deals with the relative character of things . . . and through such means demonstrate the relativity of all experience."

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0812247396
• ISBN 13: 9780812247398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Balken Debra Bricker