Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years

"The book on Mr. Cunningham aims at, and is, as complete and clear a portrait of the modern dance choreographer and his epochal work as has ever been published... The surprise of the Cunningham book is the grace with which it almost definitively sums up Mr. Cunningham's 63-year life in dance... Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years is a compelling portrait of a simple yet complex man and an artist who has seldom faltered in his explorations of life and art on the simplest and most complex levels." --Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

"What emerges from this dispassionate, scrupulous account is much more than the chronicle of fifty years in the amazing and creative life of Merce Cunningham... Kudos to David Vaughan who has given us a noble work. As archivist for the Cunningham company for twenty years, he knows better than anyone how to turn this book about a great artist and about the art of this century into a work of art in itself."

--Mikhail Baryshnikov

Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years celebrates the career of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century from his first innovative and explosive solo dances to the present. This unique book incorporates images of performances by many world renowned photographers, including Imogen Cunningham, Barbara Morgan, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Hujar and Arnold Eagle.

Unlike so many biographies of dance maestros, Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years offers no litany of substance or psychological abuse. The volume, assembled by the archivist of Merce Cunningham's world-renowned U.S. company, records and analyzes Cunningham's work process and documents the provenance of his modern dance classics. Heavily spiced with biographical detail, Merce Cunningham packages the choreographer's life story in a lovely design that respects his whole body and conveys a rare sense of movement in its mass of still photos.