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A carregar... An Artist in Americapor Thomas Hart Benton
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Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. This book had an enormous impact on me as a teenager way back when. Thomas Hart Benton talks about traveling around the USA and meeting people who are plain as dirt. He brings them alive and vivid with his words and sketches. That's what I wanted to do! Bum around! Mingle among the Grapes-of-Wrath people! Be an artist (with words, in my case). I don't think I ever read the book straight through but often dipped here and there until I couldn't sit still anymore and had to go hitchhike off somewhere. Maybe that says more about me than the book. And just now, a teen plus another 40 years, I picked up the book and read a few snatches and now want to hop in my car (no more thumbing, please) and cross the desert until I break down with a boiling radiator in front of some dumpy cafe in Texas where the only item on the menu is chicken-fried steak. My well-worn edition (the original 1937 first edition) (and no, I wasn't alive back then - I stole my father's copy), anyway, my edition has about 60 sketches, and they're marvelous if you're a Benton fan. The current version of the book is the fourth edition which apparently includes updates that Benton added in later years along with a few more sketches - I haven't seen it. sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
Controversial, flamboyant, contentious, brilliant--Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was certainly all of those. Few American artists have stirred so much love and hatred as he did in a career that lasted almost seventy years. Although his painting aroused much controversy, perhaps equally as much was created by his words, for his piercing wit, profane sarcasms, and insightful condemnations were fired off without restraint. In this fiery and provocative autobiography, Benton presents an intriguing records of American art and society during his lifetime. The first installment of this work was published in 1937, but Benton continued his life story in chapters added to editions published in 1951 and 1968. This new edition includes seventy-six drawings that add much to his narrative, plus a foreword discussing Benton's place in American art and an afterword covering his career after 1968, both written by art historian Matthew Baigell. Although Benton is most famous as a regionalist painter and muralist, his complex and fascinating career brought him into contact with many of the most important artists and thinkers of the century, including Jackson Pollock, Grant Wood, Julian Huxley, Felix Frankfurter, Eugene Debbs, John Reed, and Harry Truman. While living in New York and on Martha's Vineyard in the 1920s and 1930s, Benton often associated with leading intellectuals and radicals. However, when his evolving principles of art led him away from an interest in Marxism, he was bitterly attacked by many of his former friends, and his account of that time reveals strikingly the fierce critical battles he faced in trying to establish his own artistic vision. Critics on the Left were not his only opponents, however, and equally revealing are his responses to the moral condemnations heaped on his murals done for the states of Indiana and Missouri and on his realistic nudes of the late 1930s. Throughout his account, from descriptions of his boyhood in southwest Missouri, his travels, and his career to discussions of specific works of art and other artists, Benton portrays people and events as vividly in words as he does in his paintings. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)759.13The arts Painting History, geographic treatment, biography United States and Canada United StatesClassificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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That said, this is an epic travelogue through Depression Era USA, captured by an astute observer. The sketches throughout are of course excellent.
Purchased a 1939 edition from a used book store in Lawrence long ago, finally read following a long overdue visit to the Benton House, a Missouri State Park, on my last trip to KC ( )