notanotherbookreview

                         Doesn't the Paint Say It All?    DORTHEA TANNING  (KASMIN GALLERY)  " Andre Breton, poet and critic, published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.  Surrealism was to unite conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in 'an absolute reality, a surreality.'  " Brittanica   Dorthea Tanning, known as a surrealist artis, along with her husband, Max Ernest, would not describe her later paintings as surrealism.   But these paintings are akin to the "trance between two worlds" that Breton described as "the magic dictation: of automatic revelation."   Doesn't the Paint Say It All?  DORTHEA TANNING  (KASMIN GALLERY), a  new book about Tanning's later work, examines these singular paintings from  a pivotal one-woman show. ...

  The World of Winslow Homer   ( Time Life  Library  of Art, 1966 ) by John Thomas Flexner shows unpeopled sea and landscapes, humans battling nature with revelatory emotion and technique. A favorite of mine is the watercolor of the  artist's studio, both specific and abstract.  Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was part of The Hudson River School but he also stood apart. Many of these self-taught "Yankee" painters, like Cole, an Englishman, came to paint the pure luminous light of the New World with unknown seasons. Cole, a portrait peddlar, knocked on doors with canvas and art supplies strapped to his back, until he quit to "learn from nature." Homer,  apprenticed to a printer, learned to produce in-depth black and white illustration. After his freedom, he became a  master of watercolors and taught himself to paint "what he saw" in oils.  Surprising to him,  the work sold.   New England light contrasted to a brutal environment, ...

LA COMMEDIA SOTTERRANEA DELLA MACHINA DA SCRIVERE, Swizzle Felt's FIRST FOLIO from the THE TYPEWRITER UNDERGROUND (Pelekinesis) Is this a put-on, precious satire, poetry, an infinite jest? Yes, as well as the first blast of  THE TYPEWRITER UNDERGROUND, a movement both radical and retro, reactionary and progressive, profound and silly--Marc Zegans, poet and spoken word artist, began this movement after publishing a collection of verse,  The Underwater Typewriter. The Typewriter Underground was originally inspired by an abandoned subway, boarded up and forgotten. Zegans imagined galleries, performance in such a space. His movement has attracted a group of like-minded artists making film, music, spoken word events. It's become an alt art movement. In the FIRST FOLIO he teams with Eric Edelman, a retro collage artist, to introduce fictional author, Swizzle Felt and his group of bohemian drop-outs, such as Edamame Phelps (his personal librarian), Clytaemnestra Litotes...

https://www.mixcloud.com/WorldRadioParis/your-american-friend-in-paris-episode-14-joseph-harris/   Here is an interview to air in November with Joseph Harriss about JEAN GABIN and his significance  as artist and as a public figure, an "everyman" who came to personify France. J e an Gabin :  The Actor Who Was France The first biography in English of the iconic French film actor whose career and life mirrored both 20 th -century France and the early evolution of modern film. When Joseph Harriss published  T he Tallest Tower : Eiffel and the Belle Epoque, it was acclaimed as a definative book and it was written by an American. Now, the Paris based journalist has done it again with a different kind of icon in  Jean Gabin :  The Actor Who Was France (McFarland) .  Illustrated with more than 40 photographs, the book portrays in graphic detail G abin’s films and personal life, including his unhappy years in Hollywood and his la...

The old women in Roberta Allen's The Princess of Herself (Pelekinesis September 20th) made me think of  how (Samuel) "Beckett's itinerant greatcoat-wearing old men ramble throughout the pages of his fiction...". ( Art of Salvage, Julie Bates). Her observations have a wit dry and ready without compromise to please. In the title story, the narrator observes the Princess' "broad unlined forehead, the symmetrical features, the sallow skin, the mane of long gray curls falling past her shoulders, her shiny silver "moon" necklaces. Hippy necklaces. Behind her, the empty cafe. The polished wood tables." In Allen's stories, her older women run from mortality, chasing themselves.The narrator, like Beckett, puzzles out consciousness. She observes, not devoid of sympathy, but wields words like a sharp knife, deftly uncovering what we know and don't imagine. From a story called  Forgotten: " I remember thinking how young she looke...

The Anarchist's Girlfriend- Mysticism, Anarchy, business cults, love, art make this a tale of the churning now of our time (Pelekinesis) Small Press Distribution  recommends  The Anarchist's Girlfriend ,  New Edition by Susan I. Weinstein http://www.spdbooks.org/…/97…/the-anarchists-girlfriend.aspx "Somewhere along the Bowery the Anarchist's Girlfriend walks herself, her spirit taking her body. She wants to see the sunrise..."  This New Edition has significant new material. It's released by Pelekinesis at  http://pelekinesis.com/catalog/susan_...   http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-a... and at Amazon but do make sure it's New Edition! FROM: The Anarchist's Girlfriend free reading at Dixon Place, Dec.8th It was 4 P.M. when the dreamy blonde crossed to Cooper Square. She was dressed Rangerette style; white boots with pom-poms, a red satin cowgirl mini and vest, a silver belt, and a gray pull-string hat. One cur, a...

Prologue to THE PRIZE, Jill Bialosky's incredibly moving novel of the art world Edward Darby knew that an artist's work had the power to change the way in which art was perceived, for every successful artist must recreate the medium, but he did not know, each time he went to a new artist's studio, if he'd ever find it.  When you see a work of art, it will be as if everything else in relationship to it has faded. Art should transport the seer from the ordinary to the sublime.  His father, a scholar of romantic poetry, told him this when he was a boy. But it was more than that. It was the myths artists created about their art that gave the work authority, and as an art dealer, he was part of that creation. He thought about all this as he looked for Agnes Murray's name on the directory in the vestibile of a crumbling old warehouse in Bushwick. It was a cold and gray morning in April. He hoped he wasn't wasting his time. THE PRIZE (COUNTERPOINT, Berkeley)...