Bøger af John Beardsley

The monumental sculpture of the postwar years has generally achieved, at best, an uneasy truce with its surroundings, too often crowned into urban settings that compete with, rather than complement, its scale and visual power. But at Storm King Art Center - a 200-acre country estate transformed into a sculpture park - sculpture and landscape are brought together in the most deliberate manner and to the dramatic enhancement of both. The collection features works by master sculptors such as Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, and David Smith, as well as by many younger artists. Several pieces have been commissioned for specific sites at Storm King, while the others have been sensitively installed throughout the park's striking terrain. This handsome volume captures the many pleasures of a visit to one of the world's finest outdoor collections of twentieth-century sculpture. Using multiple views and details, as well as spectacular aerial shots, photographer David Finn reveals a great deal about these works that casual viewers might otherwise miss. The thoroughly engaging text by John Beardsley conveys the distinctive spirit of Storm King and provides an enlightening look at the development of both the collection and the landscape over the past twenty-five years.

"American artist James Castle inhabited a world of utter quiet, where the mundane became miraculous. Born to a family of homesteaders in the mountains of central Idaho in 1899, he was deaf from an early age. Perhaps not coincidentally, he developed an extraordinary visual and spatial memory. This gave him a dictionary of images of his home, farm, and valley that he replicated and manipulated for the rest of his life in a series of extraordinary soot and saliva drawings. Castle's particular environment and experience gave him access to other, more surprising sources for his art. His parents ran the local post office and store, which supplied an array of images from burgeoning early twentieth century print culture. He collected scrap paper and cardboard, which he cut up and stitched together into farm animals, furniture, and clothing. Castle spent several years at a school for the deaf, where he picked up only the rudiments of language. But he used his knowledge of letters, words, and multiple alphabets-some of his own devising-to create an arresting range of enigmatic text-based drawings. In this book, author John Beardsley delves into Castle's work as an expression of his acute capacity for remembering, managing, and improvising on visual information. Castle's work will be presented as if moving through a series of environments: inside, outside, landscape, figure, book. This allows us to imagine the visual and spatial world Castle inhabited. This publication will also be the first to include a definitive biography of the artist"--]cProvided by publisher.

This invaluable volume now includes the most recent efforts by artists - often in collaboration with architects and city planners - to transform ravaged landscapes and desolate cityscapes into pleasure-giving parks and artworks.