Art Np2

Magnum Opus The book that could save American art. Jed Perl January 4, 2011 | 4:38 pm I am besotted with a new book that is also an old book. This is  The H.D. Book,  by Robert Duncan, a wild, dazzling, idiosyncratic magnum opus that the poet composed between 1959 and 1964 and that is only now being published in its complete form, by the University of California Press. What began with a request for a brief birthday homage to the American poet known as H.D.—she had been born Hilda Doolittle—morphed into one of the greatest of all meditations on the nature not only of modern poetry but of the modern artistic imagination in its bewitching complexity. Art, Duncan exclaims, makes “what is not actual real.” I am glad to be reading Duncan’s text as we head into 2011—the second decade of the century after the modern century. There is no nostalgia in  The H.D. Book.  Duncan’s modernism is at once lofty, optimistic, activist, and open-minded. Published a half-century after it ...

Self Portrait, Oil/Canvas, Francis Bacon, 1971 Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art Is there such a thing as a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon. His canvases, modernist melodramas with just the right crowd-friendly dash of old-fashioned grandiloquence, are the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bacon, who died in 1992 at the age of eighty-two, may well be the greatest exemplar of a wrongheaded tradition that we have ever seen. He had a knack for adapting all the wrong elements from all the right artists... - excerpt Link Full Text, Slaughterhouse, Jed Perl, The New Republic, June 17, 2009

A conversation with Jed Perl, art critic for "The New Republic" about his book "New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century". - Charlie Rose web site Link Charlie Rose web site Link Articles by Jed Perl Link The New Republic