Art Of Biography Research Articles

Towards a Poetics of Dispersal: An Encounter with Anna Boghiguian

In the interview with artist Anna Boghiguian, the interviewer attempts to explore the relation the artist holds to the world around her in terms of both her lived experience and her methodology. The introduction by the interviewer as well as the interview delineate the major theoretical concerns present in Boghiguian's work as well as her extensive travels in relation to the work she has produced. Her position in relation to her work is discussed in the context of history where the opposition between the metaphysical and minimalism is explored. The contemporary moment and the nature of time are placed in relation to the historical work Boghiguian has produced on Constantine Cavafy and the illustrations provided to Tom Lamont's Siwa Door. ********** Interviewing Anna Boghiguian is a difficult task. Over the span of a couple of meetings in the Fall of 2000 1 recorded several hours of discussion with the artist, which were later on transcribed. However, due to the relaxed nature of oral conversation, a lot of digression occurred; thus it was necessary for me to streamline the text into a consistent and focused dialogue through a process of extensive editing, which was later passed on to her for approval. In my encounters with Anna Boghiguian I have attempted to uncover the relation she holds to the world around her. The artist's biography, her lived experience, is related to a discussion of the nature and meaning of her work. Rather than claim neutrality in my questions, I propose to present a discursive reading of Boghiguian's work in this introductory note, providing a context for these encounters. Although Boghiguian's work functions outside constructed critical polarities such as the division between the real and the symbolic or the lyrical and the epic--which is at best a fiction that nurtures the myth that art can act as a closed representation--one finds that these fictions can function as analytical tools in the pursuit of an alignment. This is an attempt at exploring the relationship between the enunciator and the enunciation, the position of the subject self, the self that speaks in relation to the discourse it produces. This is an invitation to view the work of an artist as a position; the process, as a relationship between two interdependent and fully valid voices: that of the artist and the world she functions within. It is my contention that it is necessary to approach the work of Anna Boghiguian with a sensitivity towards the position of the aesthetic in contemporary practice. It is common practice to view the aesthetic as either the ultimate aim of art--either a moment of transcendence which both justifies the existence of the work and is its essence, or an expression of a moral economy that neutralizes art and its relation to the world and thus a site of critique. In the contemporary world both positions have been fiercely debated; movements and counter-movements have utilized (and theorized) the aesthetic within different contexts. For Boghiguian the aesthetic remains an integral part of the experience; however, her recognition of the aesthetic is not merely a simple argument for the transcendent nature of art. Eschewing the naively beautiful, Anna's work--whether ephemeral paintings or the more brutal, and sculptural drawings--grounds itself upon the creation of a moment. The moment is significant because of its appearance at the nexus of history and lived experience. Personal experience is politicized in a process that transforms as it creates. Whether detailed vistas of city life, or Buddha wax masks, Boghiguian's work is loaded with the significance of the accretion of human culture. Finding inspiration in both long dead civilizations and the streets of the urban metropolis, i.e. in the moment as defined through cultural production, Boghiguian's work is an attempt at coming to terms with a contemporary world that has redefined the position of outside the practice of a conscious systematized appropriation of a representation of the cultural invisible, outside the religious. …

Willem de Kooning: reflections in the studio

Contains chronologically arranged stories told by Willem and Elaine de Kooning, which enrich and correct the published biographies of both artists. They were among the most important artistic figures of their generation and an integral part of the New York art scene. Also contains 100 illustrations.

The color of silver: William Spratling, his life and art

A biography of silversmith and graphic artist, William Spratling. It examines the formative periods in Spratling's life and art that preceded his brilliant entrepreneurial experiment in the Las Delicias workshop in Taxco, leaving a permanent mark on Mexico's artistic and economic life.

Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists

Women and art 1850-1900, Jan Marsh a Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood?, Pamela Gerrish Nunn artist's biographies and catalogue of individual works.

Painting Out Pop

Painting Out Pop

Educational History and the Art of BiographyAnd There Were Giants in the Land: The Life of William Heard Kilpatrick. John A. Beineke

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview EssayEducational History and the Art of Biography And There Were Giants in the Land: The Life of William Heard Kilpatrick. John A. Beineke Kathleen CruikshankKathleen Cruikshank Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Education Volume 107, Number 3May, 1999 Sponsored by the Penn State College of Education Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/444217 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright 1999 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Skilled work: American craft in the Renwick Gallery, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Marking its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1997, the Renwick Gallery has become the nation's premier showcase and study center for objects made of metal, fiber, wood, clay, and glass. As a curatorial department of the National Museum of American Art, the Renwick has grown from a kunsthalle for temporary exhibitions to a museum branch dedicated to collecting, research, publications, exhibitions, and education. The Renwick's efforts have played a major role in heightening public appreciation of crafts and providing encouragement to those who create them. This book serves as an introduction to the world of modern crafts, exploring in both words and pictures the vibrant diversity of objects that have entered the Renwick Gallery's collection. In his essay for the book, curator-in-charge Kenneth R. Trapp traces the Renwick's history, highlighting the contributions of his predecessors and the many other people whose commitment to the gallery has ensured its success, notably the James Renwick Alliance. In his essay Howard Risatti explores our intuitive understanding of the way crafts are related to the human body and their consequent deep meaning for us. Also included are brief biographies of sixty-five artists whose work is represented in the book, among them Anni Albers, Wendell Castle, Dale Chihuly, Harvey Littleton, Peter Voulkos, and Beatrice Wood.

Profile of a Latency Woman: Development for Biographers

Profile of A Latency Woman: Development for Biographers Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Introduction: Methodological Lacks Since Studies in Hysteria, psychoanalytic case studies and biographies have grown up together. They have been related like step-siblings, from the same father. And they both show his parenting influence, but not in the same way. Case writing has grown with psychoanalysis, becoming more and more sophisticated while incorporating—as Freud’s own practice forecast—complex understandings of clinical perspectives, complex theoretical debates, and attention to the historical and social contexts of cases, the environments of diseases. But biography writing has never had a rich tradition of psychoanalytic reflection and methodological sophistication. Its practice still chiefly depends on “content analysis” as the Studies in Hysteria did; intricacy comparable to that of the Wolf Man case has largely eluded it. On the model of Freud’s case writing practice, which he applied to subjects like Leonardo to produce “pathography,” his early followers wrote a rich library of case-like biography writing, an achievement that compelled the whole art of biography in the twentieth century toward psychoanalysis, if not directly or doctrinairely, then indirectly, as a matter of cultural osmosis or absorption of the psychoanalytic “climate of opinion.’” On the other hand, the genre influence did not flow so strongly in the other direction, and psychoanalysis itself has only recently become biographical—in two senses. First and most obviously, in the late 1950s the history of psychoanalysis began to be written as a biographical history, a history of clinicians and the depth psychological sources of their [End Page 235] theories and practices. Launched officially and monumentally by Ernest Jones, this history was a history of Freud biographies, but now it is a burgeoning biographical archive of books, oral histories, and memoirs of Freudians, former Freudians, and anti-Freudians. Second, within psychoanalysis, clinicians have stepped into their case studies: there they are, telling what they said and did, exploring their countertransferences, setting themselves in the history of psychoanalysis, becoming subjects for biography as they explore their countertransferences. Over the decades of this uneven joint development of psychoanalysis and biography, it seems to me that three methodological roads have appeared and been considered, if not taken. The first road is the most widely acknowledged and the most consistently taken. It is understood that different people looking at or imagining the same subject will see different beginnings of a life narrative and attribute different significances to childhood events and experiences. Appropriators of Freud’s theories line up along lines of faction within the fold: some, for example, looking at an infant subject see the primary narcissistic baby Freud saw, and some see a baby programmed for relatedness; some think that what can be observed can be read as the manifest content of intrapsychic process, some think that such readings are the readers’ fantasies. And everyone is in a quandary because it is obvious that the materials with which a childhood—some version of a childhood—could be thoroughly or deeply reconstructed are never available to biographers. Biographers always deal with little fragments, little bases of inference and are tempted to “content analysis” because they do not have a psychoanalytic situation, a transferential process, to work in and with. Such divisions of opinion and problems of material have had an impact on psychoanalytic biography writing, and particularly on biographical—or autobiographical—writing about psychoanalysts. But there is not yet a literature that approaches multidirectionally the methodological and technical issues raised by complex interplays of subject, biographer, biographer’s biography, theory, and theoretician’s biography over the question of how to reconstruct and determine the significance of childhood. The second methodological road can be pointed by noting that all modern biographers work with a developmental [End Page 236] line in mind that extends over the course of a life. Each has ideas about stages or phases, key junctures or forks, processes of identity formation, anxieties of influence, meanings of identifications, and, generally, developmental norms and deviations. For most, these ideas are sketchy and full of blanks because they have been acquired piecemeal from a culture in which developmental theory in some form is as taken for granted and as unexamined as evolutionary...

Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy

Raack !Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1889-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy R. C. Raack, Professor Emeritus California State University- Hayward Remembering Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1898-1998: Wagnerian Opera in Stalin's Diplomacy "Cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. The task is to take it into our hands." Joseph Stalin, 1924 Stalin Eisenstein With these words, Stalin entered on a task that he would, within a few years, wholly accomplish. He sought to capture the new forces of technology, the moving picture among them, to help him realize the domestic and yet grander dreams ofhis Party, and of his recently deceased spiritual mentor, V. I. Lenin.1 Stalin, with a few years, took the Soviet cinema, its makers, and Lenin's Bolshevik party wholly into his hands. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the Russian cinematographer who, perhaps as much as any other practitioner of the arts, suffered tragically the depredations Stalin effected on his work and in his personal life. Not a few of his contemporary artists and literateurs, just as famous as he, were executed or died in the Gulag. Eisenstein had, in his youth, subscribed to the program of the Bolsheviks, producing heavily political films like Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ten Days that Shook the World (1928) to propagandize the cause. These films came well before the dreary conformity soon imposed by Stalin, through his cultural tsars, was set firmly in place as a kind of opaque ceiling above individual creative imagination. In his later career (he died in 1948, aged 50), Eisenstein was to be effectively entrapped in the Kremlin boss's ukases that narrowly prescribed the propaganda directions of Soviet cinema. Stalin constantly meddled in every aspect of Soviet creative life, cinema being perhaps his favorite amateur playground . His continuing program of arrests, imprisoments, and executions of citizens of all walks of life brought terror to the entire society,—including the creative elite. When he demanded films celebrating national heroes, Eisenstein, after being publicly mauled in 1936 and 1937 for countless infractions of the rules of Soviet artistic expression, was offered what was in effect the redeeming task of revivifying in film an antique Russian hero, Alexander Nevsky (1938). This opportunity to exculpate himself by plunging into another politically risky production followed the shredding ofhis almost completed film Bezhin Meadow. That he had to endure while pathetically apologizing for his alleged misdemeanors . A few years later, when Stalin saw himself victorious in war after takingover large neighboring territories, Eisenstein was called in to reproduce in film the story of another Russian conqueror, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, part 1 [1945, commissioned in early 1941]). It is likely that Eisenstein was, in some ways, more vulnerable to being caught up in the dictator's whims than most members of the elite.2 The executioner's blade cut close to Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, but, though it took some out of the ranks of the Soviet artistic elite personally 48 I Film & History Eisenstein Anniversary Essays | Film & Politics close to him, he was spared—not, perhaps, unaccountably , given his international reputation and the effectiveness of his films at conveying the Soviet message abroad. Now, one hundred years after the birth of the great cinematographer, some heretofore far less known aspects of his artistic biography as it intertwined contemporary Soviet cultural history, and even diplomatic history, should be told. What should amaze those only familiar with Eisenstein's major film work is the level of professional engagement of this artist in every imaginative, and even scholarly, task of production, whatever he did. In his short life of political restriction and drastically limited opportunities he was only able to complete few productions (six major films, one in two parts—albeit all grand international successes). Some ofhis oeuvre was in fact cancelled while in production or, like Bezhin Meadow, the worst case, actually physically destroyed. One vitally important cinema work, Que viva Mexico^ was wholly emasculated in Hollywood as a result ofa tragicomedy of ill will, lack of communication, lack ofbudgeting experience and fiscal discipline on Eisenstein's part.3 Most writers have in the past highly sung Eisenstein's glory as a filmmaker, overlooking the close political...

American paintings before 1945 in the Wadsworth Atheneum

The history of the Wadsworth Atheneum is told in this two-volume set. It includes biographies of both famous and obscure artists whose work is in the museum along with entries on each painting. The story of the 19th-century private collectors who established the public collections is told.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: biographical writings

Marking the centenary of the birth of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), this book offers a new approach to the Bauhaus artist and theorist’s multifaceted life and work—an approach that redefines the very idea of biographical writing. In Laszlo Moholy-Nagy , Louis Kaplan applies the Derridean deconstructivist model of the to an intellectual biography of a Constructivist artist. Inhabiting the borderline between life and work, the book demonstrates how the signature inscribed by Moholy operates in a double space, interweaving signified object and signifying matter, autobiography and auto-graphy. Through interpretative readings of over twenty key artistic and photographic works, Kaplan graphically illustrates Moholy’s signature effect in action. He shows how this effect plays itself out in the complex of relations between artistic originality and plagiarism, between authorial identity and anonymity, as well as in the problematic status of the work of art in the age of technical reproduction. In this way, the book reveals how Moholy’s artistic practice anticipates many of the issues of postmodernist debate and thus has particular relevance today. Consequently, Kaplan clarifies the relationship between avant-garde Constructivism and contemporary deconstruction. This new and innovative configuration of biography catalyzed by the life writing of Moholy-Nagy will be of critical interest to artists and writers, literary theorists, and art historians.

Past and Present/Fiction and Fact: Narratives in American Art History

Both of these books-Morgan's biography of a single artist, Lubin's contextualized study of six works of American Art-fall within the current reach of American Art History. Yet these two studies could not be more different in range, ambition, and approach. Their pairing provides an opportunity to think about American art as cultural and social history. Together they raise questions about what counts as evidence, and about historical and art-historical interpretation (including the role of postmodern theory in the historical enterprise). Morgan's biography is the third book and the master narrative of his project on Kenyon Cox.' As classical muralist, antimodern critic, and teacher, Cox became the major voice for standards of academic craftsmanship and the ideal in American art from the 1880s until his death in 1919. This book draws the threads of life and work together into a carefully paced, four-act drama of eight chapters. Act One describes Cox's childhood in the accomplished Ohio family that nurtured his lifelong ideals. Act Two treats Cox's development: his five-year training as an art student in Paris; his first decade as a struggling artist-illustrator, teacher and writer in New York; and his social life and courtship of the art student Louise Howland King. The third act chronicles Cox's maturity. At the heart of the book, chapter 5 traces Cox's twenty-two-year career as one of America's most distinguished classical muralists. Chapter 6 deals with the annual cycles in the artist's life-the seasons in New York followed by summers with family in Cornish New Hampshire or at artists' colonies. Chapter 7 gives us the critic who championed the artist's role in the process of building social cohesion, and opposed

Art Collectors of Russia: The Private Treasures Revealed

Shchukin, Morozov, Kostakis - the precursors Salomon A. Schuster's collection - the spirit of St Petersburg Valantina Golod's collection - a miniature palace Vladimir I. Paleev's collection - a heritage preserved Dimitri S. Varchavsky's collection - guided by sensuality Igor G. Sanovich's collection - a cabinet of curiosities Valeri Dudakov's collection - a curator's dream Yuri Weitsman's collection - in the footsteps of Catherine the Great Abraham F. Chudnovsky's collection - a marriage of art and science Mikhail Perchenko's collection - a contemporary boyar the Moscow bank collection - the western mirage biographies of Russian artists.

The Cinema of Federico Fellini

This artistic biography of the Italian film-maker Federico Fellini shows how his imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature and his encounter with the ideas of C G Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering Fellini's entire career, the book links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neo-realist scriptwriter. Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian themes to reveal the director's growth not only as an artistic master of the visual image but also as an astute interpreter of culture and politics. Throughout the book Bondanella draws on a new archive of several dozen manuscripts, obtained from Fellini and his scriptwriters. These previously unexamined documents allow a comprehensive treatment of Fellini's important part in the rise of Italian neo-realism and the even more decisive role that he played in the evolution of Italian cinema beyond neo-realism in the 1950s. After two chapters on Fellini's pre-cinematic career, the book covers all the films to 1991 in analytical chapters arranged by topic: Fellini and his growth beyond his neo-

Biographers and the Art of Biography. By U. O'Connor. (Pp. 120; illustrated; £12.95.) Wolfhound Press: Dublin. 1991.

Biographers and the Art of Biography. By U. O'Connor. (Pp. 120; illustrated; £12.95.) Wolfhound Press: Dublin. 1991.

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (review)

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years Charles Ross Brian Boyd , Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 797 pp. $35.00. "A throaty voice from the heart." So Nabokov, with unerring precision and style, describes a cigarette commercial in one of the many previously unpublished snip-pets from letters and diaries and private papers that make this volume, the follow-up to Boyd's volume on Nabokov's Russian years, definitive. Boyd continues his chronological method, tracing his hero day by day and pausing, every time a major work is published, for an extended analysis of its art and themes. Much has been written about the art of biography, and Boyd is not immune from the temptation to cast his subject in the most flattering light, to echo Nabokov's famous style (particularly adverbs like "supremely"), or to follow his guidelines to his novels. Yet the key task of the biographer as drudge is the time line, pieced together from all available scraps of information, as well as numerous interviews to fill in gaps. Nabokov was increasingly private after he came to America in 1940. Boyd has not the number of living witnesses that made Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson so gripping or—and I am fully serious—make Kitty Kelly's steamy slander of Nancy Reagan so convincing. If he lacked witnesses, comparatively speaking, Boyd more than makes up for their missing voices by his untiring efforts in the Nabokov archives in Montreux, which required his ingratiating himself with Véra and Dmitri Nabokov, the great man's widow and son. A project of this scope required Boyd in effect to dedicate his life to another man's image. One hestiates to gauge the mental strain of such a maneuver, itself the theme of Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. A biographer of such dedication must be convinced of the truth of his enterprise. In Nabokov's case, the truth is, finally, not what kind of person he was. I myself never had any urge to meet the man while he was alive. Instead, the truth, as Nabokov himself said, lay in his style: not the throaty voice, but the ironic ring to the description. It is a voice to which Boyd is always in tune, an unfailing cicerone. One might quibble that Boyd is a little ungenerous with previous literary critics, as in failing to mention the MFS special issue on Nabokov in 1979. Nonetheless, some of the literary criticism is of a very high order, as in Boyd's discussion of our foreknowledge of quilty in Lolita or the difficult task of promoting Transparent Things. For my money Boyd's greatest moment comes when he points out the simple fact that Nabokov intended his translation of Eugene Onegin to be printed as an interlinear text. This typography would make clear at once his need to preserve an iambic meter. Nothing is more frustrating to a translator than others' failure to appreciate the aural quality of a line, or its centrality to literary art. [End Page 479] Charles Ross Purdue University Copyright © 1992 Purdue Research Foundation

Giotto's father and the family of Vasari's Lives

In Giotto's Father Barolsky shows that Vasari's Lives is a major source for the social history of Italian Renaissance art. This book completes the author's Vasari trilogy, begun with Michelangelo's Nose and Why Mona Lisa Smiles. Giotto's Father is the first book to examine the extensive and deep theme of family in Vasari's Lives and to explain its importance in the study of the image of the family in the sixteenth century. The world of the artist's workshop was closely tied to the artist's family life. Artists were often trained by their fathers, and they sometimes married into the families of other artists. It is thus reasonable for Vasari to have viewed the community of artists as an extended family or brotherhood presided over by major patriarchal figures, for example, Giotto, Ghiberti, and Raphael. Building on the view of Vasari's work as a highly wrought, complex work of fiction, Barolsky shows how the Lives is not just a series of biographies of artists but a sustained, detailed, and highly fictionalized account of artists' families. In very nearly every biography, Vasari makes up stories of paternal blessing, of filial piety or prodigality, of noble and ignoble wives, of greedy, cruel, or violent relatives-tales that tell us a great deal about Vasari's own family in particular and about Renaissance family relations in general. Barolsky's explanation of just how deeply ideas about family inform Vasari's Lives provides a new and more complex understanding of one of the most important sources for the comprehension of the Renaissance artist. Vasari's family stories are often so fanciful that historians and art historians frequently ignore them because they seem unreliable. Barolsky compares these family tales to those told by Cellini, Michelangelo, and Bandinelli and shows that, although fictional, Vasari's stories ring true to the sentiments expressed by his contemporaries in their own fictionalized family histories. Fictions provide valuable clues to the realities that they metaphorically describe. As an extended historical fiction, Vasari's book tells us a great deal about the emotions, aspirations, and ideals of Renaissance life.

Biographies of creative artists: an annotated bibliography

Biographies of creative artists: an annotated bibliography

Mirror of empire: Dutch marine art of the seventeenth century

The Dutch of the seventeenth century were the first Europeans to specialise in marine art, and the achievements of the celebrated Dutch masters attest to the vitality and enduring appeal of Dutch marine art. Mirror of Empire is the catalogue accompanying a travelling exhibition sponsored by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It is the first survey in English of Dutch marine art of the seventeenth century and includes many of the works of both Willem Van de Velde the Elder and Willem Van de Velde the Younger. The catalogue focuses on paintings, drawings, prints, sea charts and related cartographical material, while stressing the relationship among marine art and Dutch history, commerce and the tremendous significance of Dutch ship design. The book provides biographies of Dutch marine artists and contributors' essays on related topics that help explain the works of art within the larger historical context of their period. These topics include the Dutch trade routes that assured the Dutch Republic its preeminent position in seventeenth century Europe, the design and function of Dutch ships, the iconography of Dutch marine paintings as found in Dutch genre pictures of the period, and the importance of Dutch cartography to Western civilization.

Thomas Hart Benton: drawing from life

Prior to painting his murals or illustrating books, Thomas Hart Benton would make preliminary drawings, whether in the studio or outdoors. This book brings together over 190 of his many drawings which reflect all of his styles and subjects. Benton was a small man - not quite five foot three - who liked to paint big: he covered nearly as much wall space in five years as Michaelangelo did in twenty. The central role that his drawing played in the construction of his murals is clearly explained in this artistic biography giving examples of each stage along the way. The process of making preliminary drawings allowed Benton to paint the murals themselves with seemingly carefree exuberance - a public performance that the theatrical artist thoroughly enjoyed. This work captures Benton's pugnacious personality and aims to reveal his life through his drawings. This study orginally accompanied a travelling exhibition of Benton's work, organized by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in 1990.