in Italy]] Central Library is designated as the State Central Reference Library and is open to the public only for consultation of documents within its premises]] in Moscow, Russia]] detail mosaic, quote by Victor Hugo about libraries]] A library is a collection of sources, resources, and services, and the structure in which it is housed; it is organized for use and maintained by a public body, an institution, or a private individual. In the more traditional sense, an library is an collection of books. It can mean the collection itself, the building or room that houses such a collection, or both. The term "library" has itself acquired a secondary meaning: "an collection of useful material for common use." This sense is used in fields such as computer science, mathematics, statistics, electronics and biology. It can also be used by publishers in naming series of related books, e.g. The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Libraries most often provide a place of silence for studying.

Public and institutional collections and services may be intended for use by people who choose not to — or cannot afford to — purchase an extensive collection themselves, who need material no individual can reasonably be expected to have, or who require professional assistance with their research. In addition to providing materials, libraries also provide the services of librarians who are experts at finding and organizing information and at interpreting information needs.

Today's libraries are repositories and access points for print, audio, and visual materials in numerous formats, including maps, prints, documents, microform (microfilm/microfiche), audio tapes, CDs, cassettes, videotapes, DVDs, video games, e-books, e-audiobooks and many other electronic resources. Libraries often provide public facilities to access to their electronic resources and the Internet.

Thus, modern libraries are increasingly being redefined as places to get unrestricted access to information in many formats and from many sources. They are extending services beyond the physical walls of a building, by providing material accessible by electronic means, and by providing the assistance of librarians in navigating and analyzing tremendous amounts of information with a variety of digital tools.

Early history

The first libraries were composed for the most part, of published records, a particular type of library called archives. Archaeological findings from the ancient city-states of Sumer have revealed temple rooms full of clay tablets in cuneiform script. These archives were made up almost completely of the records of commercial transactions or inventories, with only a few documents touching theological matters, historical records or legends. Things were much the same in the government and temple records on papyrus of Ancient Egypt.

The earliest discovered private archives were kept at Ugarit; besides correspondence and inventories, texts of myths may have been standardized practice-texts for teaching new scribes. There is also evidence of libraries at Nippur about 1900 B.C. and those at Nineveh about 700 B.C. showing a library classification system. Another early organization system was in effect at Alexandria.

Over 30,000 clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal have been discovered at Nineveh, providing archaeologists with an amazing wealth of Mesopotamian literary, religious and administrative work. Among the findings were the Enuma Elish, also known as the Epic of Creation, which depicts a traditional Babylonian view of creation, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a large selection of "omen texts" including Enuma Anu Enlil which "contained omens dealing with the moon, its visibility, eclipses, and conjunction with planets and fixed stars, the sun, its corona, spots, and eclipses, the weather, namely lightning, thunder, and clouds, and the planets and their visibility, appearance, and stations", and astronomic/astrological texts, as well as standard lists used by scribes and scholars such as word lists, bilingual vocabularies, lists of signs and synonyms, and lists of medical diagnoses.

Libraries in the Hellenic world and Rome

of Rome (d. c. AD 79), which confirms that the Library of Alexandria must have existed in some form in the first century. ]] Private or personal libraries made up of non-fiction and fiction books (as opposed to the state or institutional records kept in archives) appeared in classical Greece in the 5th century BC. The celebrated book collectors of Hellenistic Antiquity were listed in the late 2nd century in Deipnosophistae:

Polycrates of Samos and Pisistratus who was tyrant of Athens, and Euclides who was himself also an Athenian and Nicorrates of Samos and even the kings of Pergamos, and Euripides the poet and Aristotle the philosopher, and Nelius his librarian; from whom they say our countryman Ptolemæus, surnamed Philadelphus, bought them all, and transported them, with all those which he had collected at Athens and at Rhodes to his own beautiful Alexandria.

All these libraries were Greek; the cultivated Hellenized diners in Deipnosophistae pass over the libraries of Rome in silence. By the time of Augustus there were public libraries near the forums of Rome: there were libraries in the Porticus Octaviae near the Theatre of Marcellus, in the temple of Apollo Palatinus, and in the Bibliotheca Ulpiana in the Forum of Trajan. The state archives were kept in a structure on the slope between the Roman Forum and the Capitoline Hill.

Private libraries appeared during the late republic: Seneca inveighed against libraries fitted out for show by non-reading owners who scarcely read their titles in the course of a lifetime, but displayed the scrolls in bookcases (armaria) of citrus wood inlaid with ivory that ran right to the ceiling: "by now, like bathrooms and hot water, an library is got up as standard equipment for a fine house (domus). Libraries were amenities suited to a villa, such as Cicero's at Tusculum, Maecenas's several villas, or Pliny the Younger's, all described in surviving letters. At the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, apparently the villa of Caesar's father-in-law, the Greek library has been partly preserved in volcanic ash; archaeologists speculate that a Latin library, kept separate from the Greek one, may await discovery at the site.

In the West, the first public libraries were established under the Roman Empire as each succeeding emperor strove to open one or many which outshone that of his predecessor. Unlike the Greek libraries, readers had direct access to the scrolls, which were kept on shelves built into the walls of a large room. Reading or copying was normally done in the room itself. The surviving records give only a few instances of lending features. As a rule Roman public libraries were bilingual: they had a Latin room and a Greek room. Most of the large Roman baths were also cultural centers, built from the start with an library, with the usual two room arrangement for Greek and Latin texts.

Libraries were filled with parchment scrolls as at Library of Pergamum and on papyrus scrolls as at Alexandria: export of prepared writing materials was a staple of commerce. There were a few institutional or royal libraries which were open to an educated public (such as the Serapeum collection of the Library of Alexandria, once the largest library in the ancient world), but on the whole collections were private. In those rare cases where it was possible for a scholar to consult library books there seems to have been no direct access to the stacks. In all recorded cases the books were kept in a relatively small room where the staff went to get them for the readers, who had to consult them in an adjoining hall or covered walkway.

In the 6th century, at the very close of the Classical period, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world remained those of Constantinople and Alexandria. Cassiodorus, minister to Theodoric, established a monastery at Vivarium in the heel of Italy with an library where he attempted to bring Greek learning to Latin readers and preserve texts both sacred and secular for future generations. As its unofficial librarian, Cassiodorus not only collected as many manuscripts as he could, he also wrote treatises aimed at instructing his monks in the proper uses of reading and methods for copying texts accurately. In the end, however, the library at Vivarium was dispersed and lost within a century.

Through Origen and especially the scholarly presbyter Pamphilus of Caesarea, an avid collector of books of Scripture, the theological school of Caesarea won a reputation for having the most extensive ecclesiastical library of the time, containing more than 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Jerome and others come to study there.

With education firmly in Christian hands, however, many of the works of classical antiquity were no longer considered useful. Old texts were washed off the valuable parchment and papyrus, which were reused, forming palimpsests. As scrolls gave way to the new book-form, the codex, which was universally used for Christian literature, old manuscript scrolls were cut apart and used to stiffen leather bindings.

Ancient Chinese libraries

The imperial library is the earliest known Chinese library, with history dating back to the Qin Dynasty. Han Chinese scholar Liu Hsiang established the first library classification system during the Han Dynasty, and the first book notation system. At this time the library catalog was written on scrolls of fine silk and stored in silk bags.

Islamic libraries

Upon the spread of Islam, libraries in newly Islamic lands knew a brief period of expansion in the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily and Spain. Like the Christian libraries, they mostly contained books which were made of paper, and took a codex or modern form instead of scrolls; they could be found in mosques, private homes, and universities, from Timbuktu to Afghanistan. In Aleppo, for example, the largest and probably the oldest mosque library, the Sufiya, located at the city's Grand Umayyad Mosque, contained a large book collection of which 10,000 volumes were reportedly bequeathed by the city's most famous ruler, Prince Sayf al-Dawla. Some mosques sponsored public libraries. Ibn al-Nadim's bibliography Fihrist demonstrates the devotion of medieval Muslim scholars to books and reliable sources; it contains a description of thousands of books circulating in the Islamic world circa 1000, including an entire section for books about the doctrines of other religions. Unfortunately, modern Islamic libraries for the most part do not hold these antique books; many were lost, destroyed by Mongols, or removed to European libraries and museums during the colonial period.

By the 8th century first Iranians and then Arabs had imported the craft of papermaking from China, with a paper mill already at work in Baghdad in 794. By the 9th century completely public libraries started to appear in many Islamic cities. They were called "halls of Science" or dar al-'ilm. They were each endowed by Islamic sects with the purpose of representing their tenets as well as promoting the dissemination of secular knowledge. The 9th century Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil of Iraq, even ordered the construction of a ‘zawiyat qurra literally an enclosure for readers which was `lavishly furnished and equipped.' In Shiraz Adhud al-Daula (d. 983) set up an library, described by the medieval historian, al-Muqaddasi, as`a complex of buildings surrounded by gardens with lakes and waterways. The buildings were topped with domes, and comprised an upper and a lower story with a total, according to the chief official, of 360 rooms.... In each department, catalogues were placed on a shelf... the rooms were furnished with carpets...'. The libraries often employed translators and copyists in large numbers, in order to render into Arabic the bulk of the available Persian, Greek, Roman and Sanskrit non-fiction and the classics of literature. This flowering of Islamic learning ceased centuries later when learning began declining in the Islamic world, after many of these libraries were destroyed by Mongol invasions. Others were victim of wars and religious strife in the Islamic world. However, a few examples of these medieval libraries, such as the libraries of Chinguetti in West Africa, remain intact and relatively unchanged even today. Another ancient library from this period which is still operational and expanding is the Central Library of Astan Quds Razavi in the Iranian city of Mashhad, which has been operating for more than six centuries.''

A number of distinct features of the modern library were introduced in the Islamic world, where libraries not only served as a collection of manuscripts as was the case in ancient libraries, but also as a public library and lending library, a center for the instruction and spread of sciences and ideas, a place for meetings and discussions, and sometimes as a lodging for scholars or boarding school for pupils. The concept of the library catalogue was also introduced in medieval Islamic libraries, where books were organized into specific genres and categories.

The contents of these Islamic libraries were copied by Christian monks in Muslim/Christian border areas, particularly Spain and Sicily. From there they eventually made their way into other parts of Christian Europe. These copies joined works that had been preserved directly by Christian monks from Greek and Roman originals, as well as copies Western Christian monks made of Byzantine works. The resulting conglomerate libraries are the basis of every modern library today.

Medieval Christian libraries

(), in Cesena, is the first European civic library.]]

With the retrenchment of literacy in the Roman west during the fourth and 5th centuries, fewer private libraries were maintained, and those in unfortified villas proved to be among their most combustible contents.

In the Early Middle Ages, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and before the rise of the large Western Christian monastery libraries beginning at Montecassino, libraries were found in scattered places in the Christian Middle East.

Medieval library design reflected the fact that these manuscripts —created via the labor-intensive process of hand copying— were valuable possessions. Library architecture developed in response to the need for security. Librarians often chained books to lecterns, armaria (wooden chests), or shelves, in well-lit rooms. Despite this protectiveness, many libraries were willing to lend their books if provided with security deposits (usually money or a book of equal value). Monastic libraries lent and borrowed books from each other frequently and lending policy was often theologically grounded. For example, the Franciscan monasteries loaned books to each other without a security deposit since according to their vow of poverty only the entire order could own property. In 1212 the council of Paris condemned those monasteries that still forbade loaning books, reminding them that lending is "one of the chief works of mercy."

Lending meant more than just having another work to read to librarians; while the work was in their possession, it could be copied, thus enriching the library's own collection. The book lent as a counter effort was often copied in the same way, so both libraries ended up having an additional title.

The early libraries located in monastic cloisters and associated with scriptoria were collections of lecterns with books chained to them. Shelves built above and between back-to-back lecterns were the beginning of bookpresses. The chain was attached at the fore-edge of a book rather than to its spine. Book presses came to be arranged in carrels (perpendicular to the walls and therefore to the windows) in order to maximize lighting, with low bookcases in front of the windows. This stall system (fixed bookcases perpendicular to exterior walls pierced by closely spaced windows) was characteristic of English institutional libraries. In Continental libraries, bookcases were arranged parallel to and against the walls. This wall system was first introduced on a large scale in Spain's El Escorial.

Southeast Asian libraries

Buddhist scriptures, educational materials, and histories were stored in libraries in pre-modern Southeast Asia. In Burma, a royal library called the Pitaka Taik was legendarily founded by King Anawrahta; in the 18th century, British envoy Michael Symes, upon visiting this library, wrote that "it is not improbable that his Birman majesty may possess a more numerous library than any potentate, from the banks of the Danube to the borders of China". In Thailand libraries called ho trai were built throughout the country, usually on stilts above a pond to prevent bugs from eating at the books.

Early modern libraries

Johannes Gutenberg's movable type innovation in the 15th century revolutionized bookmaking. From the 15th century in central and northern Italy, the assiduously assembled libraries of humanists and their enlightened patrons provided a nucleus around which an "academy" of scholars congregated in each Italian city of consequence. Cosimo de Medici in Florence established his own collection, which formed the basis of the Laurentian Library. In Rome, the papal collections were brought together by Pope Nicholas V, in separate Greek and Latin libraries, and housed by Pope Sixtus IV, who consigned the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana to the care of his librarian, the humanist Bartolomeo Platina in February 1475. In the 16th century Sixtus V bisected Bramante's Cortile del Belvedere with a cross-wing to house the Apostolic Library in suitable magnificence. The sixteenth and 17th centuries saw other privately endowed libraries assembled in Rome: the Vallicelliana, formed from the books of Saint Filippo Neri, with other distinguished libraries such as that of Cesare Baronio, the Biblioteca Angelica founded by the Augustinian Angelo Rocca, which was the only truly public library in Counter-Reformation Rome; the Biblioteca Alessandrina with which Pope Alexander VII endowed the University of Rome; the Biblioteca Casanatense of the Cardinal Girolamo Casanate; and finally the Biblioteca Corsiniana founded by the bibliophile Clement XII Corsini and his nephew Cardinal Neri Corsini, still housed in Palazzo Corsini in via della Lungara.

A lot of factors combined to create a "golden age of libraries" between 1600 and 1700: The quantity of books had gone up, as the cost had gone down, there was a renewal in the interest of classical literature and culture, nationalism was encouraging nations to build great libraries, universities were playing a more prominent role in education, and renaissance thinkers and writers were producing great works. Some of the more important libraries include the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Library of the British Museum, the Mazarine Library in Paris, and the National Central Library in Italy, the Prussian State Library, the M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library of St. Petersburg, and many more.

Literature of Libraries in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries is a collection of nine short works from the period which was published by John Cotton Dana and Henry W. Kent in 1906-07.

Types

features multiple floors with Wi-Fi access and "studypods" (personal seating and an AC outlet for laptops, all for studying). Located in Manhattan, New York City, United States.]] s.]] Libraries can be divided into categories by several methods: ;By the entity (institution, municipality, or corporate body) that supports or perpetuates them:

academic libraries

corporate libraries

government libraries, such as national libraries

historical society libraries

private libraries

public libraries

school libraries

special libraries

;By the type of documents or materials they hold:

data libraries

digital libraries

map libraries or collections

picture (photograph) libraries

slide libraries

tool libraries

;By the subject matter of documents they hold:

architecture libraries

fine arts libraries

law libraries

medical libraries

aquatic science libraries

theological libraries

;By the users they serve:

military communities

users who are blind or visually/physically handicapped (see National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped)

;By traditional professional divisions:

Academic libraries — These libraries are located on the campuses of colleges and universities and serve primarily the students and faculty of that and other academic institutions. Some academic libraries, especially those at public institutions, are accessible to members of the general public in whole or in part.

Public libraries or public lending libraries — These libraries provide service to the general public and make at least some of their books available for borrowing, so that readers may use them at home over a period of days or weeks. Typically, libraries issue library cards to community members wishing to borrow books. Many public libraries also serve as community organizations that provide free services and events to the public, such as reading groups and toddler story time.

Research libraries — These libraries are intended for supporting scholarly research, and therefore maintain permanent collections and attempt to provide access to all necessary material. Research libraries are most often academic libraries or national libraries, but many large special libraries have research libraries within their special field and a very few of the largest public libraries also serve as research libraries.

School libraries — Most public and private primary and secondary schools have libraries designed to support the school's curriculum.

Special libraries — All other libraries fall into this category. Many private businesses and public organizations, including hospitals, museums, research laboratories, law firms, and many government departments and agencies, maintain their own libraries for the use of their employees in doing specialized research related to their work. Special libraries may or may not be accessible to some identified part of the general public. Branches of a large academic or research libraries dealing with particular subjects are also usually called "special libraries": they are generally associated with one or more academic departments. Special libraries are distinguished from special collections, which are branches or parts of a library intended for rare books, manuscripts, and similar material.

Many institutions make a distinction between circulating libraries (where materials are expected and intended to be loaned to patrons, institutions, or other libraries) and collecting libraries (where the materials are selected on a basis of their natures or subject matter). Many modern libraries are a mixture of both, as they contain a general collection for circulation, and a reference collection which is often more specialized, as well as restricted to the library premises.

Public libraries

area of Leeds in England.]] in Police, a town in Pomerania, Poland]]

The earliest example in England of a library to be endowed for the benefit of users who were not members of an institution such as a cathedral or college was the Francis Trigge Chained Library in Grantham, Lincolnshire, established in 1598. The library still exists and can justifiably claim to be the forerunner of later public library systems. The beginning of the modern, free, open access libraries really got its start in the U.K. in 1847. Parliament appointed a committee, led by William Ewart, on Public Libraries to consider the necessity of establishing libraries through the nation: In 1849 their report noted the poor condition of library service, it recommended the establishment of free public libraries all over the country, and it led to the Public Libraries Act in 1850, which allowed all cities with populations exceeding 10,000 to levy taxes for the support of public libraries. Another important act was the 1870 Public School Law, which increased literacy, thereby the demand for libraries, so by 1877, more than 75 cities had established free libraries, and by 1900 the number had reached 300. This finally marks the start of the public library as we know it. And these acts led to similar laws in other countries, most notably the U.S.

1874 is a well known year in the history of librarianship in the United States. The American Library Association was formed, as well as The American Library Journal, Melvil Dewey published his decimal based system of classification, and the United States Bureau of Education published its report, "Public libraries in the United States of America; their history, condition, and management." During the post-Civil War years, there was a rise in the establishment of public libraries, a movement led chiefly by newly formed women's clubs. They contributed their own collections of books, conducted lengthy fund raising campaigns for buildings, and lobbied within their communities for financial support for libraries, as well as with legislatures and the Carnegie Library Endowment founded in the 20th century. They led the establishment of 75-80 percent of the libraries in communities across the country. The American Library Association continues to play a major role in libraries to this day, and Dewey's classification system, although under heavy criticism of late, still remains the prevailing method of classification used in the United States.

As the number of books in libraries increased, so did the need for compact storage and access with adequate lighting, giving birth to the stack system, which involved keeping a library's collection of books in a space separate from the reading room. This arrangement arose in the 19th century. Book stacks quickly evolved into a fairly standard form in which the cast iron and steel frameworks supporting the bookshelves also supported the floors, which often were built of translucent blocks to permit the passage of light (but were not transparent, for reasons of modesty). The introduction of electrical lighting had a huge impact on how the library operated. The use of glass floors was largely discontinued, though floors were still often composed of metal grating to allow air to circulate in multi-story stacks. As more space was needed, a method of moving shelves on tracks (compact shelving) was introduced to cut down on otherwise wasted aisle space.

Library 2.0, a term coined in 2005, is the library's response to the challenge of Google and an attempt to meet the changing needs of users by using web 2.0 technology. Some of the aspects of Library 2.0 include, commenting, tagging, bookmarking, discussions, use of online social networks by libraries, plug-ins, and widgets. Inspired by web 2.0, it is an attempt to make the library a more user-driven institution.

Despite the importance of public libraries, they are routinely having their budgets cut by state legislature. Funding has dwindled so badly that some smaller public libraries have been forced to cut their hours and release employees. While most donations made to public libraries are from private benefactors, they still receive very little in the way of state funding. One of the more recent efforts that have been made to aid public libraries is the Attorney.org Save-A-Library campaign in which they will profile public libraries from around the country in hopes of raising donations.

Organization

Libraries have materials arranged in a specified order according to a library classification system, so that items may be located quickly and collections may be browsed efficiently. Some libraries have additional galleries beyond the public ones, where reference materials are stored. These reference stacks may be open to selected members of the public. Others require patrons to submit a "stack request," which is a request for an assistant to retrieve the material from the closed stacks. A list of closed stack libraries is being aggregated on wikipedia.

Larger libraries are often broken down into departments staffed by both paraprofessionals and professional librarians.

Circulation (or Access Services) - Handles user accounts and the loaning/returning and shelving of materials.

Collection Development - Orders materials and maintains materials budgets.

Reference - Staffs a reference desk answering user questions (using structured reference interviews), instructing users, and developing library programming. Reference may be further broken down by user groups or materials; common collections are children's literature, young adult literature, and genealogy materials.

Technical Services - Works behind the scenes cataloging and processing new materials and deaccessioning weeded materials.

Stacks Maintenance - Re-shelves materials that have been returned to the library after patron use and shelves materials that have been processed by Technical Services. Stacks Maintenance also shelf reads the material in the stacks to ensure that it is in the correct library classification order.

Management

Basic tasks in library management include the planning of acquisitions (which materials the library should acquire, by purchase or otherwise), library classification of acquired materials, preservation of materials (especially rare and fragile archival materials such as manuscripts), the deaccessioning of materials, patron borrowing of materials, and developing and administering library computer systems. More long-term issues include the planning of the construction of new libraries or extensions to existing ones, and the development and implementation of outreach services and reading-enhancement services (such as adult literacy and children's programming).

Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published several standards regarding the management of libraries through its Technical Committee 46 (TC46), which is focused on "libraries, documentation and information centers, publishing, archives, records management, museum documentation, indexing and abstracting services, and information science". The following is a partial list of some of them:

ISO 2789:2006 Information and documentation — International library statistics

ISO 11620:1998 Information and documentation — Library performance indicators

ISO 11799:2003 Information and documentation — Document storage requirements for archive and library materials

ISO 14416:2003 Information and documentation — Requirements for binding of books, periodicals, serials and other paper documents for archive and library use — Methods and materials

ISO/TR 20983:2003 Information and documentation — Performance indicators for electronic library services

Library use

, which contains the largest collection of Vietnam War-related holdings outside the U.S. federal government, catalogs much of its material on the Internet.]] Patrons may not know how to fully use the library's resources. This can be due to some individuals' unease in approaching a staff member. Ways in which a library's content is displayed or accessed may have the most impact on use. An antiquated or clumsy search system, or staff unwilling or untrained to engage their patrons, will limit a library's usefulness. In United States public libraries, beginning in the 19th century, these problems drove the emergence of the library instruction movement, which advocated library user education. One of the early leaders was John Cotton Dana. The basic form of library instruction is generally known as information literacy.

Libraries inform their users of what materials are available in their collections and how to access that information. Before the computer age, this was accomplished by the card catalog — a cabinet containing many drawers filled with index cards that identified books and other materials. In a large library, the card catalog often filled a large room. The emergence of the Internet, however, has led to the adoption of electronic catalog databases (often referred to as "webcats" or as online public access catalogs, OPACs), which allow users to search the library's holdings from any location with Internet access. This style of catalog maintenance is compatible with new types of libraries, such as digital libraries and distributed libraries, as well as older libraries that have been retrofitted. Electronic catalog databases are criticized by some who believe that the old card catalog system was both easier to navigate and allowed retention of information, by writing directly on the cards, that is lost in the electronic systems. This argument is analogous to the debate over paper books and e-books. While libraries have been accused of precipitously throwing out valuable information in card catalogs, most modern ones have nonetheless made the move to electronic catalog databases. Large libraries may be scattered within multiple buildings across a town, each having multiple floors, with multiple rooms housing the resources across a series of shelves. Once a user has located a resource within the catalog, they must then use navigational guidance to retrieve the resource physically; a process that may be assisted through signage, maps, GPS systems or RFID tagging.

Finland has the highest number of registered book borrowers per capita in the world. Over half of Finland's population are registered borrowers. In the U.S., public library users have borrowed roughly 15 books per user per year from 1856 to 1978. From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined approximately 50%. The growth of audiovisuals circulation, estimated at 25% of total circulation in 2004, accounts for about half of this decline.

Shift to digital libraries

In the past couple of years, more and more people are using the Internet to gather and retrieve data. The shift to digital libraries has greatly impacted the average person's use of physical libraries. Between 2002 and 2004, the average American academic library saw its overall number of transactions decline approximately 2.2%. Libraries are trying to keep up with the digital world and the new generation of students that are used to having information just one click away. For example, The University of California Library System saw a 54% decline in circulation between 1991 to 2001 of 8,377,000 books to 3,832,000.

These facts might be a consequence of the increased availability of e-resources. In 1999-2000, 105 ARL university libraries spent almost $100 million on electronic resources, which is an increase of nearly $23 million from the previous year. A 2003 report by the Open E-book Forum found that close to a million e-books had been sold in 2002, generating nearly $8 million in revenue. Another example of the shift to digital libraries can be seen in Cushing Academy’s decision to dispense with its library of printed books — more than 20,000 volumes in all — and switch over entirely to digital media resources.

One claim to why there is a decrease in the usage of libraries stems from the observation of the research habits of undergraduate students enrolled in colleges and universities. There have been claims that college undergraduates have become more used to retrieving information from the Internet than a traditional library. As each generation becomes more in tune with the Internet, their desire to retrieve information as quickly and easily as possible has increased. There is no doubt that finding information by simply searching the Internet is much easier and faster than reading an entire book. In a survey conducted by NetLibrary, 93% of undergraduate students claimed that finding information online makes more sense to them than going to the library. Also, 75% of students surveyed claimed that they did not have enough time to go to the library and that they liked the convenience of the Internet. While the retrieving information from the Internet may be efficient and time saving than visiting a traditional library, research has shown that undergraduates are most likely searching only .03% of the entire web. The information that they are finding might be easy to retrieve and more readily available, but may not be as in depth as information from other resources such as the books available at a physical library.

Lists of libraries

See also

American Library Association

Angus Snead Macdonald

Archive

Bookcase

Bookend

Carnegie library

Chinese Library Classification (CLC)

Controlled vocabulary

Decline of library usage

Dewey Decimal Classification

Digital library

Digital reference services

Document management system

E-books

Federal depository library

Friends of Libraries

Green library

Harvard-Yenching Classification

Interlibrary loan

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions

Internet Search Engines and Libraries

Librarian

Libraries & the Cultural Record

Library 2.0

Library catalog

Library science

Library of Congress Classification

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Library Services and Construction Act

Literature

Map collection

Mellon's Theory of Library Anxiety

National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Open access (publishing)

One Person Library

Paper

Printmaking

Public Library of Science

Research library

Slide library

Special Libraries Association

Special library

Tool-lending Libraries

References

External links

Directories of libraries

LIBweb - Directory of library servers in 146 countries via WWW, PLANWEL is mirroring this database of world libraries maintained by WebJunction, a division of Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC)

American Library Association's list of largest US libraries, ala.org

lib-web-cats: A directory of over 39,000 worldwide libraries spanning 139 countries maintained by Marshall Breeding, librarytechnology.org

LibLinks - Directory of library resource links organized by US states, liblinks.org

Libraries of the World and their Catalogues compiled by a retired librarian, sylviamilne.co.uk

National libraries of Europe, theeuropeanlibrary.org

UNESCO Libraries Portal - Over 14000 links worldwide, unesco.org

Other resources

Centre for the History of the Book, hss.ed.ac.uk

Wikisource, The Free Library

Libraries: Frequently Asked Questions, ibiblio.org

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, ifla.org

Professional Library Associations from Jenkins Law Library, jenkinslaw.org

A Library Primer, by John Cotton Dana, 1903, setting out the basics of organizing and running a library. gutenberg.org

A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, curiousexpeditions.org

Category:Book promotion

Leo Castelli (born Leo Krausz; September 4, 1907 – August 21, 1999) was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art for five decades. Castelli showed Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Op Art, Color field painting, Hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, and Neo-expressionism, among other movements.

Life and work

Leo Castelli was born at Trieste, of Italian and Austro-Hungarian Jewish origin. Castelli's first American curatorial effort was the famous Ninth Street Show of 1951, a seminal event of Abstract Expressionism. In 1957, he opened the Leo Castelli Gallery in a townhouse on E. 77th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York City. Initially the gallery showcased European Surrealism, Wassily Kandinsky, and other European artists. However the gallery also exhibited American Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly, Friedel Dzubas, and Norman Bluhm were some artists who were included in group shows.

In 1958 Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns joined the gallery, signaling a turning away from Abstract Expressionism, towards Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. From the early 1960s through the late 70s, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, Lee Bontecou, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris (artist), Donald Judd, Chryssa, Dan Flavin, Ronald Davis, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth joined the stable of Castelli artists. In the 1970s Leo Castelli opened a downtown SoHo branch of the Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway. In the 1980s he opened a second larger downtown exhibition space on Greene Street also in SoHo.

Castelli's first wife Ileana Sonnabend (born October 28, 1914, Bucharest, Romania), whom he married in 1932, was also a formidable dealer of 20th century art. She ran a contemporary art gallery in Paris during the early 1960s after the couple divorced. The couple had a daughter, Nina Sundell. In the 1970s, Ileana opened another contemporary art gallery in New York, the Sonnabend Gallery.

After Ileana’s death in October 2007 at the age of 92, her heirs sold a portion of her postwar-art collection for $600 million — reportedly the largest private sale in history.

Castelli's second wife, Antoinette Castelli, opened Castelli Graphics, an art gallery devoted to the prints and photographs of Castelli Gallery and other artists. The couple also had a son together, Jean-Christophe Castelli. In 1995 Leo Castelli married the Italian art historian Barbara Bertozzi Castelli.

In October 2007 Castelli's heirs announced the donation of the gallery's archives from 1957 through 1999 to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art. The Leo Castelli Gallery continues to operate at 18 East 77th Street in New York under the direction of his last wife showing many of the same artists from the gallery's past.

References

Further reading

Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, 2010.

External links

Castelli's Oral History Interviews with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art: May 1969 ; July 1969 ; May 1997

Portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe from ArtNews "Portrait of the Art World" exhibition

Category:American art collectors Category:American art dealers Category:American businesspeople Category:American Jews Category:American people of Austrian-Jewish descent Category:American people of Hungarian-Jewish descent Category:American people of Italian-Jewish descent Category:Austrian art dealers Category:Austrian art collectors Category:Austrian businesspeople Category:Austrian Jews Category:Austro-Hungarian Jews Category:Italian Jews Category:Italian immigrants to the United States Category:Italian people of Hungarian descent Category:People from Trieste Category:1907 births Category:1999 deaths

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Name	Romare Bearden
Caption	Romare Bearden, in his army uniform, a photograph taken by Carl Van Vechten, 1944
Birthdate	September 02, 1911
Deathdate	March 12, 1988
Nationality	American
Field	Painting

Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) was an African- American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.

Education

Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1929 he graduated from Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He completed his studies at New York University (NYU), graduating with a degree in science and education.

After he started to focus more on his art and less on athletics, he took courses in art that led to him being a lead cartoonist and art editor for the Eucleian Society's (a secretive student society at NYU) monthly journal, The Medley.

Career as an artist

Bearden grew as an artist not by learning how to create new techniques and mediums, but by his life experiences, and the different decades he created art and the different events that took place completely reshaped his vision of art. He studied under German artist George Grosz at the Art Students League in 1936 and 1937. At this time his paintings were often of scenes in the American South, and his style was strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists, especially Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Shortly thereafter he began the first of his stints as a case worker for the New York Department of Social Services. During World War II, Bearden joined the United States Army, serving from 1942 until 1945. He would return to Europe in 1950 to study philosophy at the Sorbonne under the auspices of the GI Bill.

This completely changed his style of art as he started producing abstract representations of what he deemed as human; specifically scenes from the Passion of the Christ. He had evolved from what Edward Alden Jewell, a reviewer for the New York times, called a “debilitating focus on Regionalist and ethnic concerns” to what became known as his stylistic approach which participated in the post-war aims of avant-garde American art (Witkovsky 1989: 258). His works were exhibited in Sam Kootz’s gallery until his work was deemed not abstract enough.

During his success in the gallery, however, he produced Golgotha, a painting from his series of the Passion of the Christ (see Figure 1). Golgotha is an abstract representation of the Crucifixion. The eye of the viewer is drawn to the middle of the image first, where Bearden has rendered Christ’s body. The body parts are stylized into abstract geometric shapes, yet still too realistic to be concretely abstract; this work has a feel of early Cubism. The body is in a central position and yet darkly contrasting with the highlighted crowds. The crowds of people are on the left and right, and are encapsulated within large spheres of bright colors of purple and indigo. The background of the painting is depicted in lighter jewel tones dissected with linear black ink. Bearden used these colors and contrasts because of the abstract influence of the time, but also for their meanings.

Bearden intended to not focus on Christ but he wanted to emulate rather the emotions and actions of the crowds gathered around the Crucifixion. He worked hard to “depict myths in an attempt to convey universal human values and reactions” (Witkovsky 1989: 260). According to Bearden himself, Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are the greatest expressions of man’s humanism, not because of Christ’s actual existence but the idea of him that lived on through other men. This is why Bearden focuses on Christ’s body first, to portray the idea of the myth, and then highlights the crowd, to show how the idea is passed on to men.

While it may seem as if Bearden was emphasizing the Biblical interpretations of Christ and the Crucifixion, he was actually focusing on the spiritual intent. He wanted to show ideas of humanism and thought that cannot be seen by the eye, but “must be digested by the mind” (Witkovsky, 1989: 260). This is in accordance with the time he produced this image, as other famous artists creating avant-garde abstract representations of historically significant events, such as Motherwell’s commemoration of the Spanish Civil War, Pollock’s investigation of the Northwest Coast Indian art, Rothko’s and Newman’s interpretations of Biblical stories, etc. Bearden used this form of art to depict humanity during a period of time when he didn’t see humanity in existence through the war (Romare Bearden Foundation, 1990). However, Bearden stands out from these other artists as his works, including Golgotha, are a little too realistic for this time, and he was kicked out of Sam Kootz’s gallery.

Bearden turned to music, co-writing the hit song Sea Breeze, which was recorded by Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie; it is still considered a jazz classic. In 1954, at age 42, he married Nanette (Rohan) Bearden, a 27 year old accomplished dancer and noted beauty who herself became an artist and critic. The couple eventually created the Bearden Foundation to assist young artists. Nanette Bearden was also instrumental in convincing her husband to return to visual art.

In the late 1950s, Bearden's work became more abstract, using layers of oil paint to produce muted, hidden effects. In 1956, Bearden began studying with a Chinese calligrapher, whom he credits with introducing him to new ideas about space and composition in painting. He also spent a lot of time studying famous European paintings he admired, particularly the work of the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Rembrandt. He began exhibiting again in 1960. About this time the couple established a second home in the Caribbean island of St. Maarten.

Collage

, 1970, Library of Congress]] Bearden had struggled with two artistic sides of himself: his background as “a student of literature and of artistic traditions, and being a black human being involves very real experiences, figurative and concrete” (Witkovsky 1989: 266), which was at combat with the mid-twentieth century “exploration of abstraction” (Witkovsky 1989: 267). His frustration with abstraction won over, as he himself described his paintings’ focus as coming to a plateau. Bearden then turned to a completely different medium at a very important time for the country.

During the 1960s civil rights movement, Bearden started to experiment again, this time with forms of collage (Brenner Hinish and Moore, 2003). After helping to found an artist's group in support of civil rights, Bearden's work became more representational and more overtly socially conscious. He used clippings from magazines, which in and of itself was a new medium as glossy magazines were fairly new. He used these glossy scraps to incorporate modernity in his works, trying to show how not only were African American rights moving forward, but so was his socially conscious art. In 1964, he held an exhibition he called Projections, where he introduced his new collage style. These works were very well received, and these are generally considered to be his best work (Fine, 2004).

There have been numerous museum shows of Bearden's work since then, including a 1971 show at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Prevalence of Ritual, an exhibition of his highly prized prints entitled A Graphic Odyssey showing the work of the last fifteen years of his life, and the 2005 National Gallery of Art retrospective entitled The Art of Romare Bearden.

One of his most famous series, Prevalence of Ritual, concentrated mostly on southern African American life. He used these collages to show his rejection of the Harmon Foundation’s, the Chicago arts organization, emphasis on the idea that African Americans must reproduce their culture in their art (Greene, 1971). Bearden found this to be a burden on African artists, because he saw this idea creating an emphasis on reproducing something that already exists in the world. He used this new series to speak out against this limitation on Black artists, and to emphasize modern art.

In this series, one of the pieces is entitled Baptism. Bearden was influenced by Francisco Zubaran, and based Baptism off of Zubaran’s piece The Virgin Protectress of the Carthusians. Bearden wanted to show how the water that is about to be poured on the subject being baptized is always moving, giving the whole collage a feel and sense of temporal flux. This is a direct connection with the fact that African Americans’ rights were always changing, and society itself was in a temporal flux at the time he created this image. Bearden wanted to show how nothing is fixed, and represented this idea throughout the image: not only is the subject being baptized about to have water poured from the top, but the subject is also about to be submerged in water. Every aspect of the collage is moving and will never be the same more than once, which was congruent with society at the time.

In "The Art of Romare Bearden", Ruth Fine describes his themes as "universal". "A well-read man whose friends were other artists, writers, poets and jazz musicians, Bearden mined their worlds as well as his own for topics to explore. He took his imagery from both the everyday rituals of African American rural life in the south and urban life in the north, melding those American experiences with his personal experiences and with the themes of classical literature, religion, myth, music and daily human ritual."

A mural by Romare Bearden in the Gateway Center subway station in Pittsburgh is worth $15 million, more than the cash-strapped transit agency expected, raising questions about how it should be cared for once it is removed before the station is demolished. "We did not expect it to be that much," Port Authority of Allegheny County spokeswoman Judi McNeil said. "We don't have the wherewithal to be a caretaker of such a valuable piece."

It would cost the agency more than $100,000 a year to insure the 60-foot-by-13-foot tile mural, McNeil said. Bearden was paid $90,000 for the project, titled "Pittsburgh Recollections." It was installed in 1984.

Legacy

Romare Bearden died in New York on March 12, 1988 due to complications from bone cancer. In their obituary for him, the New York Times called Bearden "one of America's pre-eminent artists" and "the nation's foremost collagist."

Two years after his death, The Romare Bearden Foundation was founded. This non-profit organization not only serves as Bearden's official Estate, but also helps "to preserve and perpetuate the legacy of this preeminent American artist." Recently, it has begun developing grant-giving programs aimed at funding and supporting children, young (emerging) artists and scholars.

In Charlotte, Romare Bearden has a street named after him, intersecting West Boulevard, on the west side of the city. On that site, Romare Bearden Drive is surrounded by the West Boulevard Public Library branch and rows of townhouses.

Published works

Romare Bearden is the author of:

Lil Dan, the Drummer Boy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Romare Bearden is the coauthor of:

with Harry Henderson, Six Black Masters of American Art, New York: Doubleday, 1972

with Carl Holty, The Painter's Mind, Taylor & Francis, 1981

with Harry Henderson, of A History of African-American Artists. From 1792 to present, New York: Pantheon Books 19

Honors achieved

Founded the 306 Group, a club for Harlem artists

In 1966 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters

In 1972 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters

In 1987, the year before he died, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Romare Bearden on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

Works

Abstract (painting)

The Blues (collage) – 1975, Honolulu Academy of Arts

The Calabash (collage) - 1970, Library of Congress

Carolina Shout (collage) - The Mint Museum of Art

Falling Star (painting)

Fisherman (painting)

"Jammin' at the Savoy" (painting)

The Lantern (painting)

Last of the Blue Devils

Morning of the Rooster

Patchwork Quilt (collage) – 1970, Museum of Modern Art

Piano Lesson (painting) – Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Prevalence of Ritual: Tidings (collage)

Return of the Prodigal Son – 1967, Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Rocket to the Moon (collage)

She-Ba

Showtime (painting)

Summertime (collage) – 1967, Saint Louis Art Museum

The Woodshed

Wrapping it up at the Lafayette

The Dove 1964

Notes

Sources

[Provides biography of mother, Bessye J. Bearden]

Brenner, Carla, Hinish, Heidi, and Moore, Barbara. 2003. The Art of Romare Bearden, National Gallery of Art, Washington. http://www.nga.gov/bearden.shtm

Fine, Ruth, The Art of Romare Bearden, Abrams/National Gallery of Art, 2004.

Greene, Carroll, Jr., Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual, Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

Witkovsky, Matthew S. 1989. Experience vs. Theory: Romare Bearden and Abstract Expressionism. Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 23, No. 2, Fiction Issue pp. 257–282.

East End/East Liberty Historical Society. Pittsburgh's East Liberty Valley, Arcadia Publishing, 2008 www.arcadiapublishing.com

See also

African American art

List of WPA artists

External links

The Romare Bearden Foundation website

The Art of Romare Bearden at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Marshall Arts presents Romare Bearden

Bearden Foundation biography

Romare Bearden Images: Hollis Taggart Galleries

"Romare Bearden: The Music in His Art, A Pictorial Odyssey" - by Ronald David Jackson. video, 2005

Romare Bearden Artwork Examples on AskART.

Romare Bearden papers online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art

Review of Romare Bearden's exhibit at the Whitney Museum by John Haber

Columbus Museum of Art Bearden’s 1967 collage and mixed media piece La Primavera (click on picture for larger image)

Conjuring Bearden Exhibit at the Nasher Museum of Art

Romare Bearden's public artwork at Westchester Square-East Tremont Avenue, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit.

Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.">Price, Sally and Richard Price. 2006. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Category:1911 births Category:1988 deaths Category:African American artists Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:Collage Category:Modern painters Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:Art Students League of New York alumni Category:North Carolina culture Category:Artists from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Name	Robert Ryman
Birthdate	May 30, 1930
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Conceptual art
Influenced by	Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, John McLaughlin, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman

Robert Ryman (born May 30, 1930) is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. The majority of his works feature abstract expressionist-influenced brushwork in white or off-white paint on square canvas or metal surfaces. In 1992, a major touring retrospective of Ryman's paintings was mounted by the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Gallery. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1994. Hallen für Neue Kunst, a contemporary art museum in Schaffhausen, Switzerland has the largest public collection of Ryman's work, permanently exhibiting 29 pieces created from 1959 to 2007.

Ryman is often classified as a minimalist, but he prefers to be known as a "realist" because he is not interested in creating illusions, but only in presenting the materials he has used in compositions at their face value. A lifelong experimenter with media, Ryman has painted and/or drawn on canvas, linen, steel, aluminum, plexiglas, lumasite, vinyl, fiberglass, corrugated paper, burlap, newsprint, wallpaper, jute sacking, fiberplate, gatorboard, feather board, handmade paper, and acrilivin. He has used painted and/or drawn with oil, acrylic, encaustic, Lascaux acrylic, casein, enamel, pastel, oil pastel, graphite, guache, and enamelac. Ryman has also experimented with printmaking, creating etchings, aquatints, lithographs, and silkscreens.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Ryman moved to New York City in 1953, intending to become a professional jazz saxophonist. He soon took a day job at the Museum of Modern Art as a security guard to make ends meet, and met the artists Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin, who were co-workers with him at MoMA. He also met artist Roy Lichtenstein during this period of the 1950s.

Captivated by the newly acquired abstract expressionist works of Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Ryman became curious about the act of painting. He purchased some art supplies at local store and began experimenting in his apartment in 1955.

Ryman had his first one man show at Paul Bianchini's gallery in 1967 at the age of 36. His first one man show at a museum was in 1971 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Ryman had a close relationship with the late conservator Orrin Riley, who would frequently give him advice on archival materials, many times testing the acidity of media the artist was interested in using.

He has been interviewed by the television writer and producer Barbaralee Diamonstein twice. Once for the book and video production "Inside New York's Art World" in 1979 and again for "Inside the Art World" in 1993.

From 1975 until the late 1990s, Ryman affixed his paintings to the wall with metal brackets. He would design each set of brackets specifically for each piece and have them constructed by a local metals fabricator.

In 2009 he participated in the art project Find Me, by Gema Alava, in company of artists Lawrence Weiner, Merrill Wagner and Paul Kos.

Ryman's most famous quote is "There is never any question of what to paint only how to paint."

He has stated that his paintings' titles are meaningless, and that they only exist as a form of identification. Ryman actually prefers the term of "name" for a painting instead of a title because he is not creating a picture or making reference to anything except the paint and the materials. The "names" of paintings often come from the names of art supplies, companies, or are just general words that do not carry much connotation.

Robert Ryman's sons, Cordy Ryman and Will Ryman are also artists and currently work in New York City.

Robert Ryman is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York.

External links

The Pace Gallery

Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series - Season 4 (2007).

Robert Ryman - the Guggenheim Museum

Robert Ryman at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

Category:1930 births Category:Living people Category:Contemporary painters Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:People from Nashville, Tennessee Category:Artists from Tennessee

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Name	Robert Motherwell
Caption	Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, Robert Motherwell 1971
Birthdate	January 24, 1915
Birthplace	Aberdeen, Washington
Deathdate	July 16, 1991
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Printmaking
Training	Stanford University, Harvard, Columbia University
Movement	Abstract expressionism

Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston.

Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington. The family later moved to San Francisco, where Motherwell's father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank. Robert Motherwell received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and completed one year of a philosophy Ph.D. at Harvard before shifting fields to art and art history, studying under Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University. His rigorous background in rhetoric would serve him and the abstract expressionists well, as he was able to tour the country giving speeches that articulated to the public what it was that he and his friends were doing in New York. Without his tireless devotion to communication (in addition to his prolific painting), well-known abstract expressionists like Rothko, who was extremely shy and rarely left his studio, might not have made it into the public eye. Motherwell's collected writings are a truly exceptional window into the abstract expressionist world. He was a lucid and engaging writer, and his essays are considered a bridge for those who want to learn more about non-representational art but who are put off by dense art criticism.

Motherwell spent significant time in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Cy Twombly studied under him.

Motherwell's greatest goal was to use the staging of his work to convey to the viewer the mental and physical engagement of the artist with the canvas. He preferred using the starkness of black paint as one of the basic elements of his paintings. He was known to frequently employ the technique of diluting his paint with turpentine to create a shadow effect. His long-running series of paintings "Elegies for the Spanish Republic" is generally considered his most significant project.

Motherwell was a member of the editorial board of the surrealist magazine VVV and a contributor of Wolfgang Paalens journal Dyn, which was edited 1942-44 in six numbers. He also edited Paalens collected essays Form and Sense in 1945 as the first Number of Problems of Contemporary Art.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth houses the largest collection of Motherwell's works. The Walker Art Center also has a nearly complete collection of his prints. The Empire State Plaza holds some of his work.

He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1989.

He was married to artist Helen Frankenthaler as his third wife, whom he later divorced.

Motherwell has been on the faculty of Hunter College.

Books

Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, R. Motherwell, New York, 1951.

Robert Motherwell, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California Press, 1999.

Robert Motherwell translated to English Paul Signac's book, D'Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, 1938.

Arnason, H.H. Robert Motherwell. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977; revised edition 1982.

Engberg, Siri and Joan Banach. Robert Motherwell: The Complete Prints 1940–1991. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003.

Flam, Jack. Motherwell. London: Phaidon, 1991

Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey,">American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4. p. 238-241

Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists,">New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 11; p. 16; p. 27; p. 38; p. 258-261

Robert Hobbs. "Robert Motherwell Retrospective." Düsseldorf: Städische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1976.

Robert Hobbs, Matthew Collings, Mel Gooding and Robert Motherwell. "Open." London: 21 Publishing Ltd., 2009.

Kingsley, April. The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Pleynet, Marcelin. Robert Motherwell. Paris: Daniel Papierski, 1989.

Sources

Lifetime Honors - National Medal of Arts

External links

The Dedalus Foundation

Robert Motherwell Biography: Hollis Taggart Galleries

The Archives of American Art: Interview with Robert Motherwell conducted by Paul Cummings, November 24, 1971

Category:1915 births Category:1991 deaths Category:Abstract expressionist artists Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:Artists from New York Category:People from New York City Category:People from Greenwich Village, New York Category:Artists from Massachusetts Category:Artists from Washington (U.S. state) Category:People from Aberdeen, Washington Category:Harvard Centennial Medal recipients Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Stanford University alumni Category:Hunter College faculty Category:People from Provincetown, Massachusetts

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Name	Milton Glaser
Caption	Milton Glaser, photographed in 2003
Birthdate	June 26, 1929
Birthplace	New York City
Nationality	American
Field	Graphic design
Training	Cooper UnionAcademy of Fine Arts in Bologna
Awards	Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Lifetime Achievement award, 2004National Medal of Arts, 2009

Milton Glaser (born June 26, 1929, in New York City) is a graphic designer, best known for the I Love New York logo, his "Bob Dylan" poster, the "DC bullet" logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the "Brooklyn Brewery" logo. He also founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968.

Biography

Glaser was educated at Manhattan's High School of Music & Art (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), graduated from the Cooper Union in 1951 and later, via a Fulbright Scholarship, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna under Giorgio Morandi.

In 1954 Glaser was a founder, and president, of Push Pin Studios formed with several of his Cooper Union classmates. Glaser's work is characterized by directness, simplicity and originality. He uses any medium or style to solve the problem at hand. His style ranges wildly from primitive to avant garde in his countless book jackets, album covers, advertisements and direct mail pieces and magazine illustrations. He started his own studio, Milton Glaser, Inc, in 1974. This led to his involvement with an increasingly wide diversity of projects, ranging from the design of New York Magazine, of which he was a co-founder, to a 600-foot mural for the Federal Office Building in Indianapolis.

campaign by Milton Glaser.]]

Throughout his career he has had a major impact on contemporary illustration and design. His work has won numerous awards from Art Directors Clubs, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Society of Illustrators and the Type Directors Club. In 1979 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and his work is included in the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Israel Museum and the Musee de l'affiche in Paris. Glaser has taught at both the School of Visual Arts and at Cooper Union in New York City. He is a member of Alliance Graphique International (AGI).

Milton Glaser Inc.

Milton Glaser, Inc. was established in 1974 in Manhattan, and is still producing work in a wide range of design disciplines, including: corporate identities (logos, stationery, brochures, signage, website design, and annual reports), environmental and interior design (exhibitions, interiors and exteriors of restaurants, shopping malls, supermarkets, hotels, and other retail environments), packaging (food and beverage packaging), and product design. Some of the firm's current clients include The Brooklyn Brewery, Jet Blue, Target, Coach, Trump, Eleven Madison Park, Alessi, Juilliard, The Rubin Museum of Art, Theatre For A New Audience, The School of Visual Arts, Bread Alone, and Philip Roth, amongst others.

In addition to Milton, this small Manhattan studio employs three designers (Nicholas Pattison, Sue Walsh, and Molly Kromhout) and a studio manager (Scarlett Rigby).

Awards

In 2004, Glaser won a Lifetime Achievement award from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. In 2009, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

Shows

In addition to commercial enterprises, Milton Glaser’s work has been exhibited world-wide. His most notable single-man shows include:

• Museum of Modern Art, New York (1975) • Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1977) • Lincoln Center Gallery, New York (1981) • Houghton Gallery, The Cooper Union, New York (1984) • Vicenza Museum (1989) • Galleria Communale d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (1989)

In 1991, he was commissioned by the Italian government to create an exhibition in tribute to the Italian artist, Piero della Francesca, for part of the celebrations on the occasion of his 500th anniversary. This show opened in Arezzo, Italy and one year later (under the sponsorship of Campari) moved to Milan. In 1994, The Cooper Union, Mr. Glaser’s alma mater, hosted the show in New York.

In 1992, an exhibition of drawings titled “The Imaginary Life of Claude Monet” opened at Nuages Gallery, Italy, and in 1995, an adapted version of this show was exhibited in Japan’s Creation Gallery. 1995 also brought a Glaser exhibition to the Art Institute of Boston.

In 1997, the Suntory Museum, Japan, mounted a major retrospective of The Pushpin Studios, featuring past and present works by Milton Glaser and other Pushpin artists. In October 1999, Mr. Glaser’s illustrations of Dante’s Purgatorio were exhibited at the Nuages Gallery in Milan, Italy, and Nuages organized a large exhibition of Mr. Glaser’s work during the 2000 Carnevale in Venice.

Mr. Glaser's work is now represented in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the National Archive, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York.

Notes

See also

First Things First 2000 manifesto

Emigre 51: First Things First, 1999.

External links

Buy Milton Glaser Posters and Prints

Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives

Art Is Work A Hillmancurtis short documentary of Glaser

Magazine Cover: Bob Lape's Restaurant Index

Art Directors Club biography, portrait and images of work

Interview with Glaser

Pete Hamill on Milton Glaser

TED Talks: Milton Glaser on using design to make ideas new at TED in 1998

MILTON GLASER DRAWS & LECTURES by C. Coy

Postage stamps by Milton Glaser

Category:1929 births Category:People from New York City Category:AIGA Medalists Category:Living people Category:American graphic designers Category:American illustrators Category:American magazine publishers (people) Category:The Cooper Union alumni Category:Logo designers Category:Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts alumni Category:Fulbright Scholars Category:National Design Award winners

Bgcolour	#6495ED
Name	Lee Krasner
Caption	Lee Krasner, Cool White, (1959)
Birthname	Lena Krassner
Birthdate	October 27, 1908
Birthplace	Brooklyn, New York
Deathdate	June 19, 1984
Deathplace	New York City
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Training	Cooper Union, National Academy of Design, Hans Hofmann
Movement	Abstract expressionism
Influenced by	Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock
Influenced	}}

Lee Krasner (October 27, 1908 — June 19, 1984) was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century. On October 25, 1945, she married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement.

Early life and education

Krasner was born as Lena Krassner (outside the family she was known as Lenore Krasner) in Brooklyn, New York to Russian Jewish immigrant parents from Bessarabia.

She studied at The Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, and worked on the WPA Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1943. Starting in 1937, she took classes with Hans Hofmann, who taught the principles of cubism, and his influence helped to direct Krasner's work toward neo-cubist abstraction. When commenting on her work, Hofmann stated, "This is so good you would not know it was painted by a woman."

In 1940, she started showing her works with the American Abstract Artists, a group of American painters.

Works

Krasner would often cut apart her own drawings and paintings to create collages and, at times, revised or discarded an entire series. As a result, her surviving body of work is relatively small. Her catalogue raisonné, published in 1995 by Abrams, lists only 599 known pieces. She was rigorously self-critical, and her critical eye is believed to have been important to Pollock's work.

Krasner struggled with the public's reception of her identity, both as a woman and as the wife of Pollock. Therefore she often signed her works with the genderless initials "L.K." instead of her more recognizable full name.

Krasner and Pollock gave each other reassurance and support during a period when neither's work was well-appreciated. Like Picasso during the brief period of his interaction with Braque, the daily give-and-take of Pollock and Krasner stimulated both artists. Pollock and Krasner fought a battle for legitimacy, impulsiveness and individual expression. They opposed an old-fashioned, conformist, and repressed culture unreceptive to these values, which was put off by the intricacy of Modernism in general.

Personal

Lee Krasner died in 1984, age 75, from natural causes. She had been suffering from arthritis.

Legacy

Six months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City held a retrospective exhibition of her work. A review of the exhibition in the New York Times noted that it "clearly defines Krasner's place in the New York School" and that she "is a major, independent artist of the pioneer Abstract Expressionist generation, whose stirring work ranks high among that produced here in the last half-century." As of 2008, Krasner is one of only four women artists to have had a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art. The other three women artists are Louise Bourgeois (MoMA retrospective in 1982), Helen Frankenthaler (MoMA retrospective in 1989) and Elizabeth Murray (MoMA retrospective in 2004)..

Her papers were donated to the Archives of American Art in 1985; they were digitized and posted on the web for researchers in 2009.

After her death, her East Hampton property became the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, and is open to the public for tours. A separate organization, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, was established in 1985. The Foundation functions as the official Estate for both Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, and also, under the terms of her will, serves "to assist individual working artists of merit with financial need." The U.S. copyright representative for the Pollock-Krasner Foundation is the Artists Rights Society.

's grave in the rear in the Green River Cemetery]]

Krasner was portrayed in an Academy Award-winning performance by Marcia Gay Harden in the 2000 film Pollock, a drama about the life of her husband Jackson Pollock, directed by Ed Harris. In John Updike's novel Seek My Face (2002), a significant portion of the main character's life is based on Krasner's.

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation

List of public exhibitions

American Abstract Artists

quotes by Lee Krasner, with source

Category:1908 births Category:1984 deaths Category:Abstract expressionist artists Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:Jewish painters Category:Jewish American artists Category:American women artists Category:Art Students League of New York alumni Category:The Cooper Union alumni Category:Bessarabian Jews Category:American people of Moldovan descent Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent Category:People from East Hampton (town), New York

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Name	Larry Rivers
Birthname	Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg
Birthdate	August 17, 1923
Birthplace	Bronx, New York
Deathdate	August 14, 2002
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Sculpture
Training	Hans Hofmann School
Movement	East Coast Figurative painting, New Realism, Pop Art

Larry Rivers (August 17, 1923 - August 14, 2002) was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York on (Long Island) and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.

Biography

Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx, New York as Yitzhok Loiza Grossberg to Russian-Jewish parents. He changed his name to Larry Rivers in 1940, after being introduced as "Larry Rivers and the Mudcats" at a local New York City pub. From 1940-45 he worked as a jazz saxophonist in New York City, and he studied at the Juilliard School of Music in 1945-46, along with Miles Davis, with whom he remained friends until Davis's death in 1991.

Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grand Father" of Pop art, because he was one of the first artists to really merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective abstraction.

Rivers took up painting in 1945 and studied at the Hans Hofmann School from 1947–48, and then at New York University. He was a pop artist of the New York School, reproducing everyday objects of American popular culture as art. He was one of eleven New York artists featured in the opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery in 1955.

During the early 1960s Rivers lived in the Hotel Chelsea notable for its artistic residents like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Arthur C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious and multiple people associated with Andy Warhol's Factory. In 1965 he had his first comprehensive retrospective in five important American museums. His final work for the exhibition was The History of the Russian Revolution, which was later on extended permanent display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. During 1967 he was in London collaborating with the American painter Howard Kanovitz.

In 1968, Rivers travelled to Africa for a second time with Pierre Dominique Gaisseau to finish their documentary, Africa and I, they narrowly escaped execution as suspected mercenaries.

During the 1970s he worked closely with Diana Molinari and Michel Auder on many video tape projects, including the infamous Tits, and also worked in neon.

Established as one of America's most important postwar artists, Rivers continued, until his death on 14 August 2002, to exhibit regularly both in the United States and abroad and to create work that combined realistically rendered images within a loosely brushed, quasi-abstract background. His primary gallery being the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. In 2002 a major retrospective of Rivers' work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Legacy

Rivers married Augusta Berger in 1945, and they had one son, Steven, as well as an earlier adopted child, Joseph. The couple divorced. He married Clarice Price in 1961, a Welsh school teacher who cared for his 2 sons. Rivers and Clarice Price had two daughters, Gwynne and Emma. After 6 years, they separated. Shortly after, he lived and collaborated with Diana Molinari, who featured in many of his works of the 1970s. After that Rivers lived with Sheila Lanham, a Baltimore poet. In the early 1980s, Rivers and East Village figurative painter Daria Deshuk lived together and in 1985 they had a son, Sam Deshuk Rivers. At the time of his death in 2002, Jeni Olin, a poet, was his companion.

New York University bought correspondences and other documents from the Larry Rivers Foundation to house in their archive. However, both daughters he had with Clarice Price, Gwynne and Emma, object to one particular film being displayed, as it depicts them naked as young children. The film's purpose is supposedly to be a documentation on their growth through puberty, but it was made without their consent. This matter is addressed in the December, 2010 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.

See also

Bodley Gallery

References

Further reading

Marika Herskovic, New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists,">New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists, (New York School Press, 2000.) ISBN 0-9677994-0-6. p. 8; p. 32; p. 38; p. 310-313

External links

Marlborough Gallery

Artnet.com chronology on Larry Rivers, listing Bodley showings in the 1970s

Category:1923 births Category:2002 deaths Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:Jewish painters Category:Jewish American artists Category:Pop artists Category:People from the Bronx Category:People from Manhattan

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Name	Joseph Kosuth
Caption	Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965)
Birthdate	January 31, 1945
Birthplace	Toledo, Ohio
Nationality	American
Field	Conceptual art
Training	School of Visual Arts, New York City

Joseph Kosuth (born January 31, 1945, Toledo, Ohio) is an American conceptual artist. , France, the birthplace of Jean-François Champollion]]

Life and work

Kosuth studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1965 to 1967.

His art generally strives to explore the nature of art, focusing on ideas at the fringe of art rather than on producing art per se. Thus his art is very self-referential, and a typical tautological statement is this: :"The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art."

One of his most famous works is One and Three Chairs, a visual expression of Plato's concept of The Forms. The piece features a physical chair, a photograph of that chair, and the text of a dictionary definition of the word "chair". The photograph is a representation of the actual chair situated on the floor, in the foreground of the work of art. The definition, posted on the same wall as the photograph, delineates in words the concept of what a chair is, in its various incarnations. In this and other, similar works, Five Words in Blue Neon and Glass One and Three, Kosuth forwards tautological statements, where the works literally are what they say they are.

In an addition to his artwork, he has written several books on the nature of art and artists, including Artist as Anthropologist. In his essay "Art after Philosophy" (1969), he argued that art is the continuation of philosophy, which he saw at an end. He was unable to define art in so far as such a definition would destroy his private self referential definition of art. Like the Situationists, he rejected formalism as an exercise in aesthetics, with its function to be aesthetic. Formalism, he said, limits the possibilities for art with minimal creative effort put forth by the formalist. Further, since concept is overlooked by the formalist, "Formalist criticism is no more than an analysis of the physical attributes of particular objects which happen to exist in a morphological context". He further argues that the "change from 'appearance' to 'conception' (which begins with Duchamp's first unassisted readymade) was the beginning of 'modern art' and the beginning of 'conceptual art'." Kosuth explains that works of conceptual art are analytic propositions. They are linguistic in character because they express definitions of art. This makes them tautological. In this vein is another of his well-known pieces: In Figeac, Lot, France, on the "Place des écritures" (writings place) is a giant copy of the Rosetta stone.

Footnotes

References and notes

Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, MIT Press, 1999, pxl. ISBN 0262511177

Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After, Collected Writings, 1966-1990. Ed. by G. Guercio, foreword by Jean-François Lyotard, MIT Press, 1991 (ISBN 0-262-11157-8 /ISBN 978-0-262-11157-7)

Dreher, Thomas: Konzeptuelle Kunst in Amerika und England zwischen 1963 und 1976, Thesis Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich 1991/Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 70ff. (One and Three Chairs, 1965), 167 (Xerox Book, 1968), 169ff. (The Second Investigation, since 1968), 281-294 (The Tenth Investigation, Proposition One, 1974); ISBN 3-631-43215-1 (in German)

See also

One and Three Chairs - one of Kosuth's most well known pieces

External links

Thomas Dreher: Joseph Kosuth - "Zero & Not" 1985-86

Category:1945 births Category:Living people Category:American conceptual artists Category:People from Toledo, Ohio Category:Postmodern artists Category:Contemporary artists Category:Artists from New York Category:Installation artists Category:Neon artists Category:Postmodernists Category:Media theorists

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Name	Jim Dine
Caption	Jim Dine (standing to the left)surrounded by photographers at the inauguration of the work Walking to Borås (glimpsed on the left of picture),May 16, 2008.
Birthdate	June 16, 1935
Birthplace	Cincinnati, Ohio
Nationality	American
Field	painting
Training	University of Cincinnati.Ohio University
Movement	Neo-Dada, Pop Art

.]] Jim Dine (born June 16, 1935) is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended the University of Cincinnati and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with his Happenings. Pioneered with artists Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow, in conjunction with musician John Cage, the "Happenings" were chaotic performance art that was a stark contrast with the more somber mood of the expressionists popular in the New York art world. The first of these was the 30 second The Smiling Worker performed in 1959.

Jim Dine has been represented by The Pace Gallery since 1976.

Birth of "Pop Art"

In 1962 Dine's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Dowd, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects, curated by Walter Hopps at the Norton Simon Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first "Pop Art" exhibitions in America. These painters started a movement, in a time of social unrest, which shocked America and the Art world and changed modern Art forever, "Pop Art".

In the early 1960s Dine produced pop art with items from everyday life. These provided commercial as well as critical success, but left Dine unsatisfied. In September 1966 police raided an exhibition of his work displayed at Robert Fraser's gallery in London, England. Twenty of his works were seized and Fraser was charged under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, Dine's work was found to be indecent but not obscene and Fraser was fined 20 guineas. The following year Dine moved to London and continued to be represented by Fraser, spending the next four years developing his art. Returning to the United States in 1971 he focused on several series of drawings. In the 1980s sculpture resumed a prominent place in his art. In the time since then there has been an apparent shift in the subject of his art from man-made objects to nature.

According to James Rado, co-author (with Gerome Ragni) of the rock musical Hair, it was a Dine piece entitled "Hair" which gave the name to the rock musical.

In 1984, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, exhibited his work as "Jim Dine: Five Themes," and in 1989, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts hosted "Jim Dine Drawings: 1973-1987".

2000 and on

In 2004, the National Gallery of Art, Washington organized the exhibition, "Drawings of Jim Dine." In the summer of 2007 he participated in the Chicago public art exhibition "." He exhibits regularly with the Alan Cristea Gallery in London and has a show scheduled there in April 2010.

}}

Pinocchio Art

On May 16, 2008, Jim Dine inaugurated a nine meter high bronze statue depicting a walking Pinocchio, named Walking to Borås. The statue is placed in the city of Borås, Sweden.

Dine previously worked on a commercial book, paintings, and sculptures that focused on Pinocchio. He feels that "the idea of a talking stick becoming a boy [is] like a metaphor for art, and it’s the ultimate alchemical transformation."

See also

Claes Oldenburg

Cy Twombly

, a 1995 documentary

Marcel Duchamp

Pop Art

Further reading

Chris Bruce, compiler, with an essay by Jim Dine. Extending the Artist's Hand: Contemporary Sculpture from the Walla Walla Foundry. Pullman, Washington: Museum of Art, Washington State University, 2004. ISBN 978-0-9755662-0-6

John Coplans, "New Paintings of Common Objects", Artforum, November, 1962. (Illustrations)

References

External links

Drawings of Jim Dine at the National Gallery of Art

The Pace Gallery

Past Exhibition of Drawings of Jim Dine at the National Gallery of Art

Jim Dine Walking Memory

Jim Dine on ArtCyclopedia

Sources

Encyclopedia of Artists, volume 2, edited by William H.T. Vaughan, ISBN 0-19-521572-9, 2000

Category:1935 births Category:Living people Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:American sculptors Category:Jewish painters Category:Jewish American artists Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Modern painters Category:Pop artists Category:Ohio University alumni Category:University of Cincinnati alumni Category:Artists from Cincinnati, Ohio Category:American artists

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Name	James Rosenquist
Caption	Photo of James Rosenquist in his Aripeka, Florida studio, 1988. Photo by Russ Blaise
Birthdate	November 29, 1933
Birthplace	Grand Forks, North Dakota
Nationality	American
Field	Painting, Printmaking, Drawing
Training	Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Minnesota, Art Students League of New York
Movement	pop-art

James Rosenquist (born November 29, 1933) is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.

Background and education

He was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota and grew up as an only child. His parents, Louis and Ruth Rosenquist of Swedish descent, were amateur pilots and moved from town to town to look for work, finally settling in Minneapolis. His mother, who was also a painter, encouraged her son to have an artistic interest. In junior high school, Rosenquist won a short-term scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art and subsequently studied painting at the University of Minnesota from 1952 to 1954. In 1955, at the age of 21, he moved to New York City on scholarship to study at the Art Students League.

Career

Early Years and Pop

From 1957 to 1960, he earned his living as a billboard painter. This was perfect training, as it turned out, for an artist about to explode onto the pop art scene. Rosenquist deftly applied sign-painting techniques to the large-scale paintings he began creating in 1960. Like other pop artists, Rosenquist adapted the visual language of advertising and pop culture (often funny, vulgar, and outrageous) to the context of fine art. Rosenquist achieved international acclaim in 1965 with the room-scale painting F-111.

Rosenquist has said the following about his involvement in the Pop Art movement: "They(art critics) called me a Pop artist because I used recognizable imagery. The critics like to group people together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964. I did not really know Andy or Roy Lichtenstein that well. We all emerged separately."

Mature work

His specialty is taking fragmented, oddly disproportionate images and combining, overlapping, and putting them on canvases to create visual stories. This can leave viewers breathless, making them consider even the most familiar objects (a U-Haul trailer, or a box of Oxydol detergent, etc.) in more abstract and provocative ways.

Prints

In addition to painting, he has produced a vast array of prints, drawings and collages. One of his prints, Time Dust (1992), is thought to be the largest print in the world, measuring approximately 7 x 35 feet.

In 1994 he created the print Discover Graphics in celebration of a Smithsonian educational program detailing the printmaking process. The print's proceeds supported the Smithsonian Associates' cultural and educational programs, and an original of the lithograph hangs in the Smithsonian Art Collectors Program's ongoing exhibition, Graphic Eloquence in the S. Dillon Ripley Center in the National Mall.

Honors

Rosenquist has received numerous honors, including selection as "Art In America Young Talent USA" in 1963, appointment to a six-year term on the Board of the National Council of the Arts in 1978, and receiving the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1988. In 2002, the Fundación Cristóbal Gabarrón conferred upon him its annual international award for art, in recognition of his great contributions to universal culture.

Since his first early career retrospectives in 1972 organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, he has been the subject of several gallery and museum exhibitions, both in the United States and abroad. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organized a full-career retrospective in 2003, which traveled internationally, and was organized by curators Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft.

Rosenquist continues to produce large-scale commissions, including the recent three-painting suite The Swimmer in the Econo-mist (1997–1998) for Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany, and a painting planned for the ceiling of the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, France. His work continues to develop in exciting ways and is an ongoing influence on younger generations of artists. A note of interest would be that F-111 was mentioned in a chapter of Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland.

Personal

On April 25, 2009, a fire swept through Hernando County, Florida, where Rosenquist has lived for 30 years, burning the artist's house, studios, and warehouse. All of his paintings stored on his property were destroyed, including art for an upcoming show.

Gallery

References

External links

Rosenquist's official site (Requires Macromedia Flash)

Photographs of James Rosenquist by photographer Russ Blaise

Interview with db artmag

Pop Art Masters - James Rosenquist

In the Studio: James Rosenquist

Interview with Myartspace

The Hole in the Center of Time with the latest works at Jablonka Galerie, Berlin">Exhibition The Hole in the Center of Time with the latest works at Jablonka Galerie, Berlin

Rosenquist's Discover Graphics, the Smithsonian Art Collectors Program.

Rosenquist Writ Large, by Himself, Dwight Garner, The New York Times, 27 October 2009

Category:1933 births Category:Living people Category:American people of Swedish descent Category:American artists Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Art Students League of New York alumni Category:People from Grand Forks, North Dakota Category:Artists from North Dakota Category:Pop artists

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Name	Chuck Close
Caption	Mark (1978 - 1979), acrylic on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Detail at right of eye. Mark, a painting that took Close fourteen months to complete, was constructed from a series of airbrushed layers that imitated CMYK color printing. Compare the picture's integrity close up with the later work below, executed through a different technique.
Birthname	Charles Thomas Close
Birthdate	July 05, 1940
Birthplace	Monroe, Washington
Nationality	American
Field	photorealistic painter, photographer,
Training	B.A., University of Washington in Seattle, 1962 M.F.A., Yale University

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940, Monroe, Washington) is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors.

Life and work

Chuck Close's father died when he was eleven years old. Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs (Photorealism or Hyperrealism technique) of family and friends, often other artists. In 1962, he received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. He then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. After Yale, he lived in Europe for a while on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts.

Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. As he explained in a 2009 interview with the Cleveland Ohio Plain Dealer, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before."

Close's first one-man show was in 1970. His work was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in early 1973. In 1979 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object."

One photo of Philip Glass was included in his black and white series in 1969, redone with water colors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982.

, New York, New York. Detail at right of eye. The pencil grid and thin undercoat of blue is visible beneath the splotchy "pixels." The painting's subject is fellow artist Lucas Samaras.]]

Although his later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 107.5 in by 83.5 in (2.73 m by 2.12 m) canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic.

Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. The Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.

Close has also continued to explore difficult photographic processes such as daguerreotype in collaboration with Jerry Spagnoli and sophisticated modular/cell-based forms such as tapestry. Close's photogravure portrait of artist Robert Rauschenberg, “Robert” (1998), appeared in a 2009 exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, featuring prints from Universal Limited Art Editions. Close's wall-size tapestry portraits, in which each image is composed of thousands of combinations of woven colored thread, depict subjects including Kate Moss, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Philip Glass, and Close himself. They are produced in collaboration with Donald Farnsworth of Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA.

In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Close currently lives and paints in Bridgehampton, New York. He has been represented by The Pace Gallery, in New York since 1977.

Ironically, while being one of the most successful portrait artists of his time, Close is also afflicted with prosopagnosia (face blindness), a condition that prevents him from recognizing people's faces.

Close appeared on The Colbert Report on August 12, 2010, where he admitted he watches the show every night.

Christopher Finch wrote a biography, Chuck Close: Life, which was published in 2010.

"The Event"

On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. That day he was at a ceremony honoring local artists in New York City and was waiting to be called to the podium to present an award. Close delivered his speech and then made his way across the street to Beth Israel Medical Center where he suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. The cause was diagnosed as a spinal artery collapse. Close called that day "The Event." For months, Close was in rehab strengthening his muscles; he soon had slight movement in his arms and could walk, yet only for a few steps. He has relied on a wheelchair since.

However, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist with tape, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in pixelated form. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyperrealist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as media to achieve astoundingly realistic and interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control.

See also

List of Chuck Close subjects

The Portrait Now

References

Sources

External links

The Pace Gallery

Watch Chuck Close and Robert Storr in Conversation on BUniverse

Watch/listen to full episode of KCRW's "Art Talk: Close-Up on Chuck Close"

"Close Encounters," artNet Magazine, 8-05-08.

"Close Call" By Jon Marmor

Chuck Close at the Walker Art Center

Images of Chuck Close tapestries

Chuck Close: Process & Collaboration

Habits of Disbelief: Chuck Close by John Haber

Book Review of "A Couple Ways of Doing Something"

Images of Chuck Close Prints

Antiques Roadshow segment with a Chuck Close abstract painting

Interviews

Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Interview, 1987

Finding the Color World: Interview with Chuck Close, 2002

Chuck Close and Bob Holman in Conversation, 2006

One hour interview with Charlie Rose at Google Video (March 15, 2007)

Chuck Close Q&A; with Men's Vogue

URBAN-MUSE.COM interview with Chuck Close at his NYC Studio (Young Artists and 9/11)

"Close-Up," Chuck Close interviewed by biographer Christopher Finch in Guernica Magazine

Category:American painters Category:American printmakers Category:American photographers Category:Contemporary painters Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:Postmodern artists Category:1940 births Category:Living people Category:Portrait artists Category:University of Washington alumni Category:People with quadriplegia Category:University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty Category:Pointillism Category:People from Snohomish County, Washington Category:Artists from Washington (U.S. state) Category:Photorealist artists Category:People with prosopagnosia Category:Rome Prize winners Category:20th-century painters Category:21st-century painters

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Name	Alex Katz
Caption	Alex Katz's 1970 painting of his son Vincent with Open Mouth
Birthdate	July 24, 1927
Birthplace	Brooklyn, New York
Nationality	American
Field	Sculpture, Painting, Printmaking
Training	The Cooper Union, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Movement	East Coast Figurative painting, New Realism, Pop Art

Alex Katz (born July 24, 1927) is an American figurative artist associated with the Pop art movement. In particular, he is known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints.

Life and work

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1928 the family moved to St. Albans, Queens. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting.” His first one-person show came in 1954: an exhibition of paintings at the Roko Gallery in New York. During his first ten years as a painter, Katz admitted to destroying a thousand paintings. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more “freely” in the sense that he tried to paint “faster than [he] can think.” His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality. Ada Katz, whom he married in 1958, has been the subject of numerous portraits throughout his career. In 1960, Katz had his first (and only) son, Vincent Katz.

In the early 1960s, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising, Katz began painting large-scale paintings, often with dramatically cropped faces. In 1965, he also embarked on a prolific career in printmaking. Katz would go on to produce many editions in lithography, etching, silkscreen, woodcut and linoleum cut. After 1964, Katz increasingly portrayed groups of figures. He would continue painting these complex groups into the 1970s, portraying the social world of painters, poets, critics, and other colleagues that surrounded him He began designing sets and costumes for choreographer Paul Taylor in the early 1960s, and he has painted many images of dancers throughout the years. In 1974 The Whitney Museum of American Art showed Alex Katz Prints, followed by a traveling retrospective exhibition Alex Katz in 1986. In the 1980s, Katz took on a new subject in his work: fashion models in designer clothing. Katz was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting in 1972.

In 1989, a special edition of Parkett is devoted to Katz, showing that he is now considered a major reference for younger painters and artists. Over the years, Enzo Cucchi, Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, David Salle and Richard Prince will write essays about his work or conduct interviews with him.

In 2008 he was the subject of a documentary directed by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, entitled What About Style? Alex Katz: a Painter's Painter.

A summer resident of Lincolnville, Maine since 1954, he has developed a close relationship with local Colby College. The college presented him with an honorary doctorate in 1984. In October 1996, the Colby College Museum of Art opened a wing dedicated to Katz that features more than 400 oil paintings, collages, and prints donated by the artist.

Katz is now acknowledged to be a major American painter. He is represented by numerous galleries internationally.

Notes and references

External links

The Pace Gallery

Richard Gray Gallery

Alex Katz interviewed by Richard Prince

Colby College Museum of Art

Biography on Magical-Secrets.com

Artist Alex Katz Featured in J.Crew Catalog

"Ada with Sunglasses" tapestry by Alex Katz

Category:1927 births Category:Living people Category:American artists Category:Artists from New York Category:Artists from Maine Category:Jewish American artists Category:Pop artists Category:American printmakers Category:Rome Prize winners Category:People from Waldo County, Maine