Papers by John Elderfield
Leonardo, 1972
social-hygienic world constituted of men of good will brings about the elimination of violence. C... more social-hygienic world constituted of men of good will brings about the elimination of violence. Concerning our terrible error about art and politics, may we suggest Rothschild read us more carefully. The sentence he quotes on page 327 of his article omits (unconsciously?) the reference at the end of our sentence (p. 251). We were not referring to NO-Art in that context but to the international Karlsruhe (Fed. Rep. Ger.) Museum show entitled 'Art and Politics' May 31-August 16, 1970. Does Rothschild really think that politico-social protest on the part of artists began with our whilom good friend Herman Baron or the WPA Arts Project. We refer him to another volume listed among our references. It is a book by our colleague Ralph Shikes (Reviewed in Leonardo 4, 293 (1971)). He starts his discussion of art of social significance with the 15th century and this is even earlier than Paul Revere. May we make an impassioned plea for the greatest possible respect for man, even with his immaturities, his 'hang-ups'. We were not promoting immaturity or maturity in our article but broader and perhaps deeper understanding.
Bob Dylan has been a prolific graphic artist since the 1960s, and his graphic art is marked by th... more Bob Dylan has been a prolific graphic artist since the 1960s, and his graphic art is marked by the same constant drive for renewal that characterises his music. Never content to remain static in a single form of expression that he has already cultivated, he is constantly experimenting and testing new artistic techniques and expressions. This book of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark encompasses some 100 works, including completely new works to be seen in public for the first time. Bob Dylan has recently delved into painting in acrylic, and the exhibition is the first to document this new direction in the artist's work, showing larger format paintings alongside drawings. Dylan's works are often created during his exhaustive touring, and his motifs bear corresponding imprints of the environments and people that he crosses in his life. As a graphic artist he functions as a phenomenal observer who depicts the immediately banal and everyday facets of life in such a way that they appear fresh and new for the viewer.
Arts Council of Great Britain eBooks, 1974
Eight mainly American artists took part in this exhibition of works on paper. Elderfield's le... more Eight mainly American artists took part in this exhibition of works on paper. Elderfield's lengthy introduction warns the reader that while the works share a few strategic concerns, such as the renewal of modernist forms, they ought to be considered for their uniqueness individually. Biographical notes. Circa 100 bibl. ref.
Guadalimar: Revista bimestral de las artes, 1992
Leonardo, 1971
during the Homsey and Guildford sit-ins. Soon after our British evenements de Mai an official com... more during the Homsey and Guildford sit-ins. Soon after our British evenements de Mai an official committee of art-educational top brass and senior administrators was set up under Sir William Coldstream and charged with re-shaping the system that his earlier committee had designed and set up between 1959and 1963. Was it wise, following on the broadlybased, democratic and participatory discussions that had gone on during and after the sit-ins, to put twenty or so almost all elderly persons in a committee-room for twenty-eight months without the interpolation of any interim report or discussion document? Should not the deliberations have been both briefer and more public? Although what came forth has the status of recommendations rather than edicts, teachers and students alike now fear that the Secretary of State has been handed just the instrument she needs if she wants either to make cuts in this very considerable sector of higher education or to confer upon it an elitist or classbiassed structure. How did this system that now sees itself as imperilled first come into being? How is it that in Britain there exists such an immense number (around 160 at the present time) of art collegesmore, perhaps, than in all the rest of Europe put together? Essentially because in 1852 that brilliant Utilitarian civil servant Henry Cole, having triumphantly wound up the Great Exhibition, took charge of the nation's needs, as he saw them in the realm of training through draughtsmanship. 1 avoid the words 'art education' because the system that Cole set up and clamped upon the schools for poor children throughout the land had nothing to do with art or with education either: its purpose was to drill the budding artisans in unthinking copyistic skills of hand and eye, that they might the better serve as working parts in the industrial machine. Such a joyless disciplinarian thoroughness was exactly to the liking of the Victorian ruling classes; hence, Cole's extraordinary success in extending the then existing network of art colleges (there were already twenty-three established by 1852) where teachers could be trained to act as drill-sergeants in the provincial classrooms. Thus, in perfect accord with the principle of the double effect, Henry Cole, without knowing the outcome, brought into being an institutional framework that has, however illogically, survived to the present day and has provided a blessed oasis for creative young people disinclined from orthodox academic disciplines; and that has into the bargain furnished a steady source of income for artists and designers teaching part time, and thus enabled them to experiment in their own work without actually starving. This dreary but socially revealing story, and a great deal more besides, is set forth in a new and weighty contribution to the history and theory of the subject, amplifying the accounts given by Quentin Bell in The Schools of Design (1963) and Richard Carline in Draw They Must (1967). Macdonald's scope is not confined to England. He discusses the High Renaissance academies originating in Italy that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries superseded the mediaeval guild apprenticeships; he traces the origins of publicly financed design training in Britain from 1837 onwards; he looks at the French ateliers, the German Werkbund system, the Bauhaus. He traces the gradual discovery on the part of educators that a child is a being in his own right, with his own aetiology, and not just a deficient or delinquent miniature adult; and convincingly conveys the flood of warmth and light that ensued when this belated insight (Rousseau had told us, after all) was applied in the art room by such teachers as Ablett, Cisek, Dow and Marion Richardson. Finally, he brings the story up to date by a brief account of the Cold stream Reports, the Dip.A.D. and the sit-ins. Art education has the advantage over other varieties of education in that it leaves behind it an abundance of visible traces. Macdonald provides a fascinating range of engraved or photographic records of art pedagogy, though he sensibly refrains from attempting to illustrate the range of child art as we now know it. The lists of sources appended to each chapter would make his book invaluable to the student even if his text did not. Such reservations as 1 have are mainly over matters of proportion. Sometimes the author overloads his text with factual information (e.g. lists of names) that might better be consigned to an appendix. His account of Cole's piece-work system for art-teachers occupies fourteen pages: 1 would have preferred a fuller account of, for instance, Utilitarian philosophy, or of the Werkbund system or of the theory and practice of Pestalozzi and Froebel. The Bauhaus is perhaps too summarily treated (I would have liked some information on the doctrinal quarrel between Gropius and van Doesburg) and, somewhat chauvinistically, 1 feel that the achievements and influence of the Royal College of Art…
... OF MAXIMILIAN John Elderfield 14 lNTRODUCTlON: REMEMBERlNG QUERETARO 24 l. ART OF lNTERVENTlO... more ... OF MAXIMILIAN John Elderfield 14 lNTRODUCTlON: REMEMBERlNG QUERETARO 24 l. ART OF lNTERVENTlON Repression in France; Reform in Mexico 28 French lntervention; Manet'sResponse 34 Eagles in Mexico; Angels in France 43; The Road to Queretaro 55 60 ll. ...
Howard Hodgkin Paintings is the most complete publication to date on one of the foremost painters... more Howard Hodgkin Paintings is the most complete publication to date on one of the foremost painters of our time. Spanning the artists entire career right up to the present day, this catalogue raisonne presents nearly 450 of Hodgkins oil paintings, enabling the reader to glean a full overview of the artists development, the astonishing range of his achievements and the critical reaction to his work.
The Burlington Magazine, 2010
The writer discusses Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s 1951 publication Matisse His Art and His Public. Th... more The writer discusses Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s 1951 publication Matisse His Art and His Public. This book contains almost 350 separate units of text that seem not to have been written in sequence but that are clearly labeled in the seven-page contents and organized into sections different devoted to a period of Matisse's life, art, and critical reputation. The book raised the standards of Matisse scholarship, enlarged expectations of careful scrutiny of his art and its sources, and generated an appetite for more information and analysis.
A study of a painter of the post-war generation, Howard Hodgkin. He emerged in the 1970's and... more A study of a painter of the post-war generation, Howard Hodgkin. He emerged in the 1970's and is known as a brilliant colourist, whose paintings are based on remembered experiences. Spanning his entire career, this book reviews Hodgkin's early and formative experiences, tracing his development from these beginnings. It also offers an exchange between the artist and the author, John Elderfield, exploring ideas and topics illuminating Hodgkin's work. The book also includes a catalogue raisonne of all Hodgkin's oil paintings to date, examining the artist's historical development, the full range of his achievement and the critical reaction to his work.
Museum of Modern Art eBooks, 2004
The Museum of Modern Art in NewYork, founded in 1929, has helped to bring the history of modern a... more The Museum of Modern Art in NewYork, founded in 1929, has helped to bring the history of modern art to vivid life through its unparalleled collection of late-19th and 20th-century painting and sculpture. A veritable who's who of modern art is represented in the Museum's collection: Paul Cezanne,Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Max Beckmann, Oskar Schlemmer, Constantin Brancusi, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, AndyWarhol, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, to name but a few. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the Museum's painting and sculpture collection through more than 300 colour illustrations and texts drawn from the Museum's archives and publications. These lively, diverse, and often surprising interpretations of a work of art, sometimes from the artist themselves, both enrich and expand the literature on the history of modern art. Accompanying these texts is an introduction by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus at the Museum, which offers a personal account of the collection's history and its installations.
Leonardo, 1971
Thomas Munro’s new book has all the thoroughness, objectivity and reasonableness that characteris... more Thomas Munro’s new book has all the thoroughness, objectivity and reasonableness that characterised his Evolution in the Arts (1963) and The Arts and their Interrelations (1967). Moreover, concerned as it is with the decidedly analytical and typological subject of aesthetic morphology, it makes explicit Munro’s insistence on a scientifically analogous methodology for aesthetics (and, specifically, one comparable with the classifying aspects of natural science) ; this methodology is envisaged as encompassing the widest possible interpretation of ‘art’. To anyone sympathetic to his ambitions, this is undoubtedly a monumental work, for he is a great typologist. The classification and cataloguing of art components, such as Munro undertakes, requires that the component-units be expressed as unambiguous finite data, so systematised as to fit the regularised structure of the catalogue itself. To ensure accuracy, only smallness of scale in both analysis and structure will suffice. Here, both are minute. If one has reservations about this book, they are not in terms of its treatment. There are odd instances where he is careless and assumes too much: complexity is sometimes made to appear a quality, not a factor (e.g. p. 127); the notion of content as ‘psychological materials’ seems difficult to reconcile with : ‘the contents or ingredients are what is arranged; the form is how they are arranged’ (p. 79). [I also wonder whether one can legitimately summarise the development of post-Renaissance painting as a trend versus linearity (p. 139)]. The point is, however, if one accepts the ambition of this work, one welcomes the work itself as an incisive demonstration of its point of view. Personally, I find Munro’s ambitions as undesirable as I find them irrelevant but they deserve serious discussion in so far as they someho,w epitomise a malady in the discussion of art-the idea that art as
Choice Reviews Online, Jul 1, 2007
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Papers by John Elderfield