THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 20 Walter Gropius, Bauhaus,

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 54 THE BEATLES (Part F, Sgt Pepper’s & Eastern Religion) (Feature on artist Richard Lindner )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)

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THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 21 Sylvia Ashby playwright

September 16, 2015, 12:49 pm

≫ Next: THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 22 Poet Charles Olson, friend of Ezra Pound

≪ Previous: THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 20 Walter Gropius, Bauhaus,

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Nicholas Sparks Talks Adapting ‘The Longest Ride’ to the Screen

Fully Awake – PREVIEW

Tucked in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Black Mountain College (1933-1957) was an influential experiment in education that inspired and shaped 20th century modern art. Through narration, archive photography and interviews with students, teachers and historians, Fully Awake explores the development of this very special place – and how its collaborative curriculum inspired innovations that changed the very definition of “art”.

Great website:

I was born in Detroit and now reside in Texas. In between, I’ve lived in North Carolina, Iowa, Northern and Southern California, Hawaii, Nebraska, and Florida–not necessarily in that order. Long before starting to write plays, I concentrated on acting as an undergrad at Black Mountain College, the U. of Iowa, and a grad student at Hawaii. In Iowa, I acquired a theatre historian/husband; we have two grown children.I have thirteen published scripts, with some 1500 productions–ranging from Iditarod Elementary School in Alaska to Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. My adaptation of SECRET GARDEN was translated and published in the Netherlands. My most popular script ANNE OF GREEN GABLES has been produced all over the U. S., with recent productions in England, Scotland, Australia, Canada. Needless to say, I also have scripts in process.

In the article ‘The Longest Ride,’ A Love Story About Luke, A Champion Bull Rider, And Sophia, A Young College Girl, Is Based On The Bestselling Nicholas Sparks Novel, Hits Theaters April 10, 2015, I read:

From the art of bull riding to the art of…art, Nicholas Sparks’ research took him to unexpected places. “One of the story’s principal locales ended up being one of the greatest moments of kismet in my entire career,” he continues. “I remember sitting at the desk thinking, how on earth is this couple [young Ira and Ruth] from North Carolina going to become big art collectors?

“My research led me to Black Mountain College, which was the center of the modern art movement in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.”

Black Mountain College was founded in the 1930s as an experimental college. It came to define the modern art movement. “Everyone from de Kooning to Rauschenberg was there,” says Sparks. “Robert De Niro’s father, another noted artist, attended Black Mountain College. There were very famous artists there and if you look at the American modern art movement in the 1940s and 1950s, there were important intersections there with the great works of this century.”

In the 21st post I look at the life of the playwright Sylvia Ashby.

WHAT I DID LAST SUMMER
Black Mountain College, 1948
by
Sylvia Ashby

Sylvia Ashby
This image is housed at the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

In October 2012 I turned the corner to 84. So when I write about my errant youth, you know it was a long, long time ago.

Sylvia Ashby: “This sketch of me was a birthday card for me done by room mate Sheila Oline (later Marbain) who had a print studio in Manhattan for decades ( Maurel Studios). The inscription reads ‘I have a birthday in my pocket.’ The costume was pretty much the BMC uniform.”
This item is housed at the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

I like to write in old blue books. Not just old blue books but old, used blue books. When you sit down to write in a torn-up blue book, even if you’re writing drivel, at least you’re not wasting paper. Maybe that’s why I like to write in those discarded exam booklets. My blue books belong in a museum. They were used when I taught Freshman English in days of yore. Of course, I’d never taken Freshman English or Freshman anything for that matter. The idea was that students wrote on one side of the five-cent booklet, then made corrections on the opposite side. After finals, there’d be a stack of left-over blue books. I’d tear out the first few scribbled-on pages and have the rest for my very own. There’s something comforting, non-threatening about an old blue book. As for reading, I like memoirs—that’s my genre. I like reading about everyone’s life. Though not my own. When you think of memoirs, you think of confessions. I wonder if this is my confession–this story from my slightly errant, mostly clueless youth: Almost eighteen, an idealistic young thing, I rode the bus from Detroit to a college that was totally unaccredited—no grades, no hours, no tests, no majors, no rules. Black Mountain College, on a farm near Asheville, North Carolina, was the outpost of progressive education the U.S. At its height, when I arrived in 1946, there were at most 100 students.

Sylvia Ashby, second from right, with washboard.
This image is housed at the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

In the summer session of 1948, the faculty included Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller. I’d like to say I was cool and understood how fascinating these folks were, but alas, I was a naive, self-absorbed Midwesterner. So many of the students had either grown up on the streets of Greenwich Village or were GI’s returning from the exploits of WWII. If “avant-garde” was the typical description of BMC, you could safely say I was bringing up the rear.

I thought the world’s first geodesic dome, which Bucky Fuller fashioned from rolls of aluminum venetian blind strips, was somewhat peculiar. Besides, it fell down a few days later.

Every night after dinner, John Cage serenaded us with an Eric Satie concert, perhaps the world’s first, possibly last, Eric Satie Festival. A few years before, Cage had chunked bits of hardware into the bowels of a piano thus creating his so-called “prepared piano.” Just what it was prepared for I’m not certain. I’ve read that BMC was credited with the world’s first “Happening” that summer, though again, I’m not sure what happened. I do remember then-student Arthur Penn, he of Bonnie and Clyde fame, directing a Satie script in which Merce danced (his wonderful “Monkey Dances” stayed in his repetoire) and Bucky proved a capable comic actor. I guess my claim to fame is that I danced with William de Kooning, though it lasted less than the required fifteen minutes. I’d heard he was supported, even then, by art patrons. Personally, I thought he should get a job. In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit to studying acting with Arthur Penn, and played the ingenue in his “Hello, Out There” and “Shadow and Substance.” Though a BMC student, Arthur was already a theatre professional, coming up through the ranks of the Neighborhood Playhouse, NYC bastion of Stanislavski’s Method Acting. In my defense, I’ll add that I did recognize his brilliance and fine future.

Our beloved literature teacher M. C. Richards had translated the Satie piece (and later translated Artaud’s “Theatre and Its Double”). M.C. looked kindly on the few scraps of poetry I’d managed to turn out. Attending a conference at the university in Greensboro, she showed my collected works to poet Randall Jarrell. He said I was operating under the influence of e. e. cummings. Bingo! If she’d shown him my prose, he would have said I was under the spell of Gertrude Stein, also true: I had just learned to discard all punctuation marks. Capital letters, I decided, were a bourgeois hindrance. But, as you can see, those determined little marks have crept back in. Occasionally visitors would appear on the scene, coming to check us out—to see just what was going on there. I recall James Farmer, a leading civil rights crusader from the 60’s and beyond; Denzel Washington played Farmer in a 2007 film. Photographer Irving Penn came out of curiosity, but mainly to see his kid brother Arthur. For me, most intriguing of visitors was Anais Nin, on the scandalous side even then, a reputation enhanced by her relationship with the more notorious Henry Miller. What impressed me about Anais was her make-up: I had never seen anyone with such a painted face, not even on canvas. All pinks and lavenders with bold dark lines, it had the exaggeration of ballet stage make-up–not that I’d ever seen a ballet. In fact, I’d never heard of Anais Nin. As for Mr. Miller, forget it. I’m sure Wikipedia could tell you who portrayed Anais in the film Henry and June.

America made history when Southern colleges and universities were desegregated in the early 60’s. But BMC, in that same segregated South, had black students when I arrived, and even before I arrived, and nobody paid any attention. I guess we slipped in below the radar. There was no public transportation, so on one of those rare occasions when I got to town—Asheville—I was walking down the main street with Jeanne, a pretty black student from Tennessee. We passed a Woolworth’s Five and Ten. “Let’s go get something to eat,” I said. Jeanne quickly turned, “I can’t do that!” She was shocked, no doubt, by my general cluelessness. The point was made more forcefully during the first Christmas break. At the train station in Asheville I discovered we could not sit together. Our small group sat in one car, but Jeanne would have to sit several sections back. You’d think I could have figured out that much by now. But BMC was so isolated, and so few people had cars, we could have been dropped by parachute onto another planet—a very beautiful planet.

Unlike most—no, make that all colleges—BMC had no Regents, no Board of Directors, no Deans. Instead there was a faculty council. No surprise, toward the end of my first year, they voted to put me on probation. I responded with a simple letter. Again, M.C. was pleased with my writing, longer than the compacted bits I usually squeezed out. M.C. read my letter at the next meeting. Arthur, as student rep on the council, was there too. Some faculty members feared I was suffering from a case of Terminal Stanislavki, contracted from over-exposure to Arthur’s “Method Acting.” Maybe there was madness in the Method? Had I been permanently transformed? My rebuttal must have worked: The BMC governors granted a last-minute reprieve, for better or worse.

At the end of two years, all my friends were leaving. Writer Isaac Rosenfeld, part of the 1948 summer faculty, preached the value of the orgone box; this was a mysterious invention of Wilhelm Reich, émigré psychoanalyst who, in a handful of years, would spend time in jail on fraud charges. The orgone box, a wooden structure you sat in, was somehow supposed to improve your sex life. Naturally, a few friends left in search of the Holy Grail—a.k.a, the orgone box.

I don’t know where everyone exited to. Arthur to U. of Perugia. One group traipsed off to start a commune in Oregon, though that term was not yet in common usage—not in the 40’s. Those who headed for San Francisco became in short order the forerunners of Beatniks and Hippies. That’s when Peggy Vaughn, living on a houseboat in Sausalito, pioneered the Tin Angel, a famous San Francisco night spot. My childhood friend Marion, returning to UCLA, gradually evolved into an Oscar-nominated film editor. Sheila went back to Manhattan, living with her boyfriend in a $6 a month cold-water flat. In time, Sheila mastered silk-screen printing; decades later she gave me copies of the posters she’d made for the likes of Andy Warhol, plus the iconic LOVE poster of Robert Indiana. But, Chick Perrow went straight, ended up a Yale sociology prof.

I returned home to Detroit. Isaac, the orgone box advocate, had encouraged me to try a university, maybe something in the mid-west. Jim Herlihy was a BMC buddy: we were about the same age, both from Detroit, both interested in acting and writing. He called me up. “So, what are you going to do?” “I don’t know,” I said. By now it was late August. “I’ve been accepted here at Wayne and the University of Iowa. I don’t know where to go.” Jim, who would later write Midnight Cowboy under his full title—James Leo Herlihy—found an almanac in his fairly-bookless, tar-papered home and read to me over the phone: Iowa City was a small town of 10,000 with a river running through it. Thank you, Jim. That did it. So off I went, once again. This time trading freedom for structure. And that’s when I saw my first blue book….

Sylvia Ashby: “I was born in Detroit, now reside in Texas, and have lived in North Carolina, northern and southern California, Hawaii, Florida, Nebraska–not necessarily in that order. I concentrated on acting when I was a student at Black Mountain College and at the University of Iowa, and as a grad student at the University of Hawaii. In Iowa, I acquired a theatre-historian husband; we have two grown children. I have published 15 scripts for family audiences, with some 2,000 productions. The most popular, Anne of Green Gables, has been produced on three continents. In the last decade I returned to acting: favorite roles were in Gin Game; Beauty Queen of Leenane; Importance of Being Earnest.”For a YouTube history of Black Mountain College, go

here.

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 55 THE BEATLES (Part G, The Beatles and Rebellion) (Feature on artist Wallace Berman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 54 THE BEATLES (Part F, Sgt Pepper’s & Eastern Religion) (Feature on artist Richard Lindner )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)

Poets in The New American Poetry 1945–1960

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THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 22 Poet Charles Olson, friend of Ezra Pound

September 25, 2015, 9:33 am

≫ Next: THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 13 Charles Perrow (MARXIST)

≪ Previous: THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 21 Sylvia Ashby playwright

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Charles Olson and daughter Kate, Black Mountain College. Photo by Mary Ann Giusti. Courtesy Mary Ann Giusti

The Longest Ride Movie CLIP – Bull Riding Lesson (2015) – Britt Robertson, Scott Eastwood Movie HD

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Scott Eastwood Interview – The Longest Ride

In the 21st post I look at the life of the playwright Sylvia Ashby, and in the 22nd post I look at the work of the poet Charles Olson who in 1951, Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, working and studying here beside artists such as John Cage and Robert Creeley.^[2]

Charles Olson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles Olson

Born	27 December 1910 Worcester, Massachusetts
Died	10 January 1970 (aged 59) New York City, New York
Resting place	Gloucester, Massachusetts
Language	English
Nationality	American
Education	B.A. and M.A. at Wesleyan University
Genre	Poetry
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable works	The Distances, The Maximus Poems
Spouse	Constance Wilcock, Betty Kaiser
Children	Katherine, Charles Peter
Relatives	Karl (Father), Mary Hines (Mother)
Literature portal

Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) was a second generation American poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the language school, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. He described himself not so much as a poet or writer but as “an archeologist of morning.”

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Life[edit]

Olson was born to Karl Joseph and Mary Hines Olson and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his father worked as a mailman. Olson spent summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which was to become the focus of his writing. At high school he was a champion orator, winning a tour of Europe as a prize.^[1] He studied literature and American studies, gaining a B.A and M.A at Wesleyan University.^[2] For two years Olson taught English at Clark University then entered Harvard University in 1936 where he finished his coursework for a Ph.D. in American civilization but failed to complete his degree.^[1] He then received a Guggenheim fellowship for his studies of Herman Melville.^[2] His first poems were written in 1940.^[3]

In 1941, Olson moved to New York and joined Constance “Connie” Wilcock in civil marriage, together having one child, Katherine. Olson became the publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union. One year later, he and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., where he spent the rest of the war years working in the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information, eventually rising to Assistant Chief of the division.^[2] (The chief of the division was the future senator from California, Alan Cranston.) In 1944, Olson went to work for the Foreign Languages Division of the Democratic National Committee. He also participated in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaign, organizing a large campaign rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden called “Everyone for Roosevelt”. After Roosevelt’s death, upset over both the ascendancy of Harry Truman and the increasing censorship of his news releases, Olson left politics and dedicated himself to writing, moving to Key West, Florida, in 1945.^[1] From 1946 to 1948 Olson visited poet Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital (sic) in Washington D.C., but was repelled by Pound’s increasingly fascist tendencies.^[3]

Gravestone of Charles and Betty Olson, Beechbrook Cemetery,Gloucester, Massachusetts

In 1951, Olson became a visiting professor at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, working and studying here beside artists such as John Cage and Robert Creeley.^[2] He subsequently became rector of Black Mountain College and had a second child, Charles Peter Olson, with one of his students, Betty Kaiser. Before his divorce from his first wife finalized, Olson married Kaiser.

Olson’s ideas came to deeply influence a generation of poets, including writers such as Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Ed Dorn and Robert Duncan.^[2] At 204 cm (6’8″), Olson was described as “a bear of a man”, his stature possibly influencing the title of his Maximus work.^[4] Olson wrote copious personal letters, and helped and encouraged many young writers. He was fascinated with Mayan writing. Shortly before his death, he examined the possibility that Chinese and Indo-European languages derived from a common source. When Black Mountain College closed in 1956, Olson settled in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He served as a visiting professor at the University at Buffalo (1963-1965) and at the University of Connecticut (1969).^[2] The last years of his life were a mixture of extreme isolation and frenzied work.^[3] Olson’s life was marred by alcoholism, which contributed to his early death from liver cancer. He died in New York in 1970, two weeks past his fifty-ninth birthday, while in the process of completing The Maximus Poems.^[5] 8″

Work[edit]

Early writings[edit]

Olson’s first book, Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Herman Melville‘s novel Moby Dick, was a continuation of his M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University.^[6]

In Projective Verse (1950), Olson called for a poetic meter based on the poet’s breathing and an open construction based on sound and the linking of perceptions rather than syntax and logic. He favored metre not based on syllable, stress, foot or line but using only the unit of the breath. In this respect Olson was foreshadowed by Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s poetic theory on breath.^[7] The presentation of the poem on the page was for him central to the work becoming at once fully aural and fully visual^[8] The poem “The Kingfishers” is an application of the manifesto. It was first published in 1949 and collected in his first book of poetry, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953).

Olson’s second collection, The Distances, was published in 1960. Olson served as rector of the Black Mountain College from 1951 to 1956. During this period, the college supported work by John Cage, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Fielding Dawson, Cy Twombly, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn, Stan Brakhage and many other members of the 1950s American avant garde. Olson is listed as an influence on artists including Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney.^[9]

Olson’s reputation rests in the main on his complex, sometimes difficult poems such as “The Kingfishers”, “In Cold Hell, in Thicket”, and The Maximus Poems, work that tends to explore social, historical, and political concerns. His shorter verse, poems such as “Only The Red Fox, Only The Crow”, “Other Than”, “An Ode on Nativity”, “Love”, and “The Ring Of” are more immediately accessible and manifest a sincere, original, emotionally powerful voice. “Letter 27 [withheld]” from The Maximus Poems weds Olson’s lyric, historic, and aesthetic concerns. Olson coined the term postmodern in a letter of August 1951 to his friend and fellow poet, Robert Creeley.

The Maximus Poems[edit]

In 1950, inspired by the example of Pound’s Cantos (though Olson denied any direct relation between the two epics), Olson began writing The Maximus Poems. An exploration of American history in the broadest sense, Maximus is also an epic of place,Massachusetts and specifically the city of Gloucester where Olson had settled. Dogtown, the wild, rock-strewn centre of Cape Ann, next to Gloucester, is an important place in The Maximus Poems. (Olson used to write outside on a tree stump in Dogtown.) The whole work is also mediated through the voice of Maximus, based partly on Maximus of Tyre, an itinerant Greek philosopher, and partly on Olson himself. The last of the three volumes imagines an ideal Gloucester in which communal values have replaced commercial ones. When Olson knew he was dying of cancer, he instructed his literary executor Charles Boer and others to organise and produce the final book in the sequence following Olson’s death.^[5]

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Charles Olson

Olson Biography, University of Connecticut Libraries
Olson profile at Academy of American Poets. Retrieved 2010-12-12
Profile at Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 2010-12-12
Olson at Modern American Poetry. Retrieved 2010-12-12
Charles Olson at Find a Grave
Works by or about Charles Olson in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
Read Olson’s interview with The Paris Review. Retrieved 2010-12-12
The Charles Olson Research Collection (Archives) at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. Retrieved 2010-12-12
“Charles Olson in the Tradition of Walt Whitman”, Essay on Olson as Visionary Poet. Retrieved 2012-29-02
Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place documentary on Olson by Henry Ferrini (1 hr). Retrieved 2010-12-12
“Charles Olson”, Pennsound, a page of Charles Olson recordings. Retrieved 2010-12-12

Authority control	WorldCat VIAF: 27091190 LCCN: n78095428 ISNI: 0000 0001 1047 2288 GND: 118787071 SELIBR: 275902 SUDOC: 02915443X BNF: cb12083911z (data)

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Modern, Romance: Touring MoMA with Nicholas Sparks, King of the Tearjerker

The best-selling romance author designed his own crash course in Abstract Expressionism to research The Longest Ride.

KATIA BACHKO

Before his debut novel The Notebook, the ur-chick-lit text, sold for $1 million in 1995, Nicholas Sparks got by selling dental equipment and pharmaceuticals. Seventeen novels, 90 million copies, and 10 movies later, all in the grab-the-tissues category, Sparks can afford to follow his heart’s desires. In 2006, he founded a private school, the Epiphany School of Global Studies, whose graduates are “health-cognizant, emotionally intelligent, openly generous, deeply humble, visibly trustworthy, and profoundly honest.” Recently, he has taken to collecting art, with an eye toward what complements the decor of his palatial house and its private bowling alley in New Bern, North Carolina.

“That would match my home,” Sparks said recently, looking up at a Gerhard Richter pastoral at the Museum of Modern Art. Andy Warhol wouldn’t make the cut, neither would Edward Ruscha.

“I’m not a massive fan of minimalism,” Sparks said walking past a black-and-white Frank Stella canvas. “It doesn’t move me.”

In his 20 years as a writer, Sparks, 49, has tried many permutations of the “love is the greatest gift of all” chestnut. He studied business in college, and wrote at night. He chose romance as his genre because he noticed, with a salesman’s eye, that there was room in the market. His novels, which promise “extraordinary journeys” and “extraordinary truths,” tend toward maximalism. Lovers, young and old, are pulled apart by doubt, secrecy, and illness, but once they let love in, they can receive “the greatest happiness—and pain” they’ll ever know.

And yet, each book needs new material. In The Longest Ride, Sparks’s 2013 flirtation with art-history fiction, which opens as a film on Friday, a couple in the 1940s begin buying paintings from a group of young artists from Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Decades later those artists are household names—de Kooning, Twombly, Rauschenberg—and the collection is worth more than Sparks’s own real-life fortune many times over. I had invited Sparks to MoMA for a morning tour with Eva Diaz, a professor of art history at Pratt, who recently published The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, which describes the school as “a vital hub of cultural innovation.”

Amid the crush of school groups, Sparks, dressed in Levi’s and a red Burberry polo shirt, found Diaz, who reminded us that the college’s success sprang from tragedy: Bauhaus artists persecuted by the Nazis had fled to the States, helped establish the unaccredited school, and brought new energy to painting, design, and architecture in America.

To write the story of Ira and Ruth, the collectors in the book, Sparks designed his own crash course in Abstract Expressionism. “I’m certainly nowhere near as knowledgeable,” Sparks said, bowing his head toward Diaz. “I’m a kindergartner compared to a grad student.”

“Hey, I’m a professor,” said Diaz, who wore fading orange lipstick and wild curly hair. On the museum’s third floor, she pointed out four album covers that had circles and squares arranged in whimsical patterns, the work of Black Mountain instructor Josef Albers.

“So much of this is playing with repetition,” she said.

“You can say the same things about my novels,” Sparks said, echoing his critics. “It’s always a love story, it’s North Carolina, it’s a small town, a couple of likeable people.”

And, yet, he insists variations keep the books from feeling formulaic. “There are a few threads of familiarity, but you don’t know the period, you don’t know the age of the characters, you don’t know the dilemma, you don’t know whether it’s first person, third person, limited third person omniscient, some combination, you don’t know whether its going to be happy, sad, or bittersweet.”

Sparks spotted a Jackson Pollock and asked Diaz about the artist’s education. She said Pollock didn’t get an art degree before he established his studio in a barn on Long Island.

“I’m Jackson Pollock in the shed,” said Sparks, who majored in finance, his voice booming in the quiet gallery.

Diaz led Sparks to Willem de Kooning’s “Woman,” the first of a six-part series, which he painted after studying with Albers. Diaz explained that though the gestures on the canvas seem improvised and random, de Kooning spent months making the work. Sparks’s imagery—“in the distance, the banks of a small lake were dotted with cattle, smoky, blue-tipped mountains near the horizon framing the landscape like a postcard”—hews closer to Thomas Kinkade’s than de Kooning’s, but he saw similarities in their processes.

“When I’m creating something, I often know that a section is wrong,” Sparks said. He typically works at a brisk pace, six months per a novel, but a recent paragraph had taken 22 hours. “I sometimes wonder if de Kooning never got it quite right. That’s what I sense in the ‘Woman’ series: he looked at it, and says, ‘So much is right, but it’s not right.’”

In the lobby, Sparks paused to call his driver to take him the seven blocks to the Sherry-Netherland where he was staying. In addition to art, The Longest Ride involves a subplot about a handsome bull rider, played in the film by Scott Eastwood. Sparks had heard there was a bar equipped with a mechanical bull nearby, but declared a limit to his willingness to research his subject.

“I ain’t riding that bull,” he said.

Katia Bachko is the executive editor of The Atavist magazine, and a writer based in New York.

North Carolina’s Black Mountain College: A New Deal in American Education

September 13, 2010 Mary Emma Harris

Black Mountain College was founded in the fall of 1933 by a group of faculty who had broken away from Rollins College following a fracas in which several faculty members were fired and others resigned in protest. It closed in the spring of 1957 after a judge ordered that academic programs should be ended until all debts were paid. In the intervening twenty-four years, the college evolved into a unique American venture in education, and the energy and ideas engendered there continue to influence the arts and education in the United States. Fine Arts Magazine

Left: John Andrew Rice. Courtesy NCSA, BMC Papers.

At the center of the Rollins controversy was John Andrew Rice, Professor of Classics. A gadfly with an ingrained dissatisfaction with the status quo and authority figures, Rice, along with others, had challenged President Hamilton Holt’s progressive educational program. In April 1933, Rice was fired. Soon thereafter, Ralph Reed Lounsbury and Frederick Raymond Georgia, who had objected to Rollins’s violation of Rice’s academic freedom, were also fired. [1] These three along with Theodore Dreier, who had resigned, found themselves unemployed in the depths of the Great Depression. It seemed an opportune time to create the ideal college that had long been the subject of late-night discussions. They had two months in which to locate a ready-made campus, write a charter and obtain a certificate of incorporation, hire faculty and recruit students, and organize their ideas into a coherent philosophy. Literature teacher Joseph Martin recalled that the informal opening ceremony on the porch of Robert E. Lee Hall was similar to a “pick-up game of football,” an occasion “happily terminated by lunch.” [2] By the end of the first quarter there were twelve teachers and twenty-two students.

John Rice had been at odds with administrations at all colleges and universities where he had taught, and the experience at Rollins had only enhanced his discontent. Black Mountain College would be owned and administered by the faculty. There would be a Board of Fellows composed of several faculty elected by their peers and one student elected by students. The Board of Fellows would manage financial matters and the hiring and firing of faculty. Faculty would control all academic matters. An Advisory Board, with only the power of persuasion, was primarily a list of prominent individuals who believed in the college’s ideals and generously lent their names to increase the college’s credibility to a skeptical public. Among its members were John Dewey, Walter Gropius, and Alfred Einstein. There was to be no endowment, and donations were accepted only if they came with no effort to influence the college’s educational program.

Essentially the founders’ intention was to educate students for productive, participatory life in a democratic society. This was to be achieved through a curriculum which encouraged independent, critical thinking and life in a community where students would mature emotionally into responsible adults. At the center of the educational program was a close relationship between faculty and students and responsibility by the students for many aspects of their educational experience. Students entered in the Junior Division, a period of general study, and after passing a two-day examination covering all aspects of the curriculum, moved to the Senior Division, a period of specialization. Graduation was achieved by oral and written examinations by an outside examiner who was an authority in the student’s area of study. It was a rigorous process and only about sixty students graduated in the college’s twenty-four year history. Although term-end grades were recorded in the office for transfer purposes, the student did not know what grades were given. Of great significance for the college’s history and influence, the practice of the arts would be at the center of the learning experience.

The Black Mountain lifestyle and traditions evolved in the first years and were essential to the creative, unstructured environment. In its idealism, the college resembled a small religious community; in its reliance on limited means, a pioneering village; in its intense and experimental arts activity, a Bohemian arts colony; in its informal life style and woodland setting, a summer camp. Strongly influenced by the personalities of those who taught and studied at the college, the tenor of the community changed year by year. National and international events such as the Great Depression, World War II, and McCarthyism altered its history and were a catalyst for new programs and possibilities.

The Blue Ridge Assembly buildings provided the college with an ideal campus. Robert E. Lee Hall with its three-story high wooden columns was an imposing structure. One entered into a large lobby that extended through to the back of the building. On either side and on the second and third floors were rows of dormitory-style rooms used by YMCA guests at summer conferences. Faculty without children and students lived in Lee Hall, and those with children, in nearby cottages on the property. There were so many rooms that each student and faculty member had a study although students shared rooms for sleeping. The dining hall in which students, faculty and families shared meals was located behind Lee Hall and joined by a covered walkway.

There were classes in the mornings and evenings. In the afternoons everyone took part in a work program that included general maintenance, work on the college farm which was started the first year, and office and administrative work. Dress was informal with most wearing jeans during the daytime and casual clothes for dinner. Isolated in the Blue Ridge Mountains, far from any major metropolitan center, energies were focused inward on study and college activities

There were no bells to announce the beginning or end of classes and no students rushing with books from one class to another. Limited financial means encouraged innovation, and the students and faculty provided their own entertainment in the form of weekend concerts and drama productions, hikes in the mountains, parties (either simple or with elaborate decorations), after dinner dancing or community sings, or hikes in the mountains. For students such as Sewell ‘Si’ Sillman, it was the not the “highlights” – the luminaries and intense summer sessions in the arts – but the “day-to-day routine that was really Black Mountain.” [3] It was the interaction among individuals and the integration of learning with work, community, and recreation that had a profound effect on students. With considerable effort the college managed to achieve publicity in national publications, and visitors, both the curious and the committed, arrived to observe the college, among them John Dewey, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, May Sarton, and Thornton Wilder. Visitors were frequently called on for group discussions, concerts and lectures to the community.

In the first semester the college brought Josef Albers, abstract artist and former teacher of the fundamental course at the recently-closed Bauhaus, from Germany to teach art. At Black Mountain, he adapted these courses, formulated to train professional designers, to general education. His wife Anni Albers, eminent weaver, taught weaving and textile design. From their arrival, Black Mountain College was to be the setting for a dynamic fusion of American Progressivism and European Modernism, and the college was to be associated with modern art and innovative teaching in the visual arts.

John Rice and Josef Albers, both born in 1888, were charismatic teachers and most in the community took their courses. In appearance and personality they were polar opposites. Rice was a Southerner, short and rotund, with a wink in his eye and a quick wit. Albers was slim and ascetic, disciplined and focused. Rice prided himself on his ability to assess and reveal the foibles of others, a practice that was to be a source of controversy in the community. Among Rice’s courses were creative writing and a class called Plato in which students examined concepts and questioned assumptions. Albers taught classes in design, color, painting, and drawing. Born in Brooklyn in 1902, Theodore Dreier, who taught mathematics and physics, was tall, athletic, and idealistic. His family was well-to-do and had close connections to the art world. He immediately assumed the role of fund-raiser, and for sixteen years, his dedicated efforts and endless proselytizing were responsible for the college’s survival. John Evarts, a young musician with a gift for improvisation, taught music. He was able through his piano playing after dinner and on weekends to bring the often-divided college together for dance and song, and when he left to join the war effort in 1942, he was irreplaceable. Other faculty in the 1930s included Rhodes scholar Joseph Walford Martin in literature, Robert Wunsch in theater, and Frederick Georgia in chemistry.

Josef and Anni Albers were the first of many refugee artists and scholars hired by the college. Some had already arrived in the United States; others the college brought directly from Europe. Among those teaching in the 1930s were Fritz Moellenhoff, former student of Hans Sachs who had been assistant director of the Kuranstalten Westend in Berlin, and Erwin Straus, a neurologist and a noted phenomenologist in the field of psychology who had been editor of Der Nervenartz and a member of the faculty at the University of Berlin; Alexander ‘Xanti’ Schawinsky, artist and theater director who had studied with Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus; and Heinrich Jalowetz, along with Anton Webern and Alban Berg among Schoenberg’s first students, who had been director of the Cologne Opera before he lost his position when Hitler came to power in 1933. Jalowetz was one of the most beloved teachers at Black Mountain and died and was buried there in 1946. These accomplished individuals had been leaders in their fields, and their respect for disciplined study provided a critical balance to the college’s informal structure. They both changed and were changed by the college.

Although in the beginning – largely at the urging of John Rice – there was an attempt to determine what were acceptable Black Mountain teaching methods, this critical assessment was eventually abandoned, and teachers were left to decide how to run their classes. Some lectured and required regular papers; others did not. Generally, a completed assignment was a ticket to class. There were tests in some classes but no scheduled school-wide end of the term examinations. An attempt to teach an interdisciplinary class in the first year was not repeated. Essentially the unending conversation in the dining hall and informal gatherings was a far more effective form of interdisciplinary education that a formal class. In the cases where there was more than one teacher in a field, faculty worked together on the curriculum, but there were no formal departments.

The administration of the college was a time-consuming responsibility for the faculty. Generally, decisions were arrived at by consensus, and Board of Fellows, faculty, student and community meetings were endless. There were committees to handle all aspects of college life. Without a separate administration to settle disputes, all too often differences in opinion became explosive conflicts and ended with a group of faculty and a coterie of their student supporters leaving, a loss the college could ill afford.

The 1930s ended with the resignation of John Rice in 1940 after a long leave-of-absence and the move in June 1941 by the college to its own property Lake Eden. The Blue Ridge owners were constantly in search of a more lucrative tenant, and in 1937 the college had purchased the Lake Eden property north of the Village of Black Mountain as a hedge against a sudden ouster. In 1939 Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer were commissioned to design a modern, unified campus which would provide for music and art studios and workshops, classrooms, common rooms for community gatherings, a dining hall, faculty housing and other facilities. In the spring of 1940, when the faculty began to raise funds for the buildings, they discovered that, while donors would make small contributions for the annual running of the college, they would require an administrative structure with a guarantee of longevity and continuity of purpose to make large contributions. The situation was further complicated by the buildup of wartime production and the fact that Weatherford had found a new tenant and had given the college notice that they would have to vacate the property at the end of the 1941 spring semester.

Lawrence Kocher, former editor of the Architectural Record and a long-time advocate for the college, was hired to design simpler, modern buildings which could be constructed by faculty and students working with a contractor. The property had been developed as a summer camp and inn, and there were two lodges which could be used for dormitories, a dining hall, and a number of cottages, all in a rustic mountain style. The year 1940-41 was the most cohesive in the college’s history as everyone pulled together to construct the Studies Building, to winterize existing buildings, to construct a house for the kitchen staff, and to begin work on a barn and additional faculty cottages. [4]

Black Mountain College was able to survive the war years only by taking out a second mortgage on the college property. Most of the men students and younger faculty were drafted or left to join the war effort, and those who remained were largely European refugees and women students. Despite travel and building restrictions, the college had a vibrant academic program. Among the new faculty were Eric Bentley, a young Englishman and Brechtian scholar who had graduated from Yale University and taught at UCLA. Two new music teachers, both refugees, were Fritz Cohen, cofounder of the Jooss Ballet and composer of the score for the dance, The Green Table, and Edward Lowinsky, a young scholar of Early Music. The college farm thrived and provided essential food when wartime rationing was in effect.

At Blue Ridge, the college had to vacate the buildings in the summers when the YMCA held its summer assemblies. In 1940, 1941 and 1942 at Lake Eden it held a regular summer session and a work camp to help with the construction of new buildings and to provide the farm with workers. In 1943 it sponsored a Seminar on America for Foreign Scholars, Teachers, and Artists. In 1944, in addition to the summer session and work camp, it sponsored music and art institutes. These intense summer programs in the arts which attracted a large number of students, some of whom remained as fulltime students, were ultimately to alter the history and influence of the college. In the summer of 1944 the Music Institute was a celebration of Arnold Schoenberg’s seventieth birthday. Although Schoenberg was unable due to failing health to travel from California, the Institute brought together leading performers and interpreters of his music for an intense series of concerts and lectures. The Art Institute had as its faculty muralist Jean Charlot, sculptor José de Creeft, painter Amédée Ozenfant, and photographers Barbara Morgan and Josef Breitenbach. The college had to rent rooms across the valley at Blue Ridge to accommodate the students. Faculty in the summers of 1945 and 1946 included Will Burtin, Lyonel Feininger, Fannie Hillsmith, Jacob Lawrence, Leo Lionni, Robert Motherwell, Beaumont Newhall and Ossip Zadkine in art, and in music, Erwin Bodky, Alfred Einstein, Eva Heinetz, Hugo Kauder, and Josef Marx, among others.

As the college was enveloped in an intense round of classes, concerts, and lectures in the summer of 1944, it was simultaneously embroiled in what was without question the most vituperative internal conflict in its history. The previous year a number of fractious issues had torn the college, the most difficult being that of integration. North Carolina was a segregated state, and there were those who feared for the college’s safety if it were to integrate. Finally, the issue was resolved with a decision to permit two black women students to enroll for the summer. Nerves were still raw over the integration debate when in the middle of the summer session, two women students who had hitchhiked to visit Eric Bentley, who was teaching at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, were arrested in Chattanooga on their return to the college and jailed. The crisis culminated in the resignations of Bentley, Cohen and his wife dancer Elsa Kahl, Clark Forman, and languages teacher Frances de Graaff, along with a large coterie of students.

As the international conflict came to an end in the summer of 1945, a critically wounded Black Mountain College began slowly to rebuild. Black students were admitted for the regular sessions. Recruitment was not easy, and the college found that few were able to attend a college that did not offer an accredited degree. New faculty members were hired including M.C. Richards, a young scholar from the University of Chicago, to teach writing and literature, and her husband Albert William Levi in social sciences and philosophy. Max Wilhelm Dehn, eminent Frankfurt geometer, taught mathematics and philosophy, and Fritz Hansgirg, metallurgist who had been hired during the war, remained to teach chemistry. Theodore Rondthaler, a North Carolinian from an esteemed Moravian family, arrived to teach Latin, history and literature. John Wallen, who was exploring methods of group dynamics, taught psychology, and David Corkran, former headmaster at the North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois, taught history. When the Alberses were on sabbatical, Ilya Bolotowksy taught art, and Trude Guermonprez Elsesser and Franziska Mayer, weaving and textile design.

Approval under the GI Bill of Rights was essential to the college’s survival after the war, and with that approval a number of students, attracted both by the arts curriculum and by the opportunity to study in an unregimented environment, enrolled. As the student body swelled to almost a hundred students, there was concern that it was becoming too large. The GIs who were older and who had experienced the discipline of military life and the horrors of conflict were eager to pursue a delayed education. Among those enrolled during this period, both GIs and recent high school graduates, were filmmaker Arthur Penn, writer James Leo Herlihy, and artists Ruth Asawa, Joseph Fiore, Lorna Blaine Halper, Ray Johnson, Lore Kadden Lindenfeld, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Sewell Sillman, Kenneth Snelson, John Urbain, and Susan Weil.

In the summer of 1948, Josef Albers organized a Summer Session in the Arts which was be a pivotal moment in the college’s arts programs. Although previously both the regular sessions and the special summer sessions had brought together American-born and refugee faculty, the Europeans, far more accomplished than the younger American teachers, had been dominant. The 1948 summer faculty included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and Buckminster Fuller, all at the time unrecognized, but artists who would become seminal figures in the arts in the United States during the second half of the Twentieth Century. Buckminster Fuller, who was a last minute replacement, attempted to erect his first geodesic dome that summer. When it failed, it was dubbed the “supine” dome, and everyone cheerfully dismissed the “failure” as part of the process of experimental and a step on the way to success. Cage and Cunningham captivated the imagination of the community. They were to remain a presence at Black Mountain through 1953 as visitors and as summer faculty.

During the 1948-49 school year, the college once again was split into opposing camps. At issue was an effort to find a way to provide for the college’s survival. GI Bill revenues were declining, and it was nearly impossible to raise the funds annually to keep the college open. Many plans were considered. One was to have the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill adopt Black Mountain as an experimental school. Another was to narrow the curriculum to focus on the arts with limited offerings in other areas. The crisis ended with the resignations in the spring of 1949 of Theodore Dreier, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Charlotte Schlesinger, and Trude Guermonprez.

During the 1950s, even as the college began to sell land to survive, it experienced an explosion of creative activity. Poet and historian Charles Olson, who had taught one long weekend a month during the 1948-49 school year, returned to teach fulltime in 1951. Students Joseph Fiore and Pete Jennerjahn were hired to teach art, and Hazel Larsen Archer, to teach photography. M.C. Richards remained to teach “reading and writing.” Katherine Litz taught dance, and composers Stefan Wolpe and Lou Harrison, music. Wesley Huss taught theater. In the last years, in addition to Olson, writers Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Robert Hellman taught writing. Creeley, who was living in Mallorca, edited the Black Mountain Review, which gave a coherent means of publication for Olson, Creeley, Duncan and their associates. Pete Jennerjahn taught a Light, Sound, Movement Workshop which explored non-literary multimedia performance. The press, which previously had been used primarily to print college forms and concert and drama programs, was used by the students and faculty to print their own writing. Students during the 1950s included John Chamberlain, Edward Dorn, Francine du Plessix Gray, Joel Oppenheimer, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Rumaker, Cy Twombly, and Jonathan Williams.

Through the summer of 1953 the college continued to sponsor summer sessions which attracted exceptional faculty, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Paul Goodman, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn, Theodoros Stamos, and Jack Tworkov. In 1952, faced with an ever smaller student body, Charles Olson proposed a radical change in the college program. Already, through attrition, the college had become a college of the arts. Under Olson’s plan the college would abandon any remaining vestiges of progressive education such as the work program, the farm, and community in education in favor of a series of year-round institutes which would bring together major figures in the arts, the sciences and the humanities. The Pottery Institute in the fall of 1952 had as its faculty Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, Soestsu Yanagi, and Marguerite Wildenhain. An Institute in the New Sciences of Man had Marie-Louise von Franz and Robert Braidwood as guest speakers. The 1953 summer institute, the last of the major summer programs, featured potters Peter Voulkos, Warren MacKenzie, and Daniel Rhodes along with a general faculty in art, dance, theater and music. At summer’s end, faced with a greatly diminished student body and faculty, the lower campus with the Studies Building and Dining Hall were closed, and students and faculty moved up the hill into faculty cottages. It was impossible for the small coterie to keep up the property or to manage the farm.

By the fall of 1956 there were three teachers: Charles Olson, Wesley Huss, and Joseph Fiore, and Fiore was taking a year’s sabbatical. Olson and Huss decided that the time had come to close the Lake Eden campus. Students, including a group who had worked that summer with Robert Duncan on Medea: The Maidenhead, the first of his Medea triology, returned with him to San Francisco to continue their studies as part of Olson’s “dispersed” university. Olson remained at Lake Eden to formulate other programs and deal with legal issues. Since 1951, the faculty had been paid half-salaries in money (and at times beef from the farm) and the other half had been listed as a debt against the college. Three sued the college for the unpaid salaries, both because they were seniors and badly in need of income and because they, along with others, felt the time had come for the college to close. Olson traveled to San Francisco to deliver his, Special View of History lectures as part of the Black Mountain curriculum. In March a judge ordered that academic programs cease until debts were paid and legal issues resolved. The final issue of the Black Mountain Reviewappeared in the fall of 1957. Olson, the last rector, had arranged in advance for its printing costs. On January 9, 1962, the Final Account was approved and the college books were closed respectably with all debts paid and a balance of zero.

The influence of Black Mountain College and the productivity of its faculty and students has been extensive and diverse. Many have had stellar careers; others have achieved significant recognition as university professors, early childhood educators, artists, musicians, writers, and scientists. Institutions as diverse as Marlboro College in Vermont, the North Carolina School of the Arts, and Catlin Gable School in Portland, Oregon have been influenced by Black Mountain. The “Black Mountain Poets” include both poets and prose writers who published in the Black Mountain Review, some of whom were never at the college. The designation excludes other Black Mountain writers who were at the college but did not publish in the Review. Among the artists, there is no identifiable Black Mountain style. This diversity, rather than a limitation, is a tribute to the college’s fostering of independent thinking and working.

Essential to the success of Black Mountain College was its administration by the faculty; this also was the root of many of its problems. In the instances when the college sought the assistance of a professional administrator, inevitably there was talk of a standard curriculum, predictable results, and a conventional appearance. In each case, the college refused to exchange the open, receptive, flexible atmosphere for the possibility of longevity. A critical part of the college program was its willingness to let things happen, not to create a circumscribed program with a predictable result. Fuller’s “Supine Dome,” the founding of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, John Cage’s first “happening,” and Josef Albers’s design and color curriculum which he later taught at Yale University were not planned outcomes.

More than five decades have passed since Black Mountain College closed. Still, its story continues to have an impact in the arts and education worldwide. Biographies are being written, documentaries filmed, and exhibitions organized. The energy and ideas engendered are a continuing catalyst for new beginnings in the arts and education.

by Mary Emma Harris ©, 2010, Contributing Writer

Mary Emma Harris is an independent scholar and author of, The Arts at Black Mountain College (The MIT Press, 1987). She is Chair of the Black Mountain College Project, Inc. (www.bmcproject.org), a not-for-profit organization devoted to the documentation of the history and influence of Black Mountain College.

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Legend

BMC Project. Black Mountain College Project, Inc., New York, New York.

NCSA, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.

BMC Papers, Black Mountain College Papers.

BMC Research Project Papers. Black Mountain College Research Project Papers.

References:

[1] The American Association of University Professors investigated. Their report essentially vindicated Rice and his followers. See Arthur O. Lovejoy and Austin S. Edwards, “Academic Freedom and Tenure: Rollins College Report,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 19 (November 1933):416-39.

[2] [Joseph Walford Martin], “Black Mountain College: 1933,” NCSA, BMC Papers.

[3] Interview with Sewell Sillman by Mary Emma Harris, 7 March 1971, NCSA, BMC Research Project Papers. Permission Sewell Sillman Foundation.

[4] For a detailed description of the architectural program at the college, seewww.bmcproject.org – architecture.

See a related article on Black Mountain College alumnus, Sewell Sillman at: http://www.artesmagazine.com/2010/03/griswold-museum%e2%80%99s-krieble-gallery-features-modern-art-of-sewell-sillman/

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 55 THE BEATLES (Part G, The Beatles and Rebellion) (Feature on artist Wallace Berman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 54 THE BEATLES (Part F, Sgt Pepper’s & Eastern Religion) (Feature on artist Richard Lindner )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)

Drinking Deep at Black Mountain College

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THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 13 Charles Perrow (MARXIST)

July 13, 2015, 10:35 am

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The Longest Ride Official Trailer #1 (2015) – Britt Robertson Movie HD

Charles Perrow

From: Southern Cultures
Volume 19, Number 4, Winter 2013
pp. 76-94 | 10.1353/scu.2013.0034

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

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Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, was an icon of progressive education during its short life, from 1933 to 1956. Isolated in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, it was one of the very few schools in the country that was open to experimentation. Buckminster Fuller’s students demonstrate the lightness of the dome during the 1949 Summer Architecture Institute, photographed by Masato Nakagawa. All photographs from the North Carolina Museum of Art Black Mountain Research Project, courtesy of the North Carolina Digital Collections, ncdcr.gov.

Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, was an icon of progressive education during its short life, from 1933 to 1956. When I was there, from 1946 to 1948, there were sixty to eighty students and twenty faculty. There were few formal academic requirements, no required courses, no grades, limited resources, but an amazing abundance of creative students and faculty. Students in my two years included such notables as the writer Jose Yglesias, director Arthur Penn, painter Kenneth Noland, and sculptor Ruth Asawa. The Summer Art Institute in 1948 had John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Richard Lippold. The regular faculty had as its star the abstract painter Josef Albers, and many notables in painting, mathematics, chemistry, weaving, and music, including Ilya Bolotowsky, Max Dehn, Natasha Goldowski, Anni Albers, Erwin Bodky, and Edward Lowinsky. The rest of the faculty included lesser-known but often distinguished writers, philosophers, musicians, historians, and a progressive psychologist.

The college was always a dynamic, explosive, self-destructive hothouse. Since its inception, it had been a hotel for progressive ideas in American education, the arts, and the social sciences. Isolated in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, it was one of the very few schools in the country that was open to experimentation. A busload of new faculty and students arrived yearly, welcomed as refreshers and feared as competitors by those who had been there a year or two. Some tried to renovate BMC in their own image, some simply basked in its tolerance and idealism. The most authentic of the students and faculty were seeking to feed deeply on its vibrant flesh, immersing themselves in the unique experience and embracing its contradictions. All but a few moved on after a year or two, gratified or rejected, and a new busload arrived. A small core faculty stayed, providing some continuity and every three or four years wearily congratulating themselves on staving off another educational challenge and on disposing of the disruptive faculty and students who sought renovations (and sometimes achieved them). The core faculty sullenly cleaned up and tried again to square the circle, to create stability and security while proclaiming innovation. My busload, I believe, was quintessential.

Making Our Way

Almost everyone there at this period seemed a poster-child of some sort, representing a fragment of our culture—the closet gay, the civil rights activist, the communist, the avant-garde painter, the urgent truth-seeker, the parent-escaper. My poster was being about the only student from the West Coast (most were from the Northeast, particularly New York City); about being the only one without parents and siblings who had attended college (most students, but certainly not all, were from a well-educated upper middle class, or intellectual elite class); and being one of the few, I suppose, who had had little contact with Jewish people. BMC, in my retrospective judgment, was predominantly a Jewish culture. Tacoma, Washington, had a few Jews (including a friend), and some of my army friends were probably Jewish, but I never thought much of it. My acquaintance with Jewish culture was so limited that, even after I left BMC and went to live on the Lower East Side (East 6^th and Avenue A), it struck me as very strange as I walked in my neighborhood (a Jewish enclave in 1948-49) that all the people chatting on the front steps spent their time telling Jewish jokes. I finally realized that BMC was the only context in which I had heard those wonderful jokes and theatrical accents.

I was probably one of the few students who had no conscious…

[FUKUSHIMA UPDATE] “Fukushima: Nuclear Ticking Time Bomb, Fukushima Worldwide Consequences”

Published on Nov 12, 2013

Radiation Treatment See; http://how.to.survive.radiation.infol… get complete details…[FUKUSHIMA UPDATE] “Fukushima: Nuclear Ticking Time Bomb, Fukushima Worldwide Consequences” Interview with Dr. Charles Perrow, on the dire situation, and cleanup-up efforts or lack of them by ‘TEPCO’ at “Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster in Japan and the current affects with worldwide implications. For radiation treatment, prevention and exposure preparedness, see complete details @ http://cvmco.wordpress.com take action… sign petitions, and be prepared!

TRUNEWS Guest: Dr. Charles Perrow, PhD
Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Yale University

Topic : Dr. Charles Perrow, PhD and Emeritus Professor at Yale University, discusses his deep concern regarding the perilous decommissioning process recently undertaken at the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. According to Perrow, if any two of the 1,535 fuel rods held within the reactor touch, it could cause an uncontrollable nuclear reaction that would warrant the evacuation of Japan and the West Coast of the United States.

BIO: Charles Perrow (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1960) is a past Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society; a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavorial Sciences (1981-2, 1999); Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science; Resident Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation, 1990-91; Fellow, Shelly Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, 1995-96; Visitor, Institute for Advanced Studies, 1995-96, Princeton University; former member of the Committee on Human Factors, National Academy of Sciences, of the Sociology Panel of the National Science Foundation, and of the editorial boards of several journals. An organizational theorist, he is the author of six books, including: The Radical Attack on Business (1972), Organizational Analysis:

A Sociological View (1970), Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (1972; 3rd ed., 1986), award winning Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (1984; revised, 1999), award winning The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation (1990) with Mauro Guillen, award winning Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (2002) and over 50 articles.

His interests include the development of bureaucracy in the 19th Century; the radical movements of the 1960s; Marxian theories of industrialization and of contemporary crises; accidents in such high risk systems as nuclear plants, air transport, DNA research and chemical plants; protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure; the prospects for democratic work organizations; and the origins of U.S. capitalism.

Charles Perrow

Charles Perrow (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1960) is a past Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society; a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavorial Sciences (1981-2, 1999); Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science; Resident Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation, 1990-91; Fellow, Shelly Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, 1995-96; Princeton University; Visitor, Institute for Advanced Studies, 1995-96, Princeton NJ; former member of the Committee on Human Factors, National Academy of Sciences, of the Sociology Panel of the National Science Foundation, and of the editorial boards of several journals. An organizational theorist, he is the author of six books, including: The Radical Attack on Business (1972), Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View (1970), Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (1972; 3rd ed., 1986), award winning Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (1984; revised, 1999), award winning The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation (1990) with Mauro Guillen, award winning Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (2002) and over 50 articles. His interests include the development of bureaucracy in the 19th Century; the radical movements of the 1960s; Marxian theories of industrialization and of contemporary crises; accidents in such high risk systems as nuclear plants, air transport, DNA research and chemical plants; protecting the nation’s critical infrastructure; the prospects for democratic work organizations; and the origins of U.S. capitalism.

Selected Publications

Books

Perrow, Charles (2011, New Edition) (2007). The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Perrow, Charles (2002). Organizing America: Wealth, Power and the Origins of American Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Perrow, Charles and Mauro F. Guillén (1990). The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Perrow, Charles (1984). Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies. (Revised edition, 1999). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Perrow, Charles (1972). Complex Organizations: A Criticial Essay. (Third edition, 1986). McGraw-Hill Publishers.
Perrow, Charles (1972). The Radical Attack on Business. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Perrow, Charles (1970). Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View. Tavistock Press.

Charles Perrow, PhD

Charles Perrow’s Curriculum VitaeDownload PDF

Yale web page

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Research Interests

vulnerabilities to terrorism; organizational theory

Bio

Charles Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and a visiting professor at CISAC in the winter and spring terms. Among his award-winning research is Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (Princeton, 2002), and Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton, 1999). A revised edition of his 2007 book, The Next Catastrophe, will be published by Princeton in 2011. His recent articles include “Modeling Firms in the Global Economy,” Theory and Society, 2009, v 38:3, May, 217-243, “Organizations and Global Warming,” in Constance Lever-Tracy, ed. Handbook of Society and Climate change (Routledge, forthcoming, 2010), “Complexity, Catastrophe, and Modularity,” Sociological Inquiry 78:2, May 2008 162-73; “Conservative Radicalism,”Organization 15:2 2008 271-77; “Disasters Evermore? Reducing our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters,” Social Research 75:3 Fall, 2008. His recent membership on a National Academy of Science panel on the possibilities of certifying software led to his current work on cyber security. He is also writing on the economic meltdown, but his major interest now is the institutional/organizational aspects of global warming. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, all in sociology.

Publications

AllAbstractsBooksCommentaryJournal Articles

Nuclear denial: From Hiroshima to Fukushima	The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
Fukushima and the Inevitability of Accidents	Technology Can Nudge Climate Change Politics

Research

Global Governance and Organizations

Topics

Black Mountain College below:

‘The Longest Ride,’ A Love Story About Luke, A Champion Bull Rider, And Sophia, A Young College Girl, Is Based On The Bestselling Nicholas Sparks Novel, Hits Theaters April 10, 2015

Ira and Ruth, Luke and Sophia –– two couples separated by time and age – have little in common until a series of unexpected events are set in motion and their lives become intertwined. From New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Sparks comes an extraordinary love story that begins when a box of old letters, filled with a lifetime of love, wisdom and experience, set Luke and Sophia on a path to discover their true values and the real meaning of love.

Sophia (BRITT ROBERTSON), a senior at the University of Wake Forest, sees her lifelong dream about to come true. With just weeks to go until graduation, she has landed an internship with a prestigious New York art gallery. Sophia is on her way. That is until a friend barges through her door with a pair of cowboy boots and an invitation to a bull riding event. Though not her thing, Sophia relents and the two friends make their way to their seats, past the band of female fans known as Buckle Bunnies.

In the chute, Luke Collins (SCOTT EASTWOOD) prepares to ride the eight seconds that will put him back on the road to the top spot on the Professional Bull Riding circuit. Returning from a serious injury suffered during a previous ride on the world class bull known as Rango, Luke is determined to regain the riding championship. But the bull has other thoughts. He charges Luke, who climbs onto a fence and out of harm’s way. As his hat flies off and into a surprised Sophia’s lap, their eyes meet for a brief moment – just long enough for Luke to decide he wants to get to know this beauty. “Hold on to it for me, will ya?” he asks Sophia. And as the bull crashes into the fence, Luke is gone, leaving Sophia breathless.

That evening, Sophia, wearing Luke’s hat, runs into him, but instead of asking for his hat, he asks her for a date. She accepts, never guessing that the course of her life has changed and will become far removed from the one that she had imagined.

Ninety-one year old Ira Levinson (ALAN ALDA) is also on a life-changing course. Having lost his wife Ruth some eight years earlier, he begins a journey to Black Mountain, North Carolina and Black Mountain College, an art colony where he bought Ruth her first painting, starting a collection that would span the decades of their marriage.

Ira’s trip is interrupted when, on a rain-slicked road, he loses control of his car, crashes through a guard rail and down an embankment. As the car begins to burn, Ira is aware of someone pulling him from it. It’s Luke, with Sophia right behind him. Though semi-conscious, Ira can only think of the simple, worn box filled with letters left behind in the car. “The box; get the box,” he murmurs and Sophia braves the flames to rescue it.

Later, at the hospital, Sophia looks inside the carton and finds it filled with old letters. Ira is secretly pleased and asks her to read them to him. The two develop a bond and Sophia discovers how much the two couples have in common and how, in spite of the age difference, Young Ruth (OONA CHAPLIN) and Young Ira (JACK HUSTON) have lived a life filled with many of the challenges facing Luke and Sophia. The two couples’ lives will converge, providing the wisdom that will guide Luke and Sophia on their journey.

THE RIDE BEGINS

With The Longest Ride, Nicholas Sparks marks the third feature film adaptation of his novels with producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey. The author and Temple Hill producers previously teamed for the 2010 romantic dramaDear John and for 2012’s Safe Haven.

Neither project prepared the author for the preparation required for The Longest Ride book-to-film journey.

“The Longest Ride is something I’ve never done in film before,” says Sparks. “It’s really two stories in one. It’s the story of Ruth and Ira, a couple who’ve been married for a long time. Ira is now a widower. Their life together, told in flashbacks, is a fascinating story that Ira tells to Sophia, a college student at Wake Forest, and to Luke, a professional bull rider.

“The Longest Ride has an epic quality that applies to both love stories,” continues the author. “It covers the love story between Ruth and Ira, which starts before World War II, and it’s contrasted with the entirely different world of professional bull riding. What differentiates this film from the other adaptations of my work is its epic quality and the dual love story. It’s about the way the two love stories come together.”

Sparks continues: “When you meet the person with whom you fall in love, the feeling’s the same, whether you’re in the 1930s or in the present day. Everybody goes through the same emotions. There’s universality to the way we feel and that’s what I wanted to show. I think the fun of the film is trying to figure out how on earth these two stories are going to come together in the end.”

Bringing Sparks’ story to the big screen is director George Tillman, Jr., whose eclectic body of work encompasses romantic comedy (Soul Food), action-drama (Men of Honor) and biopics (Notorious). “George has the ability to marry emotion with masculinity, both of which are required to tell this story,” says producer Marty Bowen. “I begged him to read the script and he called me and said, ‘You know what, Marty? I’ve been married to my high school sweetheart for 25 years, and to me, what I take out of this film is sacrifice, which is the most important thing in a relationship.’ And I’m sitting there listening to George and thinking ‘Oh, I’ve found my director.’

While Tillman appreciated the love story, he was also captivated by the bull riding elements. “One of the things that I enjoy as a director,” he explains, “is discovering cultures where people can experience new things.

“I’ve always been a fan of bull riding,” he continues, “and there hadn’t been a lot of films dealing with that subject. I was so excited to see a story set against that background,” he exclaims. “I wanted to direct The Longest Ride.”

Tillman’s partner at State Street Pictures, and one of this film’s executive producers, Bob Teitel, was, like the director, taken with the film’s theme of sacrifice. “When I read The Longest Ride, the first thing that came to my mind was the word ‘sacrifice.’ With Luke and Sophia, as well as Ruth and Ira, it’s about what do you sacrifice for one another.”

TWO COUPLES

Finding actors who could bring the vivid characters to life on film was a challenge, but one that the filmmakers were excited to accept. “Scott Eastwood was one of our initial top five for the role of Luke,” says Sparks. “We bantered around a lot of different names, but Scott was always there. When we brought him in, Scott proved to be just what we were looking for. He looks like a leading man, and had a good understanding of the characters.”

Bowen adds that, “Casting the male lead in a love story is very, very hard. You want the actor to be emotionally accessible, but you also want him to be masculine, vulnerable and strong. That combination of traits is difficult to find.

“When Scott came in to talk to us about the part, he left with the movie being his. It’s as if the movie was written for Scott. He has real charisma and toughness. We had to keep close tabs on him during the shoot because if he could, he’d get on the bulls and ride them himself. That’s just who he is. It’s in his DNA. He had that blend we were looking for.”

Eastwood’s onscreen love interest, Britt Robertson, notes that she was “drawn to Scott’s different qualities. He’s a guy’s guy who’s also vulnerable, sweet, and a bit shy. When we filmed a scene where Luke and Sophia go on a date, it was amazing to see all the different colors Scott brought to the role.”

Eastwood notes that “Luke is very determined, at times selfish, but he’s a good guy. He’s a gentleman and a hard worker. Luke is coming back from a life-threatening injury and is determined to be the number one rider.”

The filmmakers tapped Britt Robertson to play Sophia because, says Bowen, “With a love story, women want to put themselves into the lead actress’ shoes. You have to be beautiful but accessible at the same time, and that’s an unusual marriage of characteristics.

“Britt is captivating and she can change an entire scene in just a moment,” Bowen continues. “She feels a scene’s subtext. It’s instinctual.”

Robertson has always been drawn to Sparks’ work, and especially to his depiction of the character she would portray on film. “I love that Sophia is passionate about art and how driven she is to succeed. I was drawn to the fact that Sophia was so goal oriented at such a young age.”

After finding the actors for the contemporary love story, the filmmakers turned to the task of casting the couple that inspires Sophia, beginning with Oona Chaplin, who plays Ruth. “Oona really selected herself for the role,” says Sparks. “She was just so vibrant. She practically leaped off the screen and said, ‘I’m Ruth!’ Oona has spent most of her time overseas, like Ruth, so she really brings that authenticity to the role. Her energy was just what we were looking for in casting the role.

For Chaplin, the fact that she could portray a character from ages 17 through 45 was a dream come true. “I really respect Ruth because she’s very strong,” says the actress. “Like Ruth, I was fortunate to have an upbringing that was full of different types of culture. There was art and music and film, and it was interesting to explore that background with the character and how she would react if that was suddenly ripped away. The [film’s flashback] historical context of the Second World War and having to leave behind everything that you know, was an interesting thing to explore.”

The filmmakers knew it would take a strong actor to portray Ruth’s husband, Ira, someone who would match Chaplin’s formidable energy and with whom she would have great chemistry. Jack Huston filled that bill. “Jack was fantastic,” says Teitel. “We knew his work from Boardwalk Empire, but his character in The Longest Ride was the trickiest to find.” “Jack is hilarious,” adds Chaplin. “From the beginning, we were on the same page about where we wanted to take Ira and Ruth. We really wanted to bring a bit more humanity and grit to the onscreen relationship. It’s been so wonderful to explore that dynamic between them.

“Oona and I quickly developed a very strong friendship,” concurs Huston. “We spent the first couple of weeks of pre-production just getting to know each other. George [Tillman, Jr.], Marty [Bowen] and Bob [Teitel] were really happy that we wanted to bring it to life and insert our own ideas.”

The story’s romantic elements drew Huston to the film. “The theme of enduring love is so beautiful,” he explains. “I loved the challenge of making an authentic love story. I wanted to explore the reality of love rather than its fabrication.”

Completing the starring cast is Alan Alda. The acclaimed actor’s character, Ira, is a central figure in the film, says Sparks. “He has his own story with Ruth, and another with Sophia and Luke, and we wanted someone who had the depth to be able to link the two love stories. Alan brought levity and lightness to the role.”

“Who doesn’t, at some point in their career want to do a project with Alan Alda,” interjects Bowen. “He’s been a consummate actor for decades. He’s a national treasure. He brings together Ira’s gruffness and humanity, which combined create maximum emotional impact. In a single take he can upset you, make you laugh and then right into it, he can make you cry.”

Alda embraced the film’s story and characters. “I’m in this wonderful spot in my life where I can do things that interest me,” he says. “And this story really interested me. It’s about deep and enduring love. I was also interested in the challenge of mostly playing a guy in his 90s. I had never done that before, and it intrigued me. I wanted to see what the problems were and how I would approach them.”

“Alan gave me so much to work off of,” says Robertson. “He’s such a kind and generous human being and actor. I learned so much about life and this business from him. Our relationship really did parallel the one between Ira and Sophia. I was constantly on the edge of my seat wanting him to just keep talking.

“That’s how Sophia feels about Ira,” she continues. “She wants to learn from Ira’s experiences and use it in her own life.”

Eastwood found Alda to not only be a great actor from whom he could learn, as well as “an overall good guy. He’s almost from my dad [Clint Eastwood]’s era and sometimes I would look at him or he would comment on something and I was just ‘God, you remind me of my dad right now. I think he would say something almost exactly like that.’”

BULL RIDING MEETS MODERN ART:

RESEARCHING THE LONGEST RIDE

Sparks did more research for The Longest Ride than he had for any of his other novels. “My explorations covered many areas I didn’t know anything about,” he explains. “I needed to find out what the art world was like in the ‘30s and ‘40s; what life was like for Jewish people in North Carolina in the 1930s; and the many facets of the Professional Bull Rider’s tour and its riders.”

A key source for this research was Professional Bull Riders (PBR), the world’s premiere bull-riding organization, which the filmmakers brought on board as technical advisors. PBR produced the movie’s bull riding events. The PBR segments were filmed in Jacksonville, North Carolina and Winston Salem, North Carolina.

Current and active PBR Built Ford Tough Series riders served as stunt doubles for Scott Eastwood, with a few of them, such as 2009 PBR World Champion Kody Lostroh, and Billy Robinson appearing as themselves.

“Nicholas Sparks captured the essence of a PBR bull rider with his character Luke Collins,” says PBR chief operating officer Sean Gleason. “We enjoyed working with Scott Eastwood to bring the character of Luke to life on the big screen as a PBR cowboy in and amongst the real-world stars of the sport.”

Bowen actually had some experience with bull riding. He was born in a small Central Texas town called Wortham (population: 1000), which, he says, didn’t even have a stoplight. “But once a week, for six weeks every summer, there was a rodeo with bull riders. I learned then that there’s a section of the United States that thinks of bull riding like others think of basketball. It’s part of our cultural institution.

“There is something primal about watching a man on the back of a two thousand pound beast,” Bowen continues. “I think conquering that fear must be an incredibly liberating thing to do. With the character of Luke, bull riding is about conquering that fear. But it’s hard to confront it when you know that it could kill you.

“You know,” Bowen adds, “bull riding is like running into the fire, instead of away from it, and it takes a special breed of person to think in those terms. It’s mesmerizing to watch, and it’s an incredible culture.”

Director George Tillman, Jr. says his first encounter with PBR was an eye-opening one. “During pre-production we traveled to Las Vegas, where we saw the PBR finals,” he recounts. “Being in a real bull riding environment, seeing the power of the bull, how much life and death this can really be – and at the same time, seeing the energy, the love of bull riding.”

Going into production, Tillman discovered he had a few misconceptions about bull riding. “The riders have to hang on for eight seconds to win,” he explains. “On television, that seems very slow and normal, but when you are actually at the ring, those eight seconds go by very quickly.

“It’s the toughest sport on dirt.”

While the actors and stunt crew/bull riders were always professional, Tillman found his four-legged performer to be a handful. “We had a top bull named Rango,” says Tillman. “The first day of shooting, we had five cameras set up. Rango goes into the chute and is very quiet. He was renowned for his toughness.”

Rango was more than ready for his close-up. That first ride was unbelievable: Rango came out of that gate, jumped about five feet in the air, and our rider held on for the eight seconds,” Tillman continues. “In fact, he may have gone on nine or ten seconds and then he flipped up in the air. It was all that we needed and on top of that, the rider landed on his feet.”

Sadly, on September 15, 2014 Rango died of heart complications while receiving treatment for an intestinal ailment.

Rango’s rider was Brant Atwood, a PBR cowboy who doubled for Eastwood. “Brant really has the swagger we needed for Luke,” explains Tillman, “and he’s one of the top bull riders in the country. When you work with the real bulls and the bull riding PBR, you’re working with some of the best riders around.”

“The great thing about the PBR,” says Bob Teitel, “is that its members are probably the last American cowboys. We captured PBR like no other film has. They get bucked off a bull and they’re lying there. The doctor comes out to check them out and they refuse help. It’s just wild!

“I don’t think people realize how dangerous the sport is,” adds Eastwood. “Bull riders are probably the toughest guys in the world. Even our stunt guys were in awe of them. I’m fascinated by the sport and have tremendous respect for the riders.”

Eastwood traveled to a ranch to train. The facility’s owner, Troy Brown, raises bucking bulls and is a stunt coordinator. “Scott was a joy to work with,” says Brown. “He put in the time and effort and he really cared that his bull riding looked right. He was always asking the bull riders for advice. We had the best bull riders in the world – the who’s who of the PBR – in this movie and Scott worked with them to make it look as real as possible.

“Scott had no bull riding experience coming into this,” Brown continues. “He rides horses but that’s a whole different ball game than bulls. But he’s a great athlete – he surfs – so he picked it up quickly. And Scott looks like a bull rider. He’s muscular but not too big. He’s very fit.”

“My research led me to Black Mountain College, which was the center of the modern art movement in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.”

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

The Longest Ride took its cast and crew across the state of North Carolina, from the coastal city of Wilmington to Lake Devotion, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Sparks, a transplant to North Carolina, had fallen in love with the state and decided to raise his family there. He takes great pride in making sure that he shows the rest of us what it really means to be a North Carolinian.

Scouting for a location to match the town where Ira grows up was a pleasant surprise for the filmmakers. “We found this town in North Carolina called Wallace,” says Teitel, “and it looks like it was still back in time – like nothing had changed. We took over this one-block street, which didn’t require much set dressing. The buildings felt like they were from the 40s and we captured the celebrations at the end of World War II. It was an amazing scene to capture – like almost a parade downtown.”

For the scenes with Ira and Ruth set in the 1940s, the city of Wilmington served as home, providing a synagogue and beautiful Victorian houses. The town of Wallace served as the location where Ira grows up and meets Ruth. A farm near Wilmington doubled for a World War II battlefield, and other locales included Caswell Beach and Eden, the latter standing in for Black Mountain College.

Scenes set in the present day, featuring Luke and Sophia, were filmed in Jacksonville, home to the story’s outdoor bull riding ring; and in Winston Salem, among other locations.

BULL RINGS, SODA SHOPS AND ART

Production designer Mark Garner pulled together the designs for the film’s various sets, encompassing the period between 1940 and 1945, and the present.

“To differentiate between the present and the past on this movie was to split it into three areas,” says Garner. “We had Sophia’s world, Luke’s world, and the past.”

For the scenes with young Ira and Ruth, Garner says he “kept everything kind of muddy with more earthy colors, which were prevalent during the period. I used deep cinnamon and browns and tans and cocoa colors with a little green. I stayed away from the bright blues and pinks, because those colors transition into Sophia’s world.”

“I kept the foundation of Sophia’s world fairly neutral because I wanted the artwork to provide the color. I wanted the art to pop against the neutral background to show where she was. When we are in the galleries, the walls are creams or pale greens so that everything pops against it. You don’t see the architecture.

“In the period world,” he continues, “you want to see the architecture, brick colors, mortar colors, and sidewalk colors. In Luke’s world, I took a middle ground and stayed with primary colors – reds, blues, greens, yellows. There are no shocking colors, just primary tones that also then relate to the PBR or the bull riding world.

Although the production was unable to film at Black Mountain College, Garner was eager to showcase the institution’s architecture. “To evoke the past, the buildings at Devotion Lake, which stood in for the college, were a little more rustic, but they were still in keeping with some of the buildings of the college,” he explains. “We chose to stay away from modern architecture because I’d already used that in other areas of the film. The structures at Devotion Lake provided a better setting for the period.”

Garner’s vision of Luke’s ranch stemmed from the story point that Luke’s father was a bull rider who passed away five years before the story begins. “We display Luke’s trophies from when he was a kid and his ribbons and belt buckles,” says Garner. “There are also a lot of family photographs of Luke’s father riding bulls.”

Selecting the pieces of art for Sophia’s dorm room took Garner back to the artists at Black Mountain College. “Because Sophia is studying at Black Mountain, I wanted to use a lot of the art that came from the people who were involved in it, and the script dictated some of the pieces,” Garner points out.

Bull riding was another area that Garner had to research before he could begin his designs. “The PBR people were incredible, and we worked very closely with their creative team,” he says. “That world had to be authentic. If you watch PBR on television, or if you see it live, every venue is exactly the same. They don’t change anything, wherever they’re riding. I needed to differentiate each location, so PBR worked with us to incorporate the color palette for each location.

“Then there’s the soda shop set,” muses Garner. “I have to say that was my most favorite set in the film, because that was an empty store that had been a beauty parlor. It was all chopped up into little cubbies. It had six layers of floors and a dropped ceiling. We found this little corner shop that was in pretty rough shape, but I could see its potential. Ultimately, it was like you were back in 1941.”

Charles Perrow

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles B. Perrow is an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He is the author of several books and many articles on organizations, and is primarily concerned with the impact of large organizations on society.^[1]

Academic appointments[edit]

After attending the University of Washington, Black Mountain College (N.C.), and UC Berkeley, he received his PhD in sociology from Berkeley in 1960. He has held appointments at the universities of Michigan, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, SUNY Stony Brook, and Yale, where he became emeritus in 2000. Since 2004 he has been a visiting professor at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, in the winter and spring quarters.

His notable accomplishments include serving as the Vice President of the Eastern Sociological Society. Perrow was also a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. Perrow served as a Resident Scholar for the Russell Sage Foundation at the Shelly Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. Perrow was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton NJ. Perrow was a member of the Committee on Human Factors at the National Academy of Sciences of the Sociology Panel for the National Science Foundation. Charles Perrow is an organizational theorist and the author of six books, most noteworthy being: Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (1984; revised, 1999), The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (2007; revised, 2011) and Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of American Capitalism (2002).

Notable works[edit]

Normal Accidents Theory

Normal Accident Theory suggests that in complex, tightly coupled systems, accidents are inevitable. In this theory, common engineering approaches to decrease system vulnerability and failures add to much complexity to the system and cause just the opposite effect leading to inevitable failure of the system. In numerous books and articles, Perrow explains the theory and provides examples to visualize the theory in action.

Perrow, Charles. 1999. Normal Accidents. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

In Charles Perrow’s book Normal Accidents, Perrow analyzes the social side of technological risk. The critical finding discussed in the book is that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety, which includes building in additional warnings and safeguards do not work because the added system complexity only makes failure inevitable. Perrow states that by adding to the complexity of the system creates new possibilities of accidents. These systems are usually so intertwined that the failure of one part leads to the failure of the entire system. He provides several examples to visualize his theory in action. A failure example Perrow uses is the Three Mile Island Nuclear accident, in this situation, all the major systems experienced failure in just 13 seconds. There was no possibility for the operator to fix the problem before it was too late. Perrow concludes that systems need to be designed with the human operator in mind and realize that the system will fail and plan the system to calculate for all possible failure scenarios. If that is not possible, the system should be abandoned. ^[2]

Perrow’s Power Theory

Perrow believes that it is in our human nature to accumulate without bounds. He suggests that efficiency is not in our nature, and so what drives capitalism is the desire to accumulate resources. One argument he makes is that individual capitalists prefer accumulation to efficiency, and will focus their efforts on accumulation. This theory has changed the way people view the history of large organizations.

Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002

In his book, Perrow discusses the evolution of the American society and economy from the 1800’s until now. Perrow talks about how the industrialists used their power to create bigger and bigger organizations, and were focused on gaining more wealth and power. The conditions were right for this to occur with little or no government regulations the two big industries attributed for creating this movement are the textile and railroad industries. Perrow insists that it was a lust to accumulate wealth and power that drove the American capitalism evolution. Charles Perrow examines classic organizational theory and redefines it in his own terms. Perrow introduces several theories and models including: the human relations model, the Neo-Weberian model, the institutional school model, the agency theory, and transaction-costs economics and discusses power in organizational analysis. ^[3]

The Next Catastrophe

Charles Perrow has brought the vulnerabilities of the United States systems forward in an attempt to encourage the planning and prevention efforts of failures whether accidental or by design.

Perrow, Charles (2011, New Edition) (2007). The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

In his book, Perrow argues that instead of focusing efforts to protect targets the U.S. should reduce their size to minimize damage and reduce their attractiveness to terrorists. He mentions three causes of disasters: natural, organizational, and deliberate. Perrow suggests that our best hope lies in the deconcentration of high-risk populations, corporate power, and critical infrastructures such as electric energy, computer systems, and the chemical and food industries. Perrow discusses the rise of the catastrophe threats whether from terrorism, natural disasters, or industrial accidents. He reveals that FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security are so ill equipped to protect us. ^[4] ^[5]

Research interests[edit]

His major theme is the impact of large organizations upon society. His structure and power view is explored in successive editions of Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay, first published in 1972, 3rd edition, 1986 (McGraw Hill). It is applied in the award winning Organizing America: Wealth, Power and the Origins of American Capitalism (2002, Princeton).

A related theme has been the structural analysis of risky systems, emphasizing “interactive complexity” (non linear systems) and “tight coupling” (cascading failures). This was explored in the award winning Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies (1984, rev. ed. 1999, Princeton). The inspiration for Perrow’s book was the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, where a nuclear accident resulted from an unanticipated interaction of multiple failures in a complex system. The event was an example of a normal accident because it was “unexpected, incomprehensible, uncontrollable and unavoidable”.^[6] The role of organizations in disasters is discussed further in The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (2007, rev. ed. 2011)

His other books are the award winning The AIDS Disaster: The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation (1990, Yale, with Mauro F. Guillén); The Radical Attack on Business (1972, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich); Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View (1970, Tavistock Press); and Organization for Treatment: A Comparative Study of Juvenile Correctional Institutions (1966, The Free Press, with David Street and Robert D. Vinter).

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Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. “True Communism has never been tried” is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.

Tony Bartolucci noted that Schaeffer has correctly pointed out:

Hope in Marxism-Leninism is a leap in the area of nonreason. From the Russian Revolution until 1959 a total of 66 million prisoners died. This was deemed acceptable to the leaders because internal security was to be gained at any cost. The ends justified the means. The materialism of Marxism gives no basis for human dignity or rights. These hold to their philosophy against all reason and close their eyes to the oppression of the system.

WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?

Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.

Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.

1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.

Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.

2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).

Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.

3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.

How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?

Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).

Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).

WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.

In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:

Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.

To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.

Is Christianity at all like Communism?

Sometimes Communism sounds very “Christian” – desirable goals of equality, justice, etc but these terms are just borrowed from the New Testament. Schaeffer elsewhere explains by saying Marxism is a Christian heresy.

Below is a great article. Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

This article was published January 30, 2011 at 2:28 a.m. Here is a portion of that article below:

A final advantage is the mutation of socialism into so many variants over the past century or so. Precisely because Karl Marx was unclear as to how it would work in practice, socialism has always been something of an empty vessel into which would be revolutionaries seeking personal meaning and utopian causes to support can pour pretty much anything.

A desire to increase state power, soak the rich and expand the welfare state is about all that is left of the original vision. Socialism for young lefties these days means “social justice” and compassion for the poor, not the gulag and the NKVD.

In the end, the one argument that will never wash is that communismcan’t be said to have failed because it was never actually tried. This is a transparent intellectual dodge that ignores the fact that “people’s democracies” were established all over the place in the first three decades after World War II.

Such sophistry is resorted to only because communism in all of those places produced hell on earth rather than heaven.

That the attempts to build communism in a remarkable variety of different geographical regions led to only tyranny and mass bloodshed tells us only that it was never feasible in the first place, and that societies built on the socialist principle ironically suffer from the kind of “inner contradictions” that Marx mistakenly predicted would destroy capitalism.

Yes, all economies are mixed in nature, and one could plausibly argue that the socialist impulse took the rough edges off of capitalism by sponsoring the creation of welfare-state programs that command considerable public support.

But the fact remains that no society in history has been able to achieve sustained prosperity without respect for private property and market forces of supply and demand. Nations, therefore, retain their economic dynamism only to the extent that they resist the temptation to travel too far down the socialist road.

Francis Schaeffer notes:

At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with...Jurgen Habermas (1929-).

Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society” (1967)

Brannon Howse talks some about the Frankfurt School in some of his publications too.

During the 1960’s many young people were turning to the New Left fueled by Marcuse and Habermas but something happened to slow many young people’s enthusiasm for that movement.

1970 bombing took away righteous standing of Anti-War movement

Francis Schaeffer mentioned the 1970 bombing in his film series “How should we then live?” and I wanted to give some more history on it. Schaeffer asserted:

In the United States the New Left also slowly ground down,losing favor because of the excesses of the bombings, especially in the bombing of the University of Wisconsin lab in 1970, where a graduate student was killed. This was not the last bomb that was or will be planted in the United States. Hard-core groups of radicals still remain and are active, and could become more active, but the violence which the New Left produced as its natural heritage (as it also had in Europe) caused the majority of young people in the United States no longer to see it as a hope. So some young people began in 1964 to challenge the false values of personal peace and affluence, and we must admire them for this. Humanism, man beginning only from himself, had destroyed the old basis of values, and could find no way to generate with certainty any new values. In the resulting vacuum the impoverished values of personal peace and affluence had comes to stand supreme. And now, for the majority of the young people, after the passing of the false hopes of drugs as an ideology and the fading of the New Left, what remained? Only apathy was left. In the United States by the beginning of the seventies, apathy was almost complete. In contrast to the political activists of the sixties, not many of the young even went to the polls to vote, even though the national voting age was lowered to eighteen. Hope was gone.

After the turmoil of the sixties, many people thought that it was so much the better when the universities quieted down in the early seventies. I could have wept. The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions. How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents–personal peace and affluence. (How Should We Then Live, pp. 209-210

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 55 THE BEATLES (Part G, The Beatles and Rebellion) (Feature on artist Wallace Berman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 54 THE BEATLES (Part F, Sgt Pepper’s & Eastern Religion) (Feature on artist Richard Lindner )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 52 THE BEATLES (Part D, There is evidence that the Beatles may have been exposed to Francis Schaeffer!!!) (Feature on artist Anna Margaret Rose Freeman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 49 THE BEATLES (Part A, The Meaning of Stg. Pepper’s Cover) (Feature on artist Mika Tajima)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 48 “BLOW UP” by Michelangelo Antonioni makes Philosophic Statement (Feature on artist Nancy Holt)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 47 Woody Allen and Professor Levy and the death of “Optimistic Humanism” from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Plus Charles Darwin’s comments too!!! (Feature on artist Rodney Graham)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 46 Friedrich Nietzsche (Featured artist is Thomas Schütte)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 21 (Dr. Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State, “…most scientists don’t think enough about God…There’s no evidence that we need any supernatural hand of God”)

Friday, 29 September, 2000, 06:03 GMT 07:03 UK

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THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 14 Willem de Kooning (Part A)

July 30, 2015, 11:47 am

≫ Next: THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 15 Willem de Kooning (Part B)

≪ Previous: THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 13 Charles Perrow (MARXIST)

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This is the 14th post in this series on the amazing artists, poets and professors associated with Black Mountain College (the college that was featured in the recent film THE LONGEST RIDE.

Sparks Adaptation The Longest Ride Works for Both ‘Rom’ and ‘Com’

Susan EllingburgCrosswalk.com Contributing Writer
201510 Apr
COMMENTS0

Sparks Adaptation <i>The Longest Ride</i> Works for Both 'Rom' and 'Com'

Release Date: April 10, 2015
Rating: PG-13 for some sexuality, partial nudity, and some war and sports action
Genre: Drama, Romance
Run Time: 139 minutes
Director: George Tillman Jr.
Cast: Scott Eastwood, Britt Robertson, Alan Alda, Jack Huston, Oona Chaplin

It’s Spring, and when a young movie-goer’s fancy turns to love, best-selling author Nicholas Sparks is ready to take her there. Based on the Sparks novel of the same name, The Longest Ride is a sweetheart of a movie that may not break new ground but is almost certain to please.

Sophia (Britt Robertson, Dan in Real Life and the upcoming Tomorrowland) is an art lover on the cusp of a brilliant career at a Manhattan gallery, just as soon as she finishes her last semester of college. Luke (Scott Eastwood, son of Clint) is a professional bull rider, a cowboy who has already had a spectacular rise and fall and is desperately trying to make a comeback. The two have little in common and almost no time to be together. Clearly, they’re meant for each other.

They do make an adorable couple. Sophia is cute and intense with a sweet, lively face that crinkles into any number of interested expressions. Luke is charming and a little old-fashioned with plenty of the smoldering appeal that made Eastwood’s movie star dad a favorite for an earlier generation of female fans. Their budding romance is delightfully awkward, but it’s all for naught as these two are clearly going their separate ways (or are they?). As if the glorious North Carolina scenery, romantic candlelight, etc. were not enough, their first date takes an intense turn when they happen upon a car accident and rescue the elderly driver and his box of mementos. Ira (Alan Alda, Tower Heist) is banged up but not so much that he loses his gift of good-natured, crotchety banter. When Sophia befriends Ira and gradually comes to know his story—mostly through the letters in his box—one tale becomes two as the relationship between young Ira and his beloved Ruth (Oona Chaplin) is woven into that of the modern couple.

While Sophia and Luke’s romance is sweet and all, when they were onscreen I found myself waiting for the next chapters of Ira and Ruth’s far more interesting love story. Set against the backdrop of WWII, and covering a span of many years, there’s a depth to the older couple’s love that is (naturally) missing in the newly-connected modern-day couple. The two couples have so many parallels it strains belief a bit, but this is a starry-eyed fantasy, after all. Sometimes reality is overrated.

In addition to all the sweetness, there are enough funny moments to justify both the ‘rom’ and ‘com’ labels. Both male and female viewers in my audience burst into laughter on several occasions, several confessed to a tear or two, and a good time was had by all… except maybe Rango, the bull who is Luke’s nemesis. All that bull riding—and there is a fair amount—is shown from a variety of interesting angles, including the rider’s. The film features a number of real-life cowboys from the PBR (Professional Bull Riders) circuit, adding a nice touch of gritty reality.

The soundtrack is more than just background music; it provides commentary on the action. Like the dulcet tones of the Pistol Annies singing “I feel a sin comin’ on; please Jesus don’t hold me back” or Ryan Adams crooning about “Desire.” As those titles suggest, Sophia and Luke’s is a modern relationship, which means they don’t bother with anything so quaint as waiting for marriage; they consummate their love in several scenes that are steamy in more ways than one. To director George Tillman Jr.’s credit, those scenes are, at least, artfully filmed and have a dreamy romantic feel. This is a true love story, not just a relationship movie.

The Longest Ride is the is the tenth Sparks book to be made into a movie, and at almost 2 hours, 20 minutes is the longest of them, but the time passes quickly. While the big “surprise” ending may not be much of a surprise to those familiar with the inspirational stories that populate Facebook (it’s a variation on a tale that made the rounds a year or so ago), it’s satisfying nonetheless. All ends as it should, making this an enjoyable girls’-night-out movie that, thanks to all the bull riding action, guys may actually enjoy, too.

Drugs/Alcohol: Drinking at bars, wine with dinner, occasional drunkenness.
Language/Profanity: A couple of muttered “Shhhhhht” one d-word and one exclamation of “Jesus.”
Sex/Nudity: Sophia’s friend pulls down Sophia’s t-shirt to expose more cleavage for her date with Luke and tells her “You’re the only girl I know who wouldn’t have a fling with a cowboy.” Teasing comment about not wearing underwear (more funny than sultry). Several kisses, some artistically-filmed sex scenes that show relatively discreet side and back nudity. We see a good amount of Luke’s muscular backside and hands caressing. Some slow stripping scenes and semi-skinny dipping (swimming in underwear).
Violent/Frightening/Intense: Bull riding is an intense, competitive, dangerous sport and we see it from a variety of angles. Some war scenes show troops under fire. Men are injured in a variety of ways. A victim is pulled from a wrecked car.

Publication date: April 10, 2015

The Longest Ride Official Trailer #1 (2015) – Britt Robertson Movie HD

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Wild Intellectuals and Exotic Folks

By Rachel Galvin | HUMANITIES, July/August 2001 | Volume 22, Number 4

+ Click on image to enlarge.

Steps of Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC, 1939.

—Library of Congress

A small college in the mountains of North Carolina brought together some of the most innovative artists and thinkers of its time—Robert Motherwell and Buckminster Fuller and John Cage. Plagued by debts, the school sold off its land, cattle, and pianos until it eventually closed its doors in 1957.

The poet Charles Olson called Black Mountain a “little hotbox of education,” saying, “The place is overrun with talent for me to use, and learn by.” A crucible for artistic talent, Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 and for twenty-four years was a magnet for artists in a variety of media: John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Robert Duncan, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, Charles Olson, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ben Shahn, among others.

Black Mountain was a progressive liberal arts college founded on the idea of complete academic freedom. But with the traditional parameters of the classroom nearly eradicated, was Black Mountain still an institution of higher learning?

“Most work in 1955-1956 was done in tutorial fashion, one member of the community asking another’s opinion on a painting, a piece of writing, a text, an idea,” Martin Duberman writes in his book, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. “And that might be exactly why so many who were in the community during 1955-1956 insist today that it was a learning environment—an occasional loony bin, a rest camp, a pressure cooker, a refuge, and a welfare agency—but nonetheless a learning environment.”

“Black Mountain is a legendary school in terms of art circles and in North Carolina,” says Dick Lankford, archivist at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. Lankford is directing the department’s effort to preserve Black Mountain College materials. With an NEH grant, sixteen collections of audiotaped interviews, brittle records, and deteriorating photographs are being conserved, archived, and cata-loged in a searchable reference system that will be accessible on the Web. The Department hopes to digitize the materi-als and eventually make them available on the Internet.

Project archivist Barbara Cain says scholars and students are coming from all over the world to consult the collections. “We have a scholar working on neo-Dadaism coming from France, and a German scholar interested in the carry-over from Germany to the United States, particularly in the teaching of art.” Other projects include a book on the teaching methods of Josef Albers, who taught color and design at Black Mountain; a study of the Bauhaus movement in America; and a college course on poet Robert Creeley and other Black Mountain writers.

“There was a period of time when people looked down at Black Mountain as a failure because it closed its doors, but history provides a certain perspective,” Lankford says. “Black Mountain has been a pivotal institution since its founding in 1933 right up until its demise in 1957. Its educational philosophy was way ahead of its time.”

The college was founded by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and other former faculty members from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. The group envisioned a college that would be run democratically, owned and administered by the faculty and students themselves. No courses would be required, no grades given, and students would be free to direct their course of studies as they pleased. Everyone—students and faculty—would participate in the work program, preparing meals, maintaining the campus, and working on the school farm. And in contrast to the majority of colleges and universities of the time, Black Mountain would be a place where knowledge was put into action and the arts given equal importance with the rest of the curriculum.

“Now we take for granted that every college has an art department,” says Mary Emma Harris, art historian and project consultant. “Then, you could study art history, but not really get a degree in art—and when a degree did exist, it was given through the home economics department.”

Black Mountain’s founders looked to John Dewey, author of Democracy and Education, who wrote that to develop one’s creative abilities was “an inalienable right.” In Harper’s Magazine in May, 1937, Rice explained his theory that the arts ought to be an educational activity rather than simply a subject of study: “What you do with what you know is the important thing. To know is not enough.”

In its first year, the college offered courses in physics, mathematics, chemistry, music, English, psychology, economics, and Romance languages, as well as art classes. To lend credibility to the institution, the founders assembled a distinguished roster of advisers that included John Dewey, Walter Gropius, Carl Jung, Max Lerner, Franz Kline, and Albert Einstein. Despite the hesitation of many parents to send their children to an unaccredited college that would not offer a degree, the college managed to attract a sufficient number of students dissatisfied with traditional education, and in 1933 its doors opened.

“Black Mountain was a community, first and last—a company of people,” says Robert Creeley, poet and former faculty member. Creeley believes artist John Chamberlain put it most aptly: “At Black Mountain one found, as he said, people who were more interested in what they didn’t know than in what they did. It was an extraordinary sense of conduct and thinking, despite its small numbers. It had only faculty and students as its determinants—no overseers, no administration other than those so participating. That was its absolute virtue—the interactive condition of its faculty and students. No one was or could get ‘outside.’”

Students came from all over the U.S. to attend Black Mountain, but the majority con-sisted of northeasterners—many from New York City, according to Jonathan Williams, former Black Mountain student and publisher of Jargon Books. Potential students were most often reached by word of mouth. “M. C. Richards, who was there in the forties mostly as a writer—she became a potter as well—would go out in the spring and try to recruit people,” says Williams. “There wasn’t any money to do much of anything. They would put out the occasional bulletin or advertising brochure once a year, some very attractively designed by the graphic arts people there.”

At its inception, the college had only three rules. The first was formulated by Rice: “The constant admonition of a college should not be ‘Be intellectual’ or ‘Be muscular!’ (in both cases the dividing line is the neck) but ‘Be intelligent!’” The second was that firearms must be deposited with the administration; and the third rule was that women students must not hitchhike in the South. There was also a tacit agreement that a “Do Not Disturb” sign ought to be respected.

“The fact that there were no academic departments—there weren’t enough people for that—meant that the learning was interdisciplinary,” says Harris.

“Everybody was sharing ideas from their field. It wasn’t compartmentalized or departmentalized.” Composer John Cage believed the most important learning at Black Mountain took place at mealtime, because faculty and students sat together in the dining hall.

“The relationships between faculty and students were much less formal,” says Harris. “In the end it was a communal learning situation.”

The founders of the college had no illusions about creating a utopia, however, and focused on building an educational community with an emphasis on the arts. “Black Mountain College combined elements of the progressive schools, farm schools, religious sects, and summer camps,” Harris writes in her book, The Arts at Black Mountain College. “There was a strong sense of pioneering in the American tradition of building a ‘log cabin college’ out of nothing and of providing a good education without tremendous laboratories, expensive buildings, and stadiums.”

The college reaffirmed democratic government, individual freedom, and responsibility in a period of economic instability and rising totalitarianism, says Harris. In the same year the college was founded, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, the Bauhaus movement was closed down by the Nazis, and the persecution of Jews, artists, and intellectuals was beginning in Europe. The Depression held the United States in its grip, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been elected president.

The addition of European artists to the Black Mountain faculty had a tremendous impact on the atmosphere of the college and the aesthetic taught there. Only a few months after the college opened, Josef and Anni Albers arrived from Germany, fleeing the rise of Nazism. Josef Albers, the first of the Bauhaus teachers to come to the United States, was an advocate of abstract art. “Abstracting is the essential function of the Human Spirit,” he wrote in 1936. He later said he wanted the same right as the composer to create abstract forms that “have life within themselves as music has.” Albers’s philosophy had a palpable impact on artists of all disciplines who studied with him at Black Mountain.

When the United States entered World War II, most young men were drafted or left to join the war effort. The student body remaining at Black Mountain consisted of women, men past the draft age, and European refugees. In 1941 Black Mountain College moved onto its own property at Lake Eden, where students and faculty constructed a number of buildings, expanded their farming activities, and set up a mica mine to prepare the mineral for sale as war material.

After the war, Black Mountain managed to get approved for GI bill benefits even though it was not an accredited college. “If that had not happened, the college would have closed after the war,” says Harris. “Instead, enrollment skyrocketed to more than ninety students.”

A number of as yet unrecognized artists came to Black Mountain in the late 1940s, either as visiting summer faculty or as students, furthering the college’s reigning spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration. Jacob Lawrence taught a course on “creative painting” in 1946, giving him the occasion to meet Josef Albers, who encouraged his newfound interest in abstraction. In the summer of 1948, John Cage gave the first performance ofSonatas and Interludes while Merce Cunningham danced. Both had received some atten-tion, though Cunningham had not yet left the Martha Graham Company to begin his own dance company. Willem de Kooning—who could not manage to sell any work from his first one-person exhibition in New York—came to teach art. Buckminster Fuller, an engineer and architect considered a “delightful nut,” had not yet developed his geo-desic dome, which he would do while at Black Mountain.

By the 1950s, Rice and the Albers had left Black Mountain, and in contrast to the period in which the college had been founded, America was experiencing an era of prosperity and conservatism. The college’s association with liberal causes brought it under suspicion of harboring communist sympathies. “The times then were quite hostile,” says Robert Creeley.

“The FBI had a person come check out Black Mountain College on a regular basis, ‘Frank,’ who was amiable enough, as it happens, and even gave us advice as to how we might have secured government grants.”

In 1951, poet and unorthodox scholar Charles Olson became rector of the college. Under Olson’s guidance, the college metamorphosed into a primarily arts-driven institution and the farmwork aspect of the program was all but terminated. In a letter to Creeley, Olson wrote that the college would focus on “painting, music, dance, writing, architecture, pots, cloth, wood, theatre, printing, sculpture & photography. . . . No academics.”

Olson’s personality and views on writing and art dominated the college during its remaining years. In his 1950 essay “Projective Verse,” published in Poetry New York, Olson had advocated open forms, describing the poem as a “field” and stressing that a line ought to be measured in terms of a person’s breath. These ideas distinguished him from the predominant movement in literature, New Criticism, and its proponents such as Allan Tate, Lionel Trilling, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop.

“Meeting Charles Olson was rather like meeting Ralph Waldo Emerson, I suspect. He was very much in that tradition of New England sages,” says Jonathan Williams. “He was enormous —about 6’9” and 275 pounds—he was a towering sort of person and also as a personality. Like Emerson, he was almost oracular in his writing and would just come bursting out with extraordinary remarks—practically three a minute.”

“My relation to Black Mountain had far more to do with Olson than with any fact of the institution,” says Creeley. “It was he who arranged, in effect, for the publication of the journal, Black Mountain Review, and also set up my being invited there to teach in the spring of 1954.”

Black Mountain floundered financially during Olson’s tenure. The faculty often went without pay, and the college periodically sold off its land, cattle, and pianos to raise funds.

“By the time I got to Black Mountain, its faculty and student body were very small indeed,” says Creeley. “The classes I taught were about six to eight people, period—the entire student body ranged from thirty to twenty as I recall. At that point the structure and operation of the college was all but derelict.”

While its administration was disintegrating, Black Mountain entered a period of flourishing productivity and artistic collaboration that continued to attract talented artists. Ben Shahn, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Fielding Dawson, Joel Oppenheimer, and John Chamberlain taught at the college. In the summer of 1951, students witnessed Shahn debating the relative merits of figurative and abstract art with Motherwell; Shahn painted designs for Nick Cernovich’s dance; and writers who would become known as the “Black Mountain poets” collaborated with artists in magazines such as Black Mountain Review, Cid Corman’s Origin, and Jonathan Williams’s Jargon.

“I began Jargon only a few weeks before going to Black Mountain,” says Williams. “The first thing I did there was Jargon number two, which was a poem by Joel Oppenheimer dedicated to Kathryn Litz—a dancer who was at Black Mountain that summer—and I asked Bob Rauschenberg for a work to put in with the poem.” That summer, Litz had danced in a stage production called The Glyph, with a set designed by Ben Shahn and text by Olson.

Williams went on to publish Olson’s Maximus poems, as well as collections by Creeley, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky, Michael McClure, Paul Metcalf, Mina Loy, and Lorine Niedecker. Jargon continues to publish new and innovative work and to encourage collaboration between writers and visual artists. “Jargon is very much as it was. I use a lot of photography in the design of the books,” says Williams. “I like the idea of two people working together in a book.”

“The support Jonathan Williams’s Jargon Press gave me was very, very helpful,” says Creeley. “Cid Corman is also an old friend indeed and Origin’s publication of my work as a feature in its second issue again let me take my writing seriously and found me a company I have never lost and forever value. That’s what magazines really are for, as Olson writes, ‘we who live our lives quite properly in print’—or words to that effect.”

Creeley’s endeavor to combine words and imagery, which preceded his association with Black Mountain, continues today. A current traveling exhibition entitled “In Company” showcases Creeley’s affiliation with visual artists, several of whom he worked with while at Black Mountain.

Black Mountain in the mid-fifties was a locus of artistic vitality. Robert Duncan wrote in the 1956 Black Mountain Review that “in American poetry the striding syllables show an aesthetic based on energies.” He also recognized the “bravura brushstroke” in abstract expressionist painting: “the power and movement of the arm itself . . . the involvement of the painter in the act.”

Donald Allen calls Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Williams, and their peers “our avant-garde, the true continuers of the modern movement in American poetry,” in his preface to the 1960 New American Poetry. “These poets have already created their own tradi-tion, their own press, and their public.”

The vision of experimental education delineated by Black Mountain’s founders in the early 1930s was dramatically revised by the time lack of funds caused the school to close its doors in 1957, yet the college continued to draw individuals interested in intellectual and artistic freedom and to nurture ground-breaking artists. One former student said that at any place on the campus, day or night, “there were always people arguing and talking. . . . All kinds of people with completely different, associated interests and fields.”

“Black Mountain being so small and freewheeling, Olson’s class began after supper,” Jonathan Williams recalls. “It would go on until about 10:30 and then everybody would get in cars and race down to the local beer joint, Ma Peak’s Tavern, until that closed around twelve, and then people would bring cases of beer back to the college. I don’t know what those poor mountain folks thought of all those wild intellectuals and exotic folks from New York. A lot of interesting talk got talked down there— there were big booths, so you could get seven or eight people in one of those booths and jabber away. That’s what Dahlberg said, ‘Literature is the way we ripen ourselves by conversation.’”

“There was one occasion when Olson’s class ran for two days—it got so interesting at dawn of the first day that people said listen, we’re really getting somewhere, let’s just keep going. It went on all that day and all the next night.”

McCartney art makes UK debut

Sir Paul McCartney

Abstract art: Sir Paul started painting when he was 40

The first UK exhibition of Sir Paul McCartney’s art work has opened in Bristol.The 58-year-old singer has been painting since he was 40, but he has only exhibited his work once before, in Germany last year.Featuring a selection of the 500 canvasses he has painted, the exhibition, at the Arnolfini Gallery, coincides with the publication of a book on his art.Speaking on the eve of the exhibition’s opening, Sir Paul said he had always wanted to be an artist, and felt he had missed out on formal training in his teenage years.”I always liked drawing as a kid and I liked the idea of painting but I felt there was some sort of reason why I shouldn’t, because I hadn’t been trained, because I hadn’t been to art college, because I was just a working class person,” he said.Abstract art

Sir Paul recounted how a conversation with US artist Willem de Kooning prompted him to pick up palette and brushes.

Willem de Koonig

Willem de Kooning, abstract artist who inspired Sir Paul, died in 1997

While looking at one of the late painter’s works Sir Paul asked de Kooning: “At the risk of appearing gauche, what is it, Bill?”De Kooning, an abstract expressionist, replied: “I dunno, looks like a couch, huh?”

“I thought his painting looked like a purple mountain and he thought it looked like a couch, but the fact that he said that it didn’t matter what it was just freed me,” Sir Paul said.

Spat with Lennon

The exhibition coincides with the recent re-publication of an interview fellow Beatle John Lennon gave to Rolling Stone magazine in 1970.

Lennon attacks Sir Paul in the interview, but the musician pointed out that it came when the band members were going through their worst crisis.

John Lennon

John Lennon: Interview ‘hurt a lot at the time’ according to Sir Paul

“It hurt a lot at the time but we got back together as friends and he is on record as saying a lot of that slagging off he gave me was really just him crying for help,” Sir Paul said.“He could have been boozed out of his head, as he was during that period, he could have been crazed on this, that or the other substance.

“But we did get very friendly, and he did tell me that a lot of those things he said he didn’t mean.

“I was very lucky in as much as before he got killed we were able to tell each other we loved each other,” he added.

Willem de Kooning chronology

de Kooning with painting, 1946. Photograph by Harry Bowden, 10x9in. Archives of American Art.

1904 April 24, Willem de Kooning is born in Port of Rotterdam, Holland, to Leendert de Kooning (b. February 10, 1876) and Cornelia Nobel de Kooning (b. March 3, 1877). He has one older sister, Marie (b. 1899). (His mother later gives birth to three more daughters, none of whom live past one year.)

1909 Parents divorce; court awards custody of five-year-old Willem to his father. His mother, however, kidnaps Willem and is later awarded full custody.

1916 Completes grammar school.

1916-1920 Begins training in commercial art under Jan and Jaap Giding, proprietors of a large commercial art firm, with whom he resides. Enrolls in the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium, attending night classes until 1924, when he graduates with certifications in both carpentry and art.

1920 Leaves the Giddings to begin training with Bernard Romein, noted art director of a large department store in Rotterdam.

1924-1926 Travels to Antwerp and enrolls in the Van Schelling School of Design, commuting to Brussels to study simultaneously at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, supporting himself with commercial work.

The Kiss, 1925. Graphite on paper, 48.3×33.5cm. Allan Stone Gallery, New York City.

1926 Immigrates to United States as a stow-away on the SS Shelly, arriving in Newport News, Virginia on July 30. Takes ship to Boston, Massachusetts, then travels by train to Rhode Island. Settles in Hoboken, New Jersey, and finds lodging at the Dutch Seaman’s Home. Becomes acquainted with other artists and moves to New York City. Works as commercial artist and as a sign-painter, window dresser, and carpenter.

1927 Moves to Manhattan and begins working for Eastman Brothers, a design firm. Meets Misha Reznikoff, who is later instrumental in securing his 1948 summer teaching job at Black Mountain College.

1928 Spends the summer at the artists’ colony in Woodstock, New York.

1929 Becomes associated with modern artists John Graham and Stuart Davis. Buys Capehart hi-fi sound system, spending nearly six months’ salary. Frequents George’s in the Village and the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem with David Margoli and other artists.

1930 Meets David Smith and Arshile Gorky. Moves into studio apartment with Gorky. Works as a window dresser for A.S. Beck, a chain of shoe stores in New York. Meets Virginia “Nini” Diaz, with whom he goes to Woodstock, New York. in late May. Moves to 348 W. 55th Street with Diaz in the autumn; Diaz’s mother moves in. Diaz has first of three abortions, the last in 1935, which leaves her unable to conceive.

1932 Moves to Greenwich Village with Diaz.

1934 Joins Artist’s Union, which leads to attending John Reed Club (a pro- Communist group) meetings, despite his anti-Commuist leanings. Meets Julie Browner in May and begins relationship; Diaz moves out. Returns to Woodstock and rents home with Browner for the summer. Invites Diaz to join them, which she does, resulting in a ménage à trois. Invites Marie Marchowski and her friend to join them; they also move in. Returns to New York City, live at 40 Union Square, a home owned by friend and architect Mac Vogel. Browning returns from Woodstock; she and de Kooning move to 145 West 21st Street, then to 145 West 23rd Street.

1935 Meets Rudy Burckhardt and Edwin Denby, who become first collectors of de Kooning’s work. Begins full-time employment with the mural division of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, one of which is the Williamsburg Federal Housing Project in Brooklyn. Makes pivotal decision to devote his life to art, inspired by WPA director Burgoyne Diller. Leaves A.S. Beck to pursue art full time. Meets art critic, Harold Rosenberg. His mother comes to visit.

1936 Moves with Browner to commercially-zoned 156 West 22nd Street. Meets artist Mark Rothko. Unfinished work for the Williamsburg mural is included in group exhibition New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, September 14-October 12; this is his first public recognition in America. Declines participation in the American Abstract Artists group.

1937 System and Dialectics of Art, by John Graham, is published, naming de Kooning one of eight painters he considered “outstanding.” Arshile Gorky paints Portrait of Master Bill, a painting of de Kooning. Resigns from the WPA in August when “American citizens only” policy is announced, effective post-July. Begins work on a mural, Medicine, for the World’s Fair on the Hall of Pharmacy building; work on this continues until early 1939.

1938 Browner moves in with Diaz. Meets Elaine Marie Fried, a fellow artist and teacher. Paints a series of male figures, including Two Men Standing, A Man, and Seated Figure. Begins abstractions Pink Landscape and Elegy.

1939 Becomes influenced by the Surrealist style of Gorky and Picasso and the Gestural style of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Suffers financially; tutors local art students. Becomes engaged to Fried. Visits Balcomb Greene in Fishkill. With other artists, petitions the Museum of Modern Art to show the work of Earl Kerkam after his death.

The Glazier, 1940. Oil on canvas, 54×44 in. Metropolitan Museum. Figure.

1940 Alcoholism and poverty are both significant. Becomes identified with the Abstract Expressionist movement. Drawings appear in Harper’s Bazaar. On May 14, his birthplace, Rotterdam, is hit by Germans. Harper’s Bazaar commissions four hairstyle sketches, with Elaine as model, for $75 each.

1941 Attends Miro exhibition. Is influenced by Matta, with whom he and Gorky become friends.

1942 Work is featured in the January 20-February 6 John Graham exhibition at McMillan, Inc. Drawing of a sailor with pipe is used in advertisement for Model Tobacco in Life Magazine.

1943 George Keller promises a one-man show at his Bignou Gallery; de Kooning fails to send sufficient work to exhibit. A group show included Pink Landscape and Elegy; both were bought by Helena Rubenstein for $1,050. Moved to 156 West 22nd Street. In summer, meets Franz Kline at Conrad Marca Relli’s 148 West 4th Street studio. Marries Elaine Fried on December 9. Shortly thereafter, he discovers her in bed with ex-lover, Robert Jonas.

1944 Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States features de Kooning’s work at the Cincinnati Art Museum, February 8 – March 12. After closing, the exhibition moves to the Mortimer Brandt Gallery. Sidney Janis publishes the book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America.

1945 Painting The Netherlands wins competition sponsored by the Container Corporation of America in January. The Wave is shown in the Autumn Salon at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century exhibition in the fall. Elaine sails to Provincetown with physicist Bill Hardy; de Kooning disapproves. Paints Pink Angels.

1946 Inspired by Pollock and Kline, begins first black-and-white abstracts. Charles Egan opens gallery at 63 East 57th Street. Marie Marchowsky commissions backdrop for a dance performance at New York Times Hall; de Kooning and Resnick collaborate on the project. Rents a studio with Jack Tworkov. Contacts father by letter in November requesting to see him. His father encourages him to seek more stable employment.

Valentine, 1947. Oil and enamel. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Abstract.

1947 Creates the black-and-white painting, Orestes, entitled by Tiger’s Eye magazine.

1948 Charles Egan Gallery arranges first one-man show on April 12, consisting of black-and-white enamels includingPainting, Village, Square & Dark Pond; reviews are favorable. Museum of Modern Art purchases Painting for $700; it is the only sale of the exhibition. Teaches summer session at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Returns with student Pat Passlof.. Arshile Gorky hangs himself July 21. Elaine has affairs with Charles Egan, a brief fling with Harold Rosenburg, and then an affair withThomas Hess; the latter relationship lasts until the early 1950s. Willem has numerous trysts and involvements.Mailbox is shown at the Whitney’s annual show of American art the fall. Life magazine names de Kooning one of the five “young extremists.”

1949 Meets Mary Abbott; begins affair which extends intermittently until the mid-1950s. Is introduced to projector by Franz Kline; begins series of large canvas abstractions. Gives first public statement at The Subjects of the Artist School. Drinking increases. Rents cottage with Elaine in Provincetown. PaintsSailcloth and Two Women on a Wharf. Sidney Janis Gallery features portrait of de Kooning with Elaine in exhibition.Intrasubjectives exhibition at Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, September 4 – October 3, includes de Kooning. Opens restaurant, The Club, with other artists.

1950 Begins Woman I; at nearly seven feet in height, it is his largest, completes in 1952. Participates with Alfred Barr in the Venice Biennale exhibition of younger American Painters in the U.S. Pavilion, June 8-October 15. Young Painters in the U.S. and France exhibits Woman (1949-1950) at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Joins symposium which writes letter of protest to New York Herald Tribune regarding the national jury of selection for the Metropolitan Museum of Art; group pickets the Museum and refuses to submit work. New York Herald Tribune calls the group “The Irascible Eighteen.” Protest is covered in numerous national magazines. Teaches at Yale School of Art until 1952. Helps title Franz Kline’s first one-man show.

1951 Excavation is exhibited in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at the Museum of Modern Art, January 23 – March 25. Speaks at symposium organized by the Museum of Modern Art. Holds one-man show at Egan Gallery in April, with limited sales and no proceeds after expenses. Participates inNinth Street Exhibition. Receives financial support from Sidney Janis, contingent upon agreement to call his studio the Janis Gallery. Excavation wins $4,000 first prize in the 60th Annual American Exhibition: Paint and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. One of 20 artists exhibited in the American Vanguard Art for Paris exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, December 26 – January 5, 1952.

1952 Abandons Woman I, but revisits at the urging of art historian Meyer Sharpiro in June; completes in mid-June, but begins reworking in December. Starts several new “Woman” works. Elaine accompanies him to the Hamptons. Moves to 88 East 10th Street; spends much time with Harold Rosenberg. Meets art student Joan Ward, who becomes pregnant; the pregnancy is aborted.

Woman I, 1950. Oil on canvas, 192.7×147.3. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1953 Officially changes studio name to Janis Gallery. Exhibits small retrospective at the Workshop Center for the Arts in Washington and School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. First show at Sidney Janis Gallery opens in March. Drinking increases, as does continual reworking of paintings.

1954 Participates in Venice Biennale with Excavation; becomes famous as leading Abstract Expressionism artist. Has affair with Marisol Escobar. Rents house in Bridgehampton in the summer with Elaine, Ward, Ludwig Sander, and Franz Kline. Sells pictures to Martha Jackson and uses money for fare for his mother to visit. Begins painting abstract landscapes, using bright “circus colors.”

1955 Joan Ward becomes pregnant.

1956 Ward gives birth to Johanna Lisbeth (Lisa) de Kooning on January 29. Has second one-man show at Sidney Janis Gallery, April 3; the show is a sell-out. Jackson Pollock and Edith Metzger die in car crash August 11. Elaine returns from Europe and joins de Kooning, Ward and Lisa at Martha’s Vineyard.

1957 Has affair with Pollock’s widow, Ruth Kligman. Later has affair with actress Shirley Stoler; allegedly offers her painting, which she refuses. Creates abstract landscapes, continues “Woman” art from 1957- 1961.

Two figures in landscape. Oil. National Galleyr of Australia. Painting.

1958 Takes Ruth Kligman to Cuba in February; they drift apart but reunite and spend early summer at Martha’s Vineyard together. Meets attorney Lee Eastman. Travels to Europe to meet Kligman. Hires Bernard Reis as accountant in May.

1959 Moves studio to 831 Broadway. Monograph on de Kooning by Thomas B. Hess is published by Braziller in New York. Sidney Janis Gallery opens exhibition of new large abstractions on May 4; all pieces sell. Woman series and some urban landscapes are shown at The New American Painting as shown in 8 European Countries 1958-1959 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, May 28 – September 8. Buys 4.2 acres in the Springs of Long Island on June 23. Stays with Kligman in Rome from July 28 until January 1960, where he begins working with black enamel mixed with pumice, also produces several collages. Ward moves to San Francisco with Lisa. Work is featured in Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, December 16 – February 17, 1960.

1960 Michael Sonnabend and Robert Snyder make film documentary which features Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans. Returns from Italy and hires young California artist Dane Dixon as assistant. Grove Press publishes De Kooning, by Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh. Spends summer in Southhampton. Visits Joan Ward and Lisa in San Francisco; visits galleries and does lithographs in Berkelely. Convinces Ward to return to New York. Drinking escalates.

Waves, 1960. Lithograph, 109x73cm, Yale University Gallery. Print.

1961 Buys more land in the Springs. Has affair with Marina Ospina.

1962 Becomes American citizen. March exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery fails. Meets Mera McAlister in March; affair lasts until winter. Sidney Janis allows Allan Stone to handle some small works; Newman- De Kooning, an exhibition of two founding fathers opens at the Allan Stone Gallery at 48 East 86th Street, October 23. The New Realists group show runs October 31 – December 1 at the Sidney Janis Gallery. Elaine paints portrait of President Kennedy for the Harry S. Truman Library.

1963 Moves back to the Springs in March, resides with Ward and Lisa. Later moves to East Hampton, Long Island. PaintsClam Diggers. Begins affair with neighbor Susan Brockman in the summer; moves in with Brockman and her friend, Clare Hooten. Later moves with Brockman to cottage on Barnes Landing, then to house owned by Bernice D’Vorazon. Later stays with John and Rae Ferren, then rents home near studio on Woodbine Drive. Splits from Brockman, but reunites in winter. Is hospitalized for alcoholism, but drinks again after release. Produces only one painting, Two Standing Women.

1964 Plans 1968 retrospective with Eduard de Wilde from the Stedelijk Museum in Holland. Ward and Lisa move to 3rd Avenue apartment. Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom in September. Becomes friends with art collector Joseph Hirshhorn. Harold Rosenberg writes profile for Vogue magazine.

1965 The Institute of Contemporary Art features de Kooning inThe Decisive Years, 1943 to 1953, exhibiting January 13 – February 19. Ends relationship with Sidney Janis, resulting in multiple lawsuits. Rents cottage with Brockman in the spring; relationship ends shortly thereafter. Accepts retrospective at Smith College, April 8 – May 2. Gives paintings to Ward and Lisa; draws up will, leaving most of his money to Lisa. Personal assistant John McMahon becomes part-time employee; Michael Wright is hired. Intermittent hospitalizations for alcoholism. Has affair with Molly Barnes. Police Gazette sells for $37,000, October 13.

1966 Enters Southampton Hospital for alcoholism in January. Attends Lisa’s birthday party in New York. Becomes involved with anti-war protests, grows hair. Draws Women Singing I,Women Singing II, and Screaming Girls.

1967 Walker and Company publishes 24 charcoal drawings produced in 1966. Joins prestigious New York gallery M. Knoedler and Company to start contemporary art department. Eastman negotiates $100,000 annual guarantee for first refusal of work. Provides 22 additional paintings on August 4, including several of the Women on the Sign series. Ward and Lisa return to the Springs. First exhibition at M. Knoedler and Company opens November 10; works include Woman Sag Harbour, Woman Accobanac, Woman Springs, and Woman, Montaulk. Despite negative reviews, some sell. Enters Southampton Hospital for alcoholism in December.

1968 Michael Wright resigns. Visits Europe, returns to Holland for major retrospective at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, accompanied by Ward, Lisa, and Leo Cohan. (Exhibition begins there September 18, travels to London on December 8, then New York, March 5 – April 26, 1969.) Sees sister, Marie, and step-brother, Koos Lassoy; they visit their mother September 19, who dies October 8. Has car crash on Thanksgiving after drinking, he and Ward survive.

1969 Retrospect of 147 paintings, pastels, collages and drawings is held at the Museum of Modern Art, March 5 – April 26, to mixed reviews. Begins renovations of home with Ward in spring. Takes Brockman to Italy in summer; upon return, stays with her and visits Ward and Lisa. Begins sculpting in bronze. Hires David Christian to make enlarged experimental version of previous small work, Seated Woman.

1970 Visits Japan. Works on lithography; produces Love to Wakako and Mr. and Mrs. Krishner. Has affair with Emilie (Mimi) Kilgore in August; proclaims true love.

Minnie Mouse, 1971. Lithograph, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Print.

Landscape at Stanton Street, 1971. Lithograph, 75.8x56cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Print.

1971 Sculpts Clam Digger. Moves back into studio in August. Exhibits Seven by de Kooning at the Museum of Modern Art in December.

1972 Takes Mimi to attend the Venice Bienne in June. Has final exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery (part of legal settlement) in October. Lisa moves to New York, residing with de Kooning before taking apartment at 3rd Avenue and 10th Street.

1973 Enters Southampton Hospital with liver and pancreas damage in February. Undergoes rehabilitation in October and November.

1974 Traveling exhibition is organized by Fourcade, Droll. Inc., which runs until early 1977. Woman V sells for $850,000 in September, a record price for a living American artist. Dane Dixon becomes full-time assistant after McMahon leaves.

1975 Exhibits in Japan and Paris. Proposes to Kilgore, who declines. Completes 24 works in six months. Exhibits at Fourcade, Droll, Inc. in October.

Two Trees, 1975. Oil on canvas. Thought Factory. Painting.

1976 Hirshhorn Museum and the U.S. Information Agency organize major traveling exhibition to tour eleven cities in Europe. Xavier Fourcade becomes exclusive art dealer of de Kooning; mounts show of 12 new works, to favorable reviews.

1977 Attends Alcoholics Anonymous with Elaine.

1978 Willem de Kooning in East Hampton exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, February 10 – April 23, is successful. American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist exhibit features de Kooning at the opening of the new East Building of the National Gallery in Washington in May. Goes on binge in June after several friends, including Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess, die.

1979 Stops painting. Drinking continues.

1980 Works becomes graphic. From 1980 to 1987, Tom Ferrarra is assistant.

1981 Lisa begins building house on studio grounds. Revises will to include Elaine as equal beneficiary with Lisa. Begins painting again in spring.

1982 February issue of Art News features Willem de Kooning: I Am Only Halfway Through, by Avis Berman; cover photograph of de Kooning ` and Paul McCartney taken by Linda Eastman, wife of McCartney and daughter of Lee Eastman. Dustin Hoffman films documentary, De Kooning on de Kooning forStrokes of Genius series in March. Attends premier. Also attends White House dinner to honor Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands in April. New work is exhibited as New Paintings: 1981- 1982 at the Fourcade, Droll Gallery, March 17 – May 1.

1983 Finishes 54 paintings with the help of staff assistants. Is encouraged by Fourcade and Eastman to authorize enlarged photographs of sculptures. Untitled #2 is cast in a sterling silver, limited edition by Gemini Foundry in California. Allan Stone buys Two Women for $1.2 million in May. Willem de Kooning: Drawing, Paintings, Sculpture opens at the Whitney Museum of Art on December 15.

1984 Finishes 51 paintings. Receives commission to paint triptych for St. Peter’s Church in New York City; paintsHallelujah, which fails to receive hoped-for price of $900,000 and is taken down at the insistence of the congregation.

1985 Paints 63 pieces. Early signs of Alzheimer’s disease are apparent. Works with help from Elaine and assistants onUntitled XIII and Untitled XX. Last show at the Fourcade, Droll Gallery, Exhibition of de Kooning’s recent work from 1984-1985is held in October.

1986 Completes 43 works. Exhibition of Willem de Kooning’s work from 1983-1986 exhibits at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London.

1987 Does 26 paintings via projection of old sketches onto canvases by assistants. Pink Lady sells for $3.63 million. Xavier Fourcade dies of AIDS; de Kooning is not told. Elaine is diagnosed with lung cancer.

1988 Paints 27 paintings. Elaine authorizes a series of prints; encourages the changing of the will to make Lisa sole beneficiary. Attempt is blocked by Eastman, who remains executor. Elaine undergoes radiation treatments at Sloan-Kettering.

1989 Elaine dies at age 70; de Kooning is never told. Lisa and Eastman file petition declaring de Kooning incompetent. Eastman also attempts to become sole conservator, charging Lisa with mismanagement; court rules they remain co-conservators. Enters Southampton Hospital in May for a hernia operation, then in July for prostate surgery.

Untitled XXII, 1983. Oil on canvas, 70x80in. Saint Louis Museum of Art. Painting.

1990 Stops painting. Mini-retrospective, Willem de Kooning: An Exhibition of Paintings is held at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, September – October. De Kooning / Dubuffet: The Woman is shown at the Pace Gallery from December until January, 1991.

1993 Willem de Kooning from the Hirshhorn Museum Collection opens at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on October 21. Jennifer McLaughlin resigns; she is his final assistant.

1994 The Naitonal Gallery of Art in Washington exhibitsWillem de Kooning: Paintings, May – September 5.

1996 The Academie Van Beeldende Kunsten en Technishche Wetenschappen, where de Kooning studied in Amsterdam, officially changes its name to the Willem de Kooning Academy.

1997 Dies March 19, 1997 in the Springs. Funeral is attended by some 300 friends and associates, including Ruth Kligman, Susan Brockman, Molly Barnes, and Emilie Kilgore. Lisa is guest speaker.

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Great article

WILLEM de KOONING (1904–1997)

Asheville, 1948

Willem de Kooning’s Asheville takes its name from the North Carolina town near Black Mountain College where de Kooning taught in the summer of 1948. A small but extremely complex work, it gathers together numerous, often oblique allusions, including references to the college and sections that recall de Kooning’s early training in crafts such as marbling, woodgraining, and lettering.De Kooning’s works often blur the distinctions between drawings, studies, and paintings. Rather than the traditional academic progression from study to finished painting, de Kooning creates a constant flow and exchange of ideas and forms across different media. Four other versions ofAsheville show shapes similar to those found in The Phillips Collection’s painting, suggesting that de Kooning consciously refined the seemingly random forms of the Phillips painting through his manipulations of form in the related works.Asheville is an important example of de Kooning’s intricate experiments in “collage painting” of the late 1940s in which he used collage procedures, combining different materials such as torn paper and drawings to create illusions that might be used as a source for visual ideas. These techniques assisted the artist in working out a final composition that was free from any actual collaged elements. In the completed work, de Kooning created jumps and visual ruptures between passages that mimic collage. Additional deceptions in Asheville include the illusion of a tack holding a cut-out form at the upper left and a depiction of paper peeling from the surface to the left of what appears to be a mouth at the picture’s center.De Kooning enhanced these effects by scraping down and building up the surface of the painting numerous times. This layering blends spontaneity and measured thought, giving Asheville a look of immediacy and chance, though de Kooning actually constructed the painting thoughtfully over a number of months. In addition, he interspersed sinuous black lines throughout the work with a liner’s brush, a tool with unusually long brush hairs traditionally used by sign painters. These gestures of black tracery resemble the spontaneous, unconscious marks of Surrealism’s psychic automatism, but upon closer inspection they reveal de Kooning’s technical mastery of the brush and reflect his fascination with precise line.Content in Asheville is suggested through momentary glimpses of reality. The skyline noted near the upper-center edge of the painting suggests the Blue Ridge Mountains looming over the grounds of Black Mountain College. Beneath this passage is an area of blue that may refer to Lake Eden, which was adjacent to the school. Additional fragments include eyes, hands, and a mouth, as well as a window of green, an effective foil for the interplay between indoor and outdoor space in the picture.Central to de Kooning’s art is the ambiguity and multiplicity of meanings through appropriations and transformations of reality. At the time de Kooning painted Asheville, the abstract expressionists struggled to come to terms with a multiplicity of ideas: the emotional legacy of World War II, the heritage of modernism, and the array of influences available to them in New York. De Kooning responded to this flux of ideas and experiences with an extraordinary degree of self-conscious control. His depictions of collage in Asheville are characteristic of a measured approach that allowed him to respect older traditions of figuration, illusion and craft, while simultaneously engaging more radical modern idioms.

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 55 THE BEATLES (Part G, The Beatles and Rebellion) (Feature on artist Wallace Berman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 54 THE BEATLES (Part F, Sgt Pepper’s & Eastern Religion) (Feature on artist Richard Lindner )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 52 THE BEATLES (Part D, There is evidence that the Beatles may have been exposed to Francis Schaeffer!!!) (Feature on artist Anna Margaret Rose Freeman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 49 THE BEATLES (Part A, The Meaning of Stg. Pepper’s Cover) (Feature on artist Mika Tajima)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 48 “BLOW UP” by Michelangelo Antonioni makes Philosophic Statement (Feature on artist Nancy Holt)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 47 Woody Allen and Professor Levy and the death of “Optimistic Humanism” from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Plus Charles Darwin’s comments too!!! (Feature on artist Rodney Graham)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 46 Friedrich Nietzsche (Featured artist is Thomas Schütte)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 21 (Dr. Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State, “…most scientists don’t think enough about God…There’s no evidence that we need any supernatural hand of God”)

PBS Show on Black Mountain College:

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THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 15 Willem de Kooning (Part B)

August 3, 2015, 3:42 am

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The Longest Ride Movie CLIP – Bull Riding Lesson (2015) – Britt Robertson, Scott Eastwood Movie HD

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Scott Eastwood Interview – The Longest Ride

The Longest Ride Official Trailer #1 (2015) – Britt Robertson Movie HD


	For a short time in the middle of the twentieth century a small town in North Carolina became a hub of American cultural production. The town was Black Mountain and the reason was Black Mountain College. Founded in 1933, the school was a reaction to the more traditional schools of the time. At its core was the assumption that a strong liberal and fine arts education must happen simultaneously inside and outside the classroom. Combining communal living with an informal class structure, Black Mountain created an environment conducive to the interdisciplinary work that was to revolutionize the arts and sciences of its time.Among Black Mountain’s first professors were the artists Josef and Anni Albers, who had fled Nazi Germany after the closing of the Bauhaus. It was their progressive work in painting and textiles that first attracted students from around the country. Once there, however, students and faculty alike realized that Black Mountain College was one of the few schools sincerely dedicated to educational and artistic experimentation. By the forties, Black Mountain’s faculty included some of the greatest artists and thinkers of its time: Walter Gropius, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Alfred Kazin, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Goodman. Students found themselves at the locus of such wide ranging innovations as Buckminster Fuller‘s Geodesic Dome, Charles Olson’s Projective Verse, and some of the first performance art in the U.S.By the late 40s, word of what was happening in North Carolina had started to spread throughout the country. With a Board of Directors that included William Carlos Williams and Albert Einsteinand impressive programs in poetry and photography, Black Mountain had become the ideal of American experimental education. Its concentration on cross-genre arts education would influence the programs of many major American institutions.In 1953, as many of the students and faculty left for San Francisco and New York, those still at Black Mountain saw the shift in interest and knew the school had run its course. Black Mountain had existed on its own terms, and on its own terms had succeeded in expanding the possibilities of American education. Realizing that they had essentially achieved their goals, they closed their doors forever. Black Mountain’s legacy continued however, with former students such as painter Robert Rauschenberg, publisher Jonathan Williams, and poet John Wieners bringing the revolutionary spirit of their alma mater to the forefront of a number of other cultural movements and institutions.

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Great article

“I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it – drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.”

WILLEM DE KOONING SYNOPSIS

After Jackson Pollock, de Kooning was the most prominent and celebrated of theAbstract Expressionist painters. His pictures typify the vigorous gestural style of the movement and he, perhaps, did more than any of his contemporaries to develop a radically abstract style of painting that fused Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism. Although he established his reputation with a series of entirely abstract pictures, he felt a strong pull towards traditional subjects and would eventually become most famous for his pictures of women, which he painted in spells throughout his life. Later he turned to landscapes, which were also highly acclaimed, and which he continued to paint even into his eighties, when his mind was significantly impaired by Alzheimer’s disease.

WILLEM DE KOONING KEY IDEAS

De Kooning strongly opposed the restrictions imposed by naming movements and, while generally considered to be an Abstract Expressionist, he never fully abandoned the depiction of the human figure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, de Kooning became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling and distorting his figures in the process.

Although known for continually reworking his canvases, de Kooning often left them with a sense of dynamic incompletion, as if the forms were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into definition. In this sense his paintings exemplify ‘action painting’ – they are like records of a violent encounter, rather than finished works in the old Beaux Arts tradition of fine painting.

Although he came to embody the popular image of the macho, hard-drinking artist – and his most famous Women series seems painted with angry vigor – de Kooning approached his art with careful thought and was considered one of the most knowledgeable among the artists associated with the New York School. He is thought to possessed the greatest facility and polished techniques of painters in the New York School, one that compares to that of Old Masters, and he looked to the likes of Ingres, Rubens and Rembrandt for inspiration.

MOST IMPORTANT ART

Seated Woman (1940)

Seated Woman was de Kooning’s first major painting of a woman, and it evolved, curiously, out of a commission for a slightly earlier picture, Portrait of a Woman (c.1940). The artist seems to have held on to the commissioned portrait and started to use it to develop new pictures. The earlier work was shaped in part by contemporary images of women in magazines and by de Kooning’s wife Elaine who had even stood in as a model when the portrait’s subject was not available. These factors surely encouraged de Kooning to see the possibilities of using a ‘portrait’ to represent womankind in general, rather than a specific individual. Seated Woman was also undoubtedly influenced by Arshile Gorky, in particular the figurative The Artist and his Mother, which Gorky worked on for almost fifteen years after 1926.

Oil and charcoal on masonite – The Philadelphia Museum of Art

WILLEM DE KOONING BIOGRAPHY

Childhood / Early Training

Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1904, Willem de Kooning was raised mostly by his mother, who owned a bar, after his parents divorced when he was three. He found his vocation early and left school when he was twelve to apprentice at a commercial design and decorating firm. He also studied at Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. During this period, he became interested in Jugendstil, the German variant of Art Nouveau, and its organic forms were significant in shaping his early style. However, he was soon distracted by the ascendant Dutch movement De Stijl, becoming particularly interested in its emphasis on purity of color and form, and its conception of the artist as a master craftsman.

After living for a year in Belgium in 1924, de Kooning returned to Rotterdam before travelling as a stowaway to the United States, arriving in Virginia in August 1926. He worked his way to Boston on a coal ship, then worked as a house painter in Hoboken, New Jersey before moving across the Hudson to Manhattan. There he took jobs in commercial art, designed window displays and produced fashion advertisements, work which would consume him for several years. De Kooning was still unable to devote himself to the art he loved, but he found the community of artists in New York too valuable to leave behind; when offered a salaried job in Philadelphia, he remarked that he would rather be poor in New York than rich in Philadelphia.

Willem de Kooning Biography

Several artists proved important for his development in those early years. He valued the example of Stuart Davis’ urbane modernism, as well as John Graham’s ideas, but Arshile Gorky was to be the biggest stylistic influence on de Kooning – “I met a lot of artists,” he once said, “but then I met Gorky.” Gorky had spent years working through Picasso’s Cubism and then Miró’s Surrealism before reaching his own mature style, and in subsequent years, de Kooning would follow a similar path: he was impressed by two major exhibitions he saw at MoMA in 1936, “Cubism and Abstract Art” and “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,” and he was powerfully influenced by a Picassoretrospective that was staged at the same museum in 1939.

De Kooning worked on projects for the WPA mural division from 1935-37, and for the first time he was able to focus entirely on fine art instead of commercial painting. His network expanded to include Harold Rosenberg, the art critic who later heralded him as a leader of action painting. And in 1936 he was included in the show New Horizons in American Art at MoMA. Men were often the subjects of his pictures in this period, and although they are often traditionally posed, the bodies of figures such as The Glazier (c.1940) were radically distorted and the planes flattened. De Kooning often struggled with certain details in his portraits – hair, hands and shoulders – and this encouraged a habit of scraping back and reworking areas of his pictures, which left them with the appearance of being unfinished. He also painted highly abstract pictures during this time, and these, such as The Wave (c.1942-44), are characterized by flat, biomorphic forms similar to those which had first attracted the young artist to Jugendstil.

Willem de Kooning Photo

In 1938, de Kooning took on Elaine Fried as an apprentice; she became his wife in 1943, and in time she would become a prominent Abstract Expressionist in her own right. The two shared a tempestuous, alcohol-fueled relationship, one which was not aided by extramarital affairs on both sides. Following their separation at the end of the 1950s, de Kooning had a child with another woman, and even had an affair with Ruth Kligman, the former lover of Jackson Pollock who had survived the car crash that killed him. However, Elaine and Willem reunited in the mid 1970s and remained together until her death in 1989.

WILLEM DE KOONING LEGACY

Although undoubtedly an equal of Jackson Pollock in talent and achievement, de Kooning’s work has proved less influential. His achievement was to blend Cubism,Expressionism and Surrealism, and he did so with astonishing power throughout a career remarkable for its consistent high quality. Yet as artists’ concerns moved away from those of modernism, his work seemed less relevant, and for a generation of less macho, more Pop-influenced artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, de Kooning represented the epitome of the grand heroics they distrusted. Rauschenberg himself would express their distance from him most powerfully – and famously – when he purchased a drawing by de Kooning, erased it, and exhibited the result as his own artwork (Erased de Kooning Drawing, (1953)). Nevertheless, de Kooning’s influence on painters remains important even to this day, particularly those attracted to gestural styles; the highly abstract and erotic work of prominent 1990s painter Cecily Brown is inconceivable without his example.

Original content written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by

Willem de Kooning. [Internet]. 2015. TheArtStory.org website. Available from:
http://www.theartstory.org/artist-de-kooning-willem.htm [Accesed 03 May 2015]

WILLEM DE KOONING QUOTES

“I don’t paint to live, I live to paint”

“I’d like to get all the colors in the world into one painting”.

“I never was interested in how to make a good painting.. But to see how far one can go”.

“Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped up in the melodrama of vulgarity.”

“I don’t paint with ideas of art in mind. I see something that excites me. It becomes my content.”

“Even abstract shapes must have a likeness”

“Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented”

INFLUENCES

ARTISTS

Pablo Picasso

Joan Miró

Piet Mondrian

Arshile Gorky

Chaim Soutine

FRIENDS

Clement Greenberg

Harold Rosenberg

Franz Kline

John Graham

MOVEMENTS

Cubism

De Stijl

Surrealism

Expressionism

Willem de Kooning

Years Worked: 1930 – 1990

ARTISTS

Robert Rauschenberg Overview

Robert Rauschenberg

Joan Mitchell Overview

Joan Mitchell

Franz Kline Overview

Franz Kline

Richard Diebenkorn Overview

Richard Diebenkorn

Cecily Brown Overview

Cecily Brown

FRIENDS

Harold Rosenberg Overview

Harold Rosenberg

Clement Greenberg Overview

Clement Greenberg

Arshile Gorky Overview

Arshile Gorky

MOVEMENTS

Pop Art Overview

Pop Art

Post-Painterly Abstraction Overview

Post-Painterly Abstraction

Neo-Expressionism Overview

Neo-Expressionism

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Good article


This is the PopLifeArt.com blog. I’ll use the blog to let you know what’s going on in the world of celebrity art.

	Paintings by Paul McCartney Like his former Beatles bandmates Ringo Starr and the late John Lennon, Paul McCartney is a painter. His interest in art developed in the 1960s through his friendship with gallery-owner Robert Fraser. Through Fraser McCartney met many well-known artists including Andy Warhol. He later became a fan of Rene Magritte. He used Magritte’s painting of an apple for the Apple Records logo. He also established a friendship with artist Willem de Kooning who is said to have had a large influence on McCartney’s artistic style. Paul McCartney took up painting in 1983. He exhibited his paintings for the first time in Siegen, Germany in 1999. The catalog from this exhibition was later released as a book titled Paul McCartney: Paintings. In 2002 he had a comprehensive exhibition of his artwork at the Walker Art Gallery in his home town of Liverpool. The image posted here is “Ancient Connections” by Paul McCartney. — See the Pop Life Art homepage for links to the artwork of Paul McCartney and other singers, musicians, and actors. — Paul McCartney Free Concert and Art Exhibit in the Ukraine (4/29/08) Photographs by Linda McCartney to go on Display in London (4/4/08)

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April 8th, 2009
Brad Blackman

Paul McCartney and Luigi’s Alcove

Category: Creativity,Inspiration, Motivation,Stuckness
No Comments »

Big Mountain Face

I’m sure you know Paul McCartney as a singer and song-writer. But did you know the ex-Beatle also paints?

A few years ago, I got the book Paul McCartney: Paintings. He does these big, expressive, semi-abstract pieces that have a sort of visceral effect, with lots of drips and runs. Very much influenced by Willem de Kooning’s abstract expressionism.

Great article on Black Mountain College:

Experimental liberal arts college at Black Mountain, NC, open from 1933 to 1957. In the 1940s and early 1950s it was a centre for a group of painters, architects, musicians and poets associated particularly with the development of performance and multimedia work, crossing many disciplines. It was founded by John Andrew Rice (1888–1968) and a group of students and staff from Rollins College, Winter Park, FL. It was located in the Blue Ridge Assembly Buildings, c. 29 km east of Asheville, NC, until 1941, when it moved to nearby Lake Eden until its closure. The progressive ideas of John Dewey influenced the interaction of formal education with community life, the absence of conventional grades and credits and the central importance accorded to the arts. The college was owned and administered by the staff. The setting was modest, and fewer than 1200 students attended in 24 years.

In the founding year Josef Albers, the first of many European refugees to teach at Black Mountain, came from Germany to teach art; through his activities the college disseminated Bauhaus teaching methods and ideas into American culture. The visual arts curriculum included courses in design and colour that later became a standard part of art education, as well as workshops in weaving, wood-working, printing, photography and bookbinding. Anni Albers, a former Bauhaus student, developed a weaving course that emphasized designing for industrial production. Xanti Schawinsky (1904–79), who studied with Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus, taught art and stage studies from 1936 to 1938 and directed Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion, one of the earliest performances of abstract theatre in the USA.

In 1944 Black Mountain College sponsored its first summer arts programme, which attracted many major artists for intense periods of teaching and participation in concerts, exhibitions, lectures and drama and dance performances. Among the European artists who taught were Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Leo Lionni (b1910), Amédée Ozenfant, Bernard Rudofsky (1905–88) and Ossip Zadkine. Other summer staff included Leo Amino (b 1911), John Cage, Mary Callery (1903–77), Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Jacob Lawrence (b 1917), Barbara Morgan (b 1900) and Robert Motherwell. Ilya Bolotowsky taught from 1946 to 1948.

After Josef Albers left in 1949, the central figure in the community was the poet and critic Charles Olson (1910–70), who taught at the college in 1948–9 and returned in 1951. Under his direction the college became a centre for the formulation of a new poetics based on open form and ‘projective verse’. The Black Mountain Review, edited by Robert Creeley (b 1926), was one of the most influential small-press journals of the period, and the college played a formative role in the revival of the small-press movement in the USA. Creeley, Joseph Fiore (b 1925), M. C. Richards (b 1916) and Robert Duncan (1919–88) were among the members of the young American staff. A ceramics course was added to the curriculum and the faculty included Robert Turner (b 1913), Karen Karnes (b 1925) and David Weinrib (b 1924). The summer sessions in the arts brought many artists to the campus, including Harry Callahan, Shōji Hamada, Franz Kline, Bernard Leach, Ben Shahn, Aaron Siskind, Jack Tworkov and Peter Voulkos (b 1924).

Albers and the other European artists brought the spirit of modernism to the progressive, experimental spirit of the founders, and the fusion of these two movements culminated in a creative atmosphere and an intense, intellectual community, receptive to experimental ventures in the arts. It was at Black Mountain College that Buckminster Fuller attempted to raise his first dome in 1948, that John Cage staged his first work of performance art in 1952, and that the Cunningham Dance Company was founded in 1953. Through the work of its students, among them Ruth Asawa (b 1926), John Chamberlain, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne (b 1929), Kenneth Snelson, Cy Twombly, Stanley Vanderbeek (1927–84) and Jonathan Williams (b1929), the college played a formative role in the definition of an American aesthetic and identity in the arts during the 1950s and 1960s.

Mary Emma Harris
From Grove Art Online

Spark’s latest ‘The Longest Ride’ filmed across NC

Like most of NC native Nicholas Sparks‘ stories, “The Longest Ride” is set in North Carolina and involves love stories that intertwine across time. In “The Longest Ride” Luke, a rodeo rider played by Clint Eastwood’s son Scott Eastwood, and Sophia, an art history major at Wake Forest University played by Britt Robertson, fall in love against a backdrop of North Carolina mountains and Piedmont hills. A second plot line features Ira, a WWII vet played by Alan Alda. Told mostly in flashback, this story is largely set at historic Black Mountain College, an experimental school just outside Asheville which left a huge legacy both in the arts and in education during its brief life.

Released by 20th Century Fox on April 10, 2015, the film was made in North Carolina, using locations across the state. Filming destinations included Wilmington, Winston-Salem, Jacksonville and the Yadkin River Valley, home of North Carolina’s largest wine area, as well as the NC mountains and the isolated peak of Pilot Mountain, just north of Winston-Salem.

“Nicholas Sparks, who makes his home in New Bern, N.C., finds endless inspiration in the history and beauty of North Carolina,” said Wit Tuttell, executive director of Visit North Carolina. “By using the natural landscapes to bring ‘The Longest Ride’ to the screen, the filmmakers have created a special invitation to explore the state’s scenery, heritage and an artistic streak that extends from the mountains to the coast.”

To help film tourists experience places featured in the film and the novel, Visit North Carolina has put together a four-day trip across the state (we think a week would do it more justice). Here are some highlights:

The itinerary begins in Asheville’s River Arts District, where you can join the stars in exploring some 189 working studios and dine in some of the trendiest restaurants in this foodie obsessed city. Consider an overnight stay at the Omni Grove Park Inn, with majestic views of the city and the mountains, where Alda and his bride, played by Oona Chaplin, honeymooned. Downtown Asheville is also a great spot to begin your exploration of the phenomenon that was Black Mountain College. The Asheville Art Museum houses the Black Mountain Collection which includes works by some of the most influential artists who made their home at the college including Elaine de Kooning, Ken Noland, and Ray Johnson. The Black Mountain College Museum and Event Center, located a block or so away, tells the history of this remarkable institution.

Day Two takes visitors down I-40 for a driveby of the old Black Mountain College campus on Lake Eden off Old Hwy 70. In operation from just 1933 to 1957, the grounds are now used as a boys camp, but regain some of their artistic spark during the Lake Eden Arts Festival, held twice a year. The artsy community of Black Mountain, home of numerous galleries and shops, is worth a visit year round.

Continue down I-40 to I-77 for a hike or horse ride on the trails at Pilot Mountain State Park, with 2,421-foot quartzite dome, a National Natural Landmark, climbed by Luke and Sophia in the movie. This is the heart of the Yadkin Valley wine region, with lots of options for tastings and dining, as well as accommodations on winery grounds. To complete the film experience, plan a stay at the Mitchell River House, Luke’s home in “The Longest Ride.”

Day Three heads for Winston-Salem, home of the lush campus of Wake Forest University, where Sophia studied art. Plan your trip into town through the towns of Pinnacle and King, location of the American Legion Complex scene of the movie’s rodeo action. The city of Winston-Salem is home to several important art galleries, including the Reynolda House Museum, once home of the Reynolds family, as well as the living history neighborhood of Old Salem. Follow Luke and Sophia’s steps to Sakura Japanese Restaurant & Sushi Bar or the elegant Fabian’s Restaurant.

Day Four of the itinerary travels to Wilmington, a 3.5 hour drive down I-40. Make a short detour at Exit 384 to visit the charming downtown of Wallace, NC, which stood in for downtown Greensboro during the era when Ira was growing up there. Locations from the film include Wallace storefronts that “played” Ira’s father’s haberdashery, the soda shop, bus station and newsstand.

Much of the filming of “The Longest Ride” took place in Wilmington, known as Hollywood East and the location of the sound stages of EUE/Screen Gems Studios, which are again open for touring during the travel season. Wilmington locations used in filming include the Temple of Israel, the Union Station Building, St. Mary’s Catholic School and homes in historic neighborhoods, best seen by horse-drawn carriage. The galleries of the Cameron Art Museum stood in for several of the museums visited in the film. Sign up for the Hollywood Location Walk to discover Wilmington locations used in many movies from “Blue Velvet” to “Iron Man 3” as well as many Sparks films and TV shows. Plan to stay at the Greystone Inn, where the “Longest Ride” party scene was filmed.

The final stop in the itinerary is nearby Caswell Beach, located on remote Oak Island, which served as a stand-in for the Outer Banks where Ruth’s family vacationed.

Learn more and access everything you need for planning a trip at VisitNC.com, or call 1-800-VISITNC (1-800-847-4862).

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FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 55 THE BEATLES (Part G, The Beatles and Rebellion) (Feature on artist Wallace Berman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 54 THE BEATLES (Part F, Sgt Pepper’s & Eastern Religion) (Feature on artist Richard Lindner )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 52 THE BEATLES (Part D, There is evidence that the Beatles may have been exposed to Francis Schaeffer!!!) (Feature on artist Anna Margaret Rose Freeman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 49 THE BEATLES (Part A, The Meaning of Stg. Pepper’s Cover) (Feature on artist Mika Tajima)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 48 “BLOW UP” by Michelangelo Antonioni makes Philosophic Statement (Feature on artist Nancy Holt)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 47 Woody Allen and Professor Levy and the death of “Optimistic Humanism” from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Plus Charles Darwin’s comments too!!! (Feature on artist Rodney Graham)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 46 Friedrich Nietzsche (Featured artist is Thomas Schütte)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 21 (Dr. Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State, “…most scientists don’t think enough about God…There’s no evidence that we need any supernatural hand of God”)

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THE ARTISTS, POETS and PROFESSORS of BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE (the college featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE) Part 16 Willem de Kooning (Part C)

August 10, 2015, 3:44 am

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Black Mountain College: A Thumbnail Sketch

Published on Aug 14, 2014

A 13 minute documentary about the legendary arts school in the mountains of North Carolina

Legend of Black Mountain

Uploaded on Apr 20, 2008

Black Mountain College was a phenomenal circumstance. The fact that so many artists of that level in their respective fields could organize and develop such an institution is unparalleled. Who would’ve thought that a small mountain town of western North Carolina would be their home, albeit for a short while.

The amazing setting and backstory of The #LongestRide Movie

March 1, 2015 by JENNIFER DONOVAN

20th Century Fox invited our writer, Jennifer Donovan, on an expenses-paid set visit to North Carolina for Nicholas Sparks’ new movie, The Longest Ride, in theaters April 10.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my visit to the set of The Longest Ride movie, focusing on the casting and the characters. In this post, I’m going to look at some of the interesting elements of the plot, which made for a great book, but will also look great on screen.

TLR-bull riding

Nicholas Sparks on the Bull-riding Element

One of the great things about this film, but the partnership that Fox had with the PBR to develop this film was like nothing you’ve ever seen. And it was necessary because people who make movies are good at making movies. And every time you see an animal in a movie, that animal is tame or trained, so they go to their spot, and so you know where to put the camera.

You don’t know where that bull is going, so how do you get Scott on the bull? How do you get the angle right? Well, guess who knows How to do that? The PBR, among other things. So, then Fox can do things that the PBR can’t with the level of quality of the camera. It’s the most realistic stuff. These are real cowboys. They’re from the PBR.

These are the real bulls from the PBR. I mean, you can look up the bull in the PBR. The thing is ranked number three in the world right now. It’s unbelievable.

TLR-Image6

Art in post-war North Carolina

In my post at 5 Minutes for Books, On Reading Nicholas Sparks for the First Time, I wrote about talking with one of the other bloggers for whom this was her first experience with a Nicholas Sparks novel. One of the things she noted, and that I liked about this novel as well, was the rich backstory and characterization of Ira and Ruth Levinson. The backdrop of art was interesting to me, not only because my daughter is an artist, but because I always love learning about a different culture or hobby or occupation while I’m reading fiction. Between bull riding and art collecting in post-war North Carolina, I learned a lot while reading The Longest Ride.

So, I have this idea for this story, and Ira and Ruth, and I have in my mind that they’re going to collect art. And I’m sitting there thinking, “How am I going to pull this off? I live in North Carolina, right. There’s a nice Jewish couple in North Carolina. If they’re in New York, maybe you could see it happening, right.”
So, I said to myself, “How can I make this seem believable?” So, my first notion was that they were just going to meet an artist who happened to be vacationing in North Carolina, befriend this person, man or woman, go with him to wherever the art scene was, and that’s how they got started.
So, that was my plan. So, I said, “Okay. So, let’s find a North Carolina artist who might have been around in the ’40s, ’50s. So, I Google like literally “North Carolina artists in the 1940s,” or something.
And boom, up pops Black Mountain College. And it turns out that Black Mountain College was this experimental college, ran for about 24 years in the 1930s to, I think, 1956 or 1957.
And it was the center of the modern art movement for American painters. Everyone from Willem de Kooning was there, to Rauschenberg, to Franz Kline, to Pat Passlof.
I mean, De Kooning’s paintings, they go for $350 million. He’s over here teaching at Black Mountain College. Buckminster Fuller was there. Robert DeNiro’s father, who was a very famous artist, he was a graduate of Black Mountain College.
Came in, they did painting and sculpture, whatever they did. And it was there, and it was a couple of hours away.
So, there I’m writing, I’m looking for an artist, and I find out that this key element that I need to make the art collecting believable, that center was like two hours from where I placed them originally.
I was like, “Wow.” So, I called my agent and I said, “You are not going to believe this. You are not going to believe what I just found.” And so, of course, then I learned all I could about Black Mountain College.

The Longest Ride is in theaters April 10.

Based on the bestselling novel by master storyteller Nicholas Sparks, THE LONGEST RIDE centers on the star-crossed love affair between Luke, a former champion bull rider looking to make a comeback, and Sophia, a college student who is about to embark upon her dream job in New York City’s art world. As conflicting paths and ideals test their relationship, Sophia and Luke make an unexpected connection with Ira, whose memories of his own decades-long romance with his beloved wife deeply inspire the young couple. Spanning generations and two intertwining love stories, THE LONGEST RIDE explores the challenges and infinite rewards of enduring love.

Starring: Britt Robertson, Scott Eastwood, Jack Huston, Oona Chaplin, and Alan Alda

Directed by: George Tillman, Jr.

Willem de Kooning was such a major figure in the art world and because of that I have dedicated the 14th, 15th and 16th posts in this series on him. Paul McCartney got interested in art through his friendship with Willem because Linda’s father had him as a client. Willem was a part of New York School of Abstract expressionism or Action painting, others included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart.

Black Mountain College: An Introduction

bmc logo by j.albers The story of Black Mountain College begins in 1933 and comprises a fascinating chapter in the history of education and the arts. Conceived by John A. Rice, a brilliant and mercurial scholar who left Rollins College in a storm of controversy, Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education. The events that precipitated the College’s founding occurred simultaneously with the rise of Adolf Hitler, the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, and the beginning of the persecution of artists and intellectuals on the European continent. Some of these people found their way to Black Mountain, either as students or faculty. Meanwhile, the United States was mired in the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt, committed to putting people back to work, established the Public Works Arts Project (a precursor of the WPA).

The founders of the College believed that the study and practice of art were indispensable aspects of a student’s general liberal arts education, and they hired Josef Albers to be the first art teacher. Speaking not a word of English, he and his wife Anni left the turmoil in Hitler’s Germany and crossed the Atlantic Ocean by boat to teach art at this small, rebellious college in the mountains of North Carolina.

Black Mountain College was fundamentally different from other colleges and universities of the time. It was owned and operated by the faculty and was committed to democratic governance and to the idea that the arts are central to the experience of learning. All members of the College community participated in its operation, including farm work, construction projects and kitchen duty. Located in the midst of the beautiful North Carolina mountains near Asheville, the secluded environment fostered a strong sense of individuality and creative intensity within the small College community.

Legendary even in its own time, Black Mountain College attracted and created maverick spirits, some of whom went on to become well-known and extremely influential individuals in the latter half of the 20th century. A partial list includes people such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, M.C. Richards, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Dorothea Rockburne and many others, famous and not-so-famous, who have impacted the world in a significant way. Even now, decades after its closing in 1957, the powerful influence of Black Mountain College continues to reverberate.

For more information:

A Radical Vision / Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College Project (maintained by Mary Emma Harris)
PBS American Masters: Black Mountain College

Willem de Kooning

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the German Wikipedia. (February 2015)

Click [show] on the right to read important instructions before translating. [show]

Willem de Kooning
De Kooning in his studio in 1961
Born	April 24, 1904 Rotterdam, Netherlands
Died	March 19, 1997 (aged 92) East Hampton, New York, United States^[1]
Nationality	Dutch, American
Known for	Abstract expressionism
Notable work	Woman I, Easter Monday,Attic, Excavation
Awards	Praemium Imperiale National Medal of Arts (1986)

Willem de Kooning (/ˈwɪləm də ˈkuːnɪŋ/;^[2] Dutch: [ˈʋɪləm də ˈkoːnɪŋ]; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.^[3]

In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as Abstract expressionism or Action painting, and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart.

Early life[edit]

Willem de Kooning, Woman V(1952–53), National Gallery of Australia

Woman III, (1953), private collection

Willem de Kooning (1968)

De Kooning as sculptor: Seated Woman on a Bench, bronze of 1972 (cast 1976), in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, in South Holland in the Netherlands, on April 24, 1904. His parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced in 1907, and de Kooning lived first with his father and then with his mother. He left school in 1916 and became an apprentice in a firm of commercial artists. Until 1924 he attended evening classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, the academy of fine arts and applied sciences of Rotterdam, now the Willem de Kooning Academie.^[3]

In 1926 de Kooning travelled to the United States as a stowaway on the Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina, and on August 15 landed at Newport News, Virginia. He stayed at the Dutch Seamen’s Home inHoboken and found work as a house-painter. In 1927 he moved to Manhattan, where he had a studio on West Forty-fourth Street. He supported himself with jobs in carpentry, house-painting and commercial art.^[3]

De Kooning began painting in his free time; in 1928 he joined the art colony at Woodstock, New York. He also began to meet some of the Modernist artists active in Manhattan. Among them were Stuart Davis, the Armenian Arshile Gorky and the Russian John Graham, who together de Kooning called the “Three Musketeers”.^[4]^:98 Gorky, who de Kooning first met at the home of Misha Reznikoff, became a close friend and, for at least ten years, an important influence.^[4]^:100 Balcomb Greene said that “de Kooning virtually worshipped Gorky”; according to Aristodimos Kaldis, “Gorky was de Kooning’s master”.^[4]^:184 De Kooning’s drawing Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother, from about 1938, may show him with Gorky; the pose of the figures is that of a photograph of Gorky with Peter Busa in about 1936.^[4]^:184

De Kooning joined the Artists Union in 1934, and in 1935 was employed in the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, for which he designed a number of murals including some for the Williamsburg Federal Housing Project in Brooklyn. None of them were executed,^[1] but a sketch for one was included in New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art, his first group show. From 1936, when De Kooning had to leave the Federal Art Project because he did not have American citizenship, he began to work full-time as an artist, earning income from commissions and by giving lessons.^[3]

Work[edit]

Early work[edit]

De Kooning’s paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s are abstract still-lifes characterised by geometric or biomorphic shapes and strong colours. They show the influence of his friends Davis, Gorky and Graham, but also of Arp, Joan Miró, Mondrian and Picasso.^[1] In the same years de Kooning also painted a series of solitary male figures, either standing or seated, against undefined backgrounds; many of these are unfinished.^[1]^[3]

Black and white abstractions[edit]

By 1946 de Kooning had begun a series of black and white paintings, which he would continue into 1949. During this period he had his first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery; it consisted largely of black and white works, although a few has passages of bright color. De Kooning’s black paintings are important to the history of Abstract Expressionism of their densely impacted forms, their mixed media, and their technique.^[5]^:25

The women[edit]

De Kooning’s well-known Woman series, begun in 1950 the time after meeting his future wife and culminating in Woman VI, owes much to Picasso, not least in the aggressive, penetrative breaking apart of the figure, and the spaces around it. Picasso’s late works show signs that he, in turn, saw images of works by Pollock and de Kooning.^[6]^:17 De Kooning led the 1950s’ art world to a new level known as the American Abstract Expressionism. “From 1940 to the present, Woman has manifested herself in de Kooning’s paintings and drawings as at once the focus of desire, frustration, inner conflict, pleasure, … and as posing problems of conception and handling as demanding as those of an engineer.”^[7] The female figure is an important symbol for de Kooning’s art career and his own life. This painting is considered as a significant work of art for the museum through its historical context about the post World War II history and American feminist movement. Additionally, the medium of this painting makes it different form others of de Kooning’s time.

Individual works[edit]

Solo exhibitions[edit]

1948

Willem de Kooning, Egan Gallery, New York, April 12-May 12.^[5]^:126

1951

Willem de Kooning, Egan Gallery, New York, April 1-30, and tour to Arts Club of Chicago^[5]^:126

1953

Willem de Kooning: Painting on the theme of the Women, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, March 16- April 11.

De Kooning 1953-1953, Museum School, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 21-May 8, and tour to Workshop Center, Washington, D.C ^[5]^:126

1955

Recent Oils by Willem de Kooning, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, November 9- December 3.^[5]^:126

1956

De Kooning, Sidney Janis Gallery, April 2-28^[5]^:126

1959

de Kooning, Sidney Janis Gallery, May 5-30^[5]^:126

1961

Willem de Kooning, Paul Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills, California, April 3-29^[5]^:126

1962

Recent painting by Willem de Kooning, Sidney Janis Gallery, May 5-31 ^[5]^:126

1964

“Women” Drawing by Willem de Kooning, Hames Goodman Gallery, Buffalo, January 10-25.

Willem de Kooning: Retrospective Drawings 1936-1963, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, February^[5]^:126

1956

Willem de Kooning, Paul Kantor Gallery, March 22- April 30, and tour to Aspen Institute, Colorado

Willem de Kooning: A retrospective Exhibition from public and private collections, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, April 8- May 2, and tour to Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of technology Cambridge.^[5]^:126

1966

De Kooning’s Women, Allan Stone Gallery, March 14- April 2.^[5]^:126

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Willem de Kooning.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning at the Museum of Modern Art
Links to reproductions
Willem de Kooning at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Woman in the Pool (1969) Phoenix Art Museum
de Kooning’s work in the Guggenheim Collection
Willem de Kooning in the National Gallery of Australia’s Kenneth Tyler collection
Sam Hunter, “Willem de Kooning Lecture”, The Baltimore Museum of Art: Baltimore, Maryland, 1964 Retrieved June 26, 2012
Frank O’Hara — Rainbow Warrior

Categories:

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Paul and de Kooning

Small details from three paintings

From left to right: Robot and star, 1995, Brains on fire, 1994, Black scratch I, 1994

“You have to paint abstract after you’ve been seeing Bill de Kooning” – Sir Paul McCartney

Paul credits the artist Willem de Kooning with being one of his greatest influences, as well as being a family friend. They met at the end of the seventies when de Kooning was a client of Linda’s father’s law firm.

Linda and Paul frequently visited the artist in his studio and Paul often became so fired up by the visits that he would go to the paint shop on the way home and buy all the same paints and canvases as de Kooning, or ‘Bill’ as he affectionately refers to him.

Abstract painting

Paul remembers De Kooning’s attitude to his painting as a particular source of inspiration. One day he asked the artist what his painting was meant to be, to which de Kooning replied, “I don’t know, it looks like a couch, huh?” Paul found the remark profoundly liberating. In his own words, ‘he never looked back’.

	Art Criticism journal, volume 20, number 1. [Images, not originally in Art Criticism, have been added here]Martin Ries DE KOONING’S ASHEVILLE AND ZELDA’S IMMOLATION



		“Perhaps I am more of a novelist than a poet.”
		-Willem de Kooning
		“What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
		-Harold Rosenberg

One of the important experiments in American art education began in Asheville , North Carolina , in 1933. Black Mountain College was conceived at a critical moment in history; its founding occurred concurrent with ominous events abroad: Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi terror of book-burnings, street beatings, political arrests of Jews, communists, homosexuals and others, and incinerations in concentration camps. The Nazis closed the famous Bauhaus, the innovative school of art, architecture, and design. Josef Albers came to Black MountainCollege as director, bringing his Bauhaus experience to encourage artistic cross-fertilization. By the time the College closed in 1957 it had attracted a venerable Who’s Who of the avant-garde, including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Eric Bentley, Robert Motherwell, Paul Taylor, Alfred Kazin, and many others. Willem de Kooning taught there in 1948.[1]

In the late 1930s and early 1940s Abstract and Cubist art were formalist structures that did not necessarily embody transcendent, universal themes. Inspired by the Freudian method of free association, the Surrealists put great emphasis on the instinctual and invented “psychic automatism” to breed buried images unavailable to the conscious mind. The goal of forward-looking American artists (fellow artist Jacob Kainen called them “the alert artists”) was to synthesize the modern movements into an entirely new pictorial style; what interested them about Surrealism was its processes, its attitudes toward creativity and the unconscious, and its emphasis on content as opposed to form. A few of the Surrealist artists “painted responses to the political and historical events of the period … Picasso’s Guernica more successfully captured the Americans’ imagination as a direct response to disaster…” [2]

The Europeans had shown the way; yet the avant-garde American artists had to work desperately to break away from the influence of the School of Paris and especially from that Olympian, Pablo Picasso. Like the Collective Unconscious or the dreams of childhood, Picasso’s images and icons kept creeping in while the Abstract Expressionists used both Surrealism and Abstraction to break the Spaniard’s stranglehold. Discussing art in the 1930s and 1940s, Jackson Pollock complained, “Damn that Picasso, just when I think I’ve gotten somewhere I discover that bastard got there first;” Arshile Gorky mourned that they were “defeated” by Picasso; while de Kooning said, “Picasso is the man to beat.”

De Kooning drew on the School of Paris (Pollock called him a “French” painter); his “apparent aim is a synthesis of tradition and modernism that would grant him more flexibility within the confines of the Late Cubist canon of design,” stated Clement Greenberg; “… there is perhaps even more Luciferian pride behind de Kooning’s ambition than there is behind Picasso’s.” [3]Thomas B. Hess wrote, “He will do drawings on transparent paper, scatter them one on top of the other, study the composition drawing that appears on top, make a drawing from this, reverse it, tear it in half, and put it on top of still another drawing. Often the search is for a shape to start off a painting…” [4]Harold Rosenberg, who upheld the idea of “high art” in defiance of mass culture, applied existential relationships between artists and the world: “The vision of transcending the arts … rests upon one crucial question: What makes one an artist?” [5]He did not see abstraction as a projection of individual emotions so much as a reflection of overall psychic need. Abstract art in its final analysis, he asserted, was transcendental.

De Kooning admired Cubism for its emphasis on structure; [6] yet Asheville, (1948, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) its surface sensuality dominating compositional logic, is both linear and

Willem de Kooning, Asheville, 1948, oil and enamel / cardboard,
64.9×81 cm (25½x31-7/8), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

painterly as well as structural. The need for the ordered geometric background structure of Cubism did not begin to disappear from de Kooning’s work until he increased his gestural activity, probably under Jackson Pollock’s influence, by loosening shapes and allowing the paint to run in such paintings as Light in August.

Willem de Kooning, Light in August, 1947,
55×41½, Museum of Contemporary Art, Teheran

The use of the sign painter’s liner brush [7] allowed him to get the precipitate look of a quick expressionist sketch; each stroke is integrated with every other stroke that shift ceaselessly as forms merge with background as well as with other forms to mold a single consolidated surface. Art dealer and friend of the artist, Allan Stone, described the forms as opening up and flowing into the background, “creating fluidity and movement which can be termed ‘liquification of cubism.'” [8]

The push toward a new expression in Asheville is beyond literal legibility. [9] Nevertheless Charles F. Stuckey says the sulfuric color scheme of ocher, red, black and white “evoke flames, smoke and ashes”; [10] he reads a large dark “eye” to the right as looking like a “cigarette burn in cloth;” he also sees “torn and displaced legs, elbows, and torso”, body parts [11] scattered like martyr’s attributes, as well as “lips cracked to expose teeth”, and finds a “darkened left side of a mouth that

Diagram of Ashville

seems to curl forward to suggest the way paper curls when it burns” (there is a plethora of gnashing teeth in Picasso’s Weeping Women [“postscripts” to Guernica, summer,1937]).

Pablo Picasso, Weeping Women 1937

However, Stuckey also finds these conflagration similes in the frantic brushstroke of de Kooning’sLight in August as they refer to the fire episode in William Faulkner’s Light in August, a novel the painter especially liked. The titles of several of de Kooning’s black and white paintings at this time:Dark Pond, Night Square, together with Black Friday (the darker name for “Good Friday,” the day of the Crucifixion) and Light in August, are “drawn from the Bible, Aeschylus, and William Faulkner.” [12]

The title of Light in August is derived from the novel of the same name by Faulkner. Heir of the Symbolists, he was little appreciated until Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner was published in 1946. F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered a similar fate: when he died in 1940 none of his books was in print, “The revival – or, better, the apotheosis – of [The Great] Gatsby began after the author’s death …. That was in 1941. It took another five years for a new generation to rediscover it.”[13] De Kooning, a “fervent reader,” [14] may have been part of that generation and read about “the macabre valley of ashes presided over by the eyes on a billboard” in Gatsby.

Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda embodied the “flaming youth” [15] in the 1920s before she suffered a mental breakdown. Zelda was confined to mental institutions throughout the 1930s and 1940s until her tragic death in March of 1948 when fire destroyed the Highland Hospital inAsheville, North Carolina, where she was a patient. De Kooning may have read about Zelda’s death in the New York Times of March 12, 1948 : “Flames quickly engulfed the four-story central building of the Highland Hospital for Nervous Diseases. … Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, widow of the author and a victim of the hospital fire, had been ill for some years and went to the Highland Hospital three months ago…”

Assuming de Kooning read of the tragic fire at Highland Hospital, he probably would have recalled the devastating fire in Gorky’s studio, Gorky’s Charred Beloved of 1946 and Agony of 1947 (Gorky committed suicide while de Kooning was working on Asheville), as well as the flames in Picasso’s Guernica (fig. 2) and related studies. Stalin’s scorched earth policy, the fire-storms ofEngland, Germany, and Japan during the war, as well as the frequent blazes in New York City , may have also occurred to him.

De Kooning’s penchant for the soot and detritus of the city is the reverse of Marcel Proust’s “golden morning brightness of a Parisian sidewalk” and more like Baudelaire’s “botanist of the sidewalk.” Edwin Denby, poet and friend in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled the artist’s attraction to minute details encountered in his environment: “I remember walking at night in Chelsea with Bill … and his pointing out to me on the pavement the dispersed compositions – spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflection of neon-light…” [16] Indeed, Rosalind Krauss similarly has commented on Picasso’s turning the dross of collage into art [17] as he shaped “these bits and pieces into an organized montage.” [18] In Apollinaire’s Zone, written just as Picasso was embarking on collage, the poet praised what the artist saw in the streets: “The inscription on the sign boards and the walls … You read the handbills, catalogs, posters that sing out loud and clear …” [19]

Willem de Kooning, Abstraction, 1949/50,
Thyssen-Bornamisza collection, Madrid.

De Kooning often began several pictures with related images; Asheville [20] andAbstraction (1949/50, Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Madrid) have much in common. The floor line in the ashen-hued Abstraction, leading in from the bottom right corner, creates a “nook” on the right side (and a resting place for a dark skull – an unusually non-abstract and specific image for the artist at that time) which “houses” a ladder, window, and door, as well as the torso, leg, and rectangular structure at bottom left. The vibrant yellows, blues, and fuchsias are dispersed by black strokes within modified white areas. There is a Picassoid hoof-form in the upper left corner, a house structure in the upper right (the same double-bar as in Asheville, a visual abutment which undoubtedly corresponds to the window edge in Guernica and related sketches), as well as several rectangular window and door shapes and a ladder from Minotauromachia.

Pablo Picasso, Guernica , 1937,
oil / canvas, 349x777cm (137-3/8×305-7/8),
Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Pablo Picasso, Minotauramachia, 1935,
etching, 49.5×69.2 cm (19½x27¼).

Is the ladder a metaphor for escape? A fireman’s attempt at rescue? A passage from one plane to another? The ladder of life and the time-honored symbol of ascension, the primal idea that one climbs the ladder of one’s forebears (however Olympian) as with Jacob’s Ladder?

In Asheville de Kooning depicts a book of charred matches (left) which he seems to have used from his earlier Still Life with Matches (c.1942, collection Mr. & Mrs. Stephen D. Paine),

Willem de Kooning, Still Life with Matches, c.1942,
13.9×19 cm (5½x7½), Mr & Mrs Stephen D. Paine collection.

very much as Thomas Hess described his working methods. This detail is topped by a blackened circle that probably was originally a thumbtack (top left) to keep fragments of drawings in position as the artist worked. A second folded matchbook is at the top just below the “thumbtack.” Are the shapes references to squares, rectangles, openings, windows, doors, and other apertures? Are they meant to appear burnt and damaged? Geometric shapes, imbued with implied order, are usually inserted in an effort to stabilize the picture, but they keep getting lost in de Kooning’s shuffle of shapes. Certainly the series of rectangles on the left of Asheville includes a “spent book of matches” (Stuckey); they are also similar to the ladder in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Abstraction, both of which may have been prompted by the ladder in Picasso’s Minotauromachia, and/or the many ladders in Joan Miró’s and Paul Klee’s and other Surrealists’ works where the Jacob-like ladder leads upwards to a fusion of tangible and intangible, a transcending union of heaven and earth, to “higher realities.”

Indeed, below the spent safety matches is a form very much like the leg of the dying horse inComposition Study for Guernica comparable to the form in the lower left of Asheville, both in similar

Pablo Picasso, Detail, Composition Study for Guernica, (II), 1 May 1937,
pencil on blue paper, 21x27cm (8-1/4×10-5/8), Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

areas of both paintings, not to mention two very Picassoid horse’s hoofs, bottom center (also bottom center in Guernica). The foot of the Rushing Woman in Guernica is comparable to the shape in the lower right corner of Asheville (similar areas of both paintings); the rectangles in the upper right corner of Asheville are like the right-angled edges of the window of the burning house in Guernica(similar areas of both paintings).

Picasso’s Guernica and Minotaur images, often reproduced in Cahiers d’Art and Minotauremagazines, could have been seen in the late ’30s and early ’40s by American artists. The mural itself was exhibited in New York at the Valentin Gallery in 1939, and an extensive Picasso exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in the same year. De Kooning was undoubtedly familiar with the first important book on Guernica [21] with its related studies and photographs of the mural in progress.

If Asheville is turned upside-down, the matchbooks relate to the more recognizable rectangles, apertures, and ladder in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Abstraction, as well as to Picasso’s many ladders.
Other paintings at that time indicate fragments of drawings are shuffled and scattered in the search for new paintings. Specific forms in such as those in the upper right are identical to the forms in.

Willem de Kooning, Painting, c.1950,
76.5×101.6 cm (30-1/8×40), David Geffen collection, Los Angeles

Willem de Kooning, Little Attic, c.1949, oil / paper / press board,
77.4×10.1 cm (30½x40), Dr. Israel Rosen collection.

The imagery in these two works, both the same size, presumably derived from a single drawing and then migrated from one painting to another. [22] These “specific forms” are similar to the progression of rectangular forms on the left side of Asheville. Other forms in Geffen’s Painting, such as ladders and gaping mouths, are repeated throughout the compositions of this period (the heart shape on the right in Little Attic is reminiscent of the shape of testicles in much of Picasso’s depictions of bulls. Both organs relate to man’s emotional life, they bind male psyche and male soma).

The Olympian Picasso continued to possess his progeny.

De Kooning often used window-like rectangles (usually delineated with black paint) in his early work to organize the background and relate the composition to the edges of his canvas. With no directional trajectories, the tension of the window shapes make enclosure dynamic rather than ambiguous. An aperture for penetration into space, a window often symbolizes the eye* of the artist opened for revelation; one can look in as well as out [23] into larger vistas, or greater consciousness.

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*
After death, the eyes of the deceased are closed; this gesture symbolically shuts the “window of the soul.”

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De Kooning was probably familiar with Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, (N.Y., 1947) where he attributes to colors certain universal meanings: “Black is something burnt out, the ashes of a funeral pyre … The silence of black is the silence of death …” Completed shortly after the artist’s black and white period, Asheville combines color as well as black and white, but none dominates. Generally, color isn’t abstract in the sense that it involves nuances of mood, while black and white is more abstract because it relates less to nature. However, we’re often disconcerted by color schemes with values of equal importance when there is no dominant hue.

Space is a pre-condition of all that exists, its appearance is emptiness, and therefore can contain everything; or as de Kooning explained, space contains “billions and billions of hunks of matter … floating around in darkness according to a great design of nothingness.” [24] De Kooning’s picture plane, to which any shape or image could be attached, is not dissimilar to the relativistic unified field theory that tries to integrate into one comprehensive idea the many clashing bits of data and complex uncertainty of randomness that is modern physics.

In the manner of Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur, the handyman, tinkerer, or inventor of myths, memory accumulates appealing images and materials that can then be reshaped and used over and over again. Many of the abstract shapes in Asheville look like fragments from previous works, a kind of visual promiscuity, or what another critic called “willful pentimenti.” [25] Although there are many unrecognized and suggestive abstract forms in the painting, they pass before us almost without our recognizing them, like fleeting images in a dream. Yet Asheville , with its loopy liner brush lines and sooty colors, is certainly one of de Kooning’s most regal works. As Rudolf Arnheim explained, in reference to Picasso: “The creative process has systolic and diastolic stages. The artist condenses his material, eliminating unessentials, or paints an abundance of shapes and ideas, recklessly crowding the concept. Rather than grow consistently like a plant, the work often fluctuates between antagonistic operations.” [26]

Or, as Harold Rosenberg said, abstract art in its final analysis is transcendental.

– E N D –

NOTES:

[ 1 ] Martin B Duberman, Black Mountain : An Exploration in Community, Peter Smith, Gloucester ,Massachusetts , 1988. p.283: The artist and Buckminster Fuller became “great friends, really extraordinary friends,” said Fuller. “I used to have to go to Asheville to get things for my structures, for my classes…and Bill de Kooning used to like to ride along with me and talk philosophy. Bill is a very, very wonderful thinker.”
S. Naifeh and G.W. Smith, Jackson Pollock: American Saga, Clarkson Potter, N.Y., 1989, p.710: de Kooning and Rosenberg shared a thoughtful if not deep philosophical streak; when asked if he would rather be a “half-assed philosopher or a great painter, de Kooning replied, “Let me think about that.”

[2] Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge University Press, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney, 1991, p.28.

[3] Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1961, p.213.

[4] Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, Museum of Modern Art , N.Y., 1968, p.47.

[5] Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art, Horizon Press, N.Y., 1972, p.13.

[6] Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 18,Spring 1951, p.7; reprinted in Hess, p. 146. De Kooning also described Cubism as “a poetic frame … where an artist could practise his intuition;” in Hess, p. 146.

[7] Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure, essays by Cornelia H. Butler, Paul Schimmel, RichardShiff and Anne M. Wagner, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles , Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton and Oxford , 2002. Elaine de Kooning’s brother, Conrad Fried, remembered that deKooning made his own brushes with extra-long floppy hairs designed to make “fast,” whiplash lines.Shiff, p.158.

[8] Allan Stone, Willem de Kooning: Liquefying Cubism, Allan Stone Gallery catalog, New York, 1994, p. iii.

[9] Willem de Kooning: “I feel certain parts you ought to leave up to the world” in “The Renaissance and Order”, trans/formation 1, 1951; quoted in Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, Museum of Modern Art , N.Y., 1968, p.141; and in Robert Goodnough, ed., Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35, N.Y.,1950, p.16.

[10] Charles F. Stuckey, “Bill de Kooning and Joe Christmas,” Art in America, vol.68, no.3, March1980, p.78.

[11] Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure, essays by Cornelia H. Butler, Paul Schimmel, RichardShiff and Anne M. Wagner, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton and Oxford , 2002. Shiff, p. 164, n. 1: “I nevertheless believe that nearly all of deKooning’s “abstractions” either began with a reference to the human figure or incorporated figuralelements along the way.”

[12] Sally Yard, “The Angel and the demoiselle – Willem de Kooning’s Black Friday,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, vol. 50, no. 2, 1991, p.15.

[13] The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, introduction by Charles Scribner III , N.Y. , 1992, p.xviii]: The Great Gatsby “led the Fitzgerald rediscovery and restoration of 1945-50…” Fitzgerald wrote of “…the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes … commensurate with their capacity to wonder.” as well as the “…sporting life at Asheville …” [The Great Gatsby, preface and notes by Matthew J. Bruccoli, N.Y., 1992, p.23].

[14] Numerous friends, associates and critics have cited de Kooning’s wide reading, from Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust to Dostoevsky, Joyce and Whitman.

[15] John Tytell, Passionate Lives, Birch Lane Press , New York , 1991, .p.77. Fitzgerald said Zelda had “a more intense flame at its highest than ever I had.”

[16] Elaine de Kooning, “Edwin Denby Remembered – Part 1,” Ballet Review 12, spring 1984, p. 30; also, Edwin Denby, Willem de Kooning, N.Y., Hanuman Books, 1988, p.46.

[17] Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers, N.Y., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, p. 72, quoting David Cottongton’s “turning the dross of the vernacular into the gold of art” in Picasso & Braque: A Symposium, (ed., Lynn Zelevansky) N.Y. Museum of Modern Art, 1992, p. 69.

[18] Krauss, p. 42.

[19] Krauss, p. 72-73.

[20] The painting is inscribed as Ashville [sic] on the back of the panel, with the emphasis on “Ash.” Charles Moore Brock, unpublished Master’s Thesis, “Describing Chaos: Willem de Kooning’s Collage Painting Asheville and its Relationship to Traditions of Description and Illusionism in Western Art,” 1993, University of Maryland , p.8.

[21] Juan Larrea, Guernica: Pablo Picasso, introduction by Alfred H Barr, published by the art dealer, Curt Valentin, N.Y., 1947.

[22] Hess, p. 47-51.

[23] Carla Gottlieb, The Window in Art: a Study of Window Symbolism in Western Painting, Abaris Books, Pleasantville , N.Y. , 1981.

[24] De Kooning, p. 7; reprinted in Hess, p. 146.

[25] Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning: The First Twenty-Six Years in New York – 1927-1952 ( New York : Garland , 1986, p. 57.

[26] Rudolf Arnheim, Picasso’s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting, University of California Press,Berkeley & Los Angeles , 1962, p.56.

This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island Universityat Brooklyn . I wish to thank John Ott, educator, computer scientist, and mathematician, for his suggestions in preparing this study.

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The Longest Ride Official Trailer #1 (2015) – Britt Robertson Movie HD

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 55 THE BEATLES (Part G, The Beatles and Rebellion) (Feature on artist Wallace Berman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 54 THE BEATLES (Part F, Sgt Pepper’s & Eastern Religion) (Feature on artist Richard Lindner )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 53 THE BEATLES (Part E, Stg. Pepper’s and John Lennon’s search in 1967 for truth was through drugs, money, laughter, etc & similar to King Solomon’s, LOTS OF PICTURES OF JOHN AND CYNTHIA) (Feature on artist Yoko Ono)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 52 THE BEATLES (Part D, There is evidence that the Beatles may have been exposed to Francis Schaeffer!!!) (Feature on artist Anna Margaret Rose Freeman )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 51 THE BEATLES (Part C, List of those on cover of Stg.Pepper’s ) (Feature on artist Raqib Shaw )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 50 THE BEATLES (Part B, The Psychedelic Music of the Beatles) (Feature on artist Peter Blake )

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 49 THE BEATLES (Part A, The Meaning of Stg. Pepper’s Cover) (Feature on artist Mika Tajima)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 48 “BLOW UP” by Michelangelo Antonioni makes Philosophic Statement (Feature on artist Nancy Holt)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE Part 47 Woody Allen and Professor Levy and the death of “Optimistic Humanism” from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS Plus Charles Darwin’s comments too!!! (Feature on artist Rodney Graham)

FRANCIS SCHAEFFER ANALYZES ART AND CULTURE PART 46 Friedrich Nietzsche (Featured artist is Thomas Schütte)

RESPONDING TO HARRY KROTO’S BRILLIANT RENOWNED ACADEMICS!! Part 21 (Dr. Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State, “…most scientists don’t think enough about God…There’s no evidence that we need any supernatural hand of God”)