Artist Books
 

A House of Her Own is the first full-length biography of the American Surrealist painter Kay Sage. Born in 1898 to wealthy American parents in upstate New York, Sage spent most of her childhood and young adult years in Italy and France. In 1937 she moved to Paris, where she became a member of the Surrealist group surrounding André Breton. She returned to the United States in 1940, settling in Woodbury, Connecticut. Her most productive years as an artist extended from roughly 1938 through the late 1950s, when her health began to deteriorate and she withdrew gradually from social contact. She stopped working on her oil paintings in 1958 but continued to forge her increasingly nihilistic poems until she shot herself in the heart in January 1963.

 

Along with her eloquent chronicle of Sage’s life, Judith D. Suther presents subtle, revelatory views of Sage’s artistic accomplishments. She takes us into the artist’s elegant, dreamlike paintings, connecting them to Sage’s complex inner life and to the artistic and intellectual worlds in which she moved. Suther also shows how the raw language and iconoclastic themes of Sage’s poetic works were related to Sage’s lifelong revolt against social and artistic convention.

In 1961 a fashionable commercial artist named Andy Warhol created an artistic furor in New York with his deadpan versions of the Campbell’s Soup can. Since then he has become the most talked about but least understood artist of the late 20th century. Warhol made acceptable the use of industrial techniques in the creation of paintings obsessed with modern clichés—car crashes, Coke bottles, sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. At the same time, his films—Blowjob, Sleep, Chelsea Girls, Lonesome Cowboys—forced us to look at the object/subject, transformed the bizarre into the banal, and remade the form and content of cinematic experiment and production.Originally published in 1971, Peter Gidal’s Andy Warhol was the first book written on Warhol’s films and paintings, a concise and astute analysis of an artistic revolution. ”Idol of the jet set,” ”trend-maker,” superstar, Warhol was taken at more than face value in Gidal’s unconventional and insightful exploration. Twenty years later, Andy Warhol remains a seminal text, essential for a serious understanding of the artist and the work.

In 1961 a fashionable commercial artist named Andy Warhol created an artistic furor in New York with his deadpan versions of the Campbell’s Soup can. Since then he has become the most talked about but least understood artist of the late 20th century. Warhol made acceptable the use of industrial techniques in the creation of paintings obsessed with modern clichés—car crashes, Coke bottles, sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor. At the same time, his films—Blowjob, Sleep, Chelsea Girls, Lonesome Cowboys—forced us to look at the object/subject, transformed the bizarre into the banal, and remade the form and content of cinematic experiment and production.Originally published in 1971, Peter Gidal’s Andy Warhol was the first book written on Warhol’s films and paintings, a concise and astute analysis of an artistic revolution. ”Idol of the jet set,” ”trend-maker,” superstar, Warhol was taken at more than face value in Gidal’s unconventional and insightful exploration. Twenty years later, Andy Warhol remains a seminal text, essential for a serious understanding of the artist and the work.