New York: 1962-1964

Description

The radical changes that occurred in the three years between January 1962 and December 1964 had a profound effect on creative life in the city and around the world, altering not only the fine arts but everything from performance to music to design. Together with these creative innovations, the period from 1962 through 1964 saw a shift in the centre of artistic gravity from Europe to the United States and the rise of a new leadership in the arts, centred on a number of New York-based curators, gallerists, and other impresarios. Inspired by the scale and format of the widely read, image-forward magazines of the time such as Life and Look, this lavishly illustrated oversize paperback traces a detailed itinerary of artists and curators, experimental exhibitions and groundbreaking happenings, as well as historical and political events that transformed society during this explosive moment. From the important "New Realists" exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 to the award of the International Grand Prize in Painting to the New York-based artist Robert Rauschenberg at the Venice Biennale in 1964, the city saw a flood of new approaches to art making, as well as fertile encounters among creators across mediums and disciplines.

Germano Celant (1940-2020), widely influential Italian art historian, critic, and curator who coined the term Arte Povera, wrote more than one hundred publications, including both books and catalogues and curated hundreds of exhibitions in the most prominent international museums and institutions worldwide

A packed time capsule, one that includes a detailed timeline of three fire-starting years of public violence, disobedience and liberation. With blast-from-the-past (and echoes-in-the-present) images on every page, it has the pull of a fast-paced documentary film.--Holland Cotter "New York Times: Arts" Stuffed full of energy, focusing on a three-year period in New York City when sundry creative realms coalesced in a delirious apogee of full-blown American vanguardism.--Jan Avgikos "Artforum" A spectacular show of art and documentation...The global contexts rhyme in energy if not in direct relevance with an insurgent avant-gardism in New York which rejected modernist detachment in order to engage lived realities.--Peter Schjeldahl "New Yorker" Art in New York in the early 1960s made for a heady mix. Culturally, we were perched on the edge of something and leaning forward. And a fast flip through the show's catalog, an illustrated three-year timeline edited by Celant and designed by Michael Rock, gives a sense of a larger -- national, global -- teetering condition.--Holland Cotter "New York Times" Certainly at the moment our fair city's most enveloping visual and aural museum experience.--Suzaan Boettger "Brooklyn Rail" Its dazzling and generous survey overflows with justifiable nostalgia for an age that, however brief, truly was golden.--Ariella Budick "Financial Times" 1962-1964 manages to encapsulate the artistic explosion taking place in New York in the early sixties in art, in dance, and in poetry.--Alfred Mac Adam "Brooklyn Rail" Start[s] a conversation about an especially fertile time in the art world's capital. Featuring well-known names like Jasper Johns, Faith Ringgold and Merce Cunningham, it also may introduce artists like Marjorie Strider to the public.--Ted Loos "New York Times: Arts"