Nature and Art are Physical: Writings on Art, 1967-2008

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Nature and Art are Physical: Writings on Art, 1967-2008 comprise the selected writings of Rackstraw Downes. "I've written about art in two different ways. First, by narrating the circumstances under which one of my paintings got painted, and how the process went forward. In this case the story, not an idea or an aesthetic point of view, is the issue. Second, by reviewing a show, or a book, or assessing the achievement of an artist or a group of artists. Here, the physical character of finished works, with the thoughts and ideas that emanate from them - or, if a book, its intellectual thrust -, is the issue." Some of the topics and figures discussed are the fallacies in Modern Art criticism, "Post-Modernist Painting," "The Conceptualization of Realism," "Henri Rousseau and the Idea of the Näive," Ensor and Morandi as printmakers, Cézanne's drawings and Roger Fry's letters, Walter de Maria's Lightning Field, Charles Burchfield, Picasso, Samuel Beckett, John Marin, Rudy Burckhardt, Claude Lorrain and John Constable, among others, in the course of which he explores the "meaning" and "tenses of landscape" and asks such questions as "is technology a new form" and "what have we made of the landscape?" John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, has provided a comprehensive introduction. Rackstraw Downes was educated at the University of Cambridge and Yale University. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Ludwig Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Art.