Brushes With History

Peter G. Meyer and Arthur C. Danto
September 2001     ISBN: 1560253290

The Nation magazine, since its founding in 1865, began what has become, for better or worse, art criticism as a cultural institution in the United States.

The volume includes such legendary figures as P.T. Barnum, and the mysterious "N.N" who in the 1890s was, in fact, possibly the first woman art critic in the history of American letters. The volume also includes contributions from many well-known artists: Stuart Davis, Marsden Harley, Alfred Stieglitz, John Marin, Kenyon Cox, Guy Pene Du Bois, Louis Lozowick and Frank Lloyd Wright

Celebrated writers on art such as Bernard Berenson, Clement Greenberg, Lawrence Alloway, Hilton Kramer, Max Kozloff John Berger, and Arthur Danto give readers first-hand accounts of the debuts of artists ranging from John Singer Sargent to Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning as well as the famous lawsuit between John Ruskin and James McNeill Whistler (reported by a youthful Henry James), the destruction of Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center murals and Richard Nixon's views on art. More recently writers like E.L. Doctorow and Katha Pollitt have weighed in on the recent culture wars over arts funding and free expression.

This eclectic collection also features contributors like Christopher Hitchens on "degenerate art," Heywood Broun on the Artists Congress of 1936, Katherine Anne Porter on children's art, Marianne Moore on the death of Nation art critic Paul Rosenfeld and Langston Hughes on "Negro Art."

Peter G. Meyer is the founding Director of The Public Works Project, a New York-based non-profit that produces protest art for public interest organizations.

Arthur C. Danto is currently Johnsonian Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Since 1984, he has been art critic for The Nation, and the author of Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective; Playing With the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe; and, most recently, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World. He lives in New York City.