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Informationen zum Autor Richard Meyer Klappentext "An account of the life and work of Morris Hirshfield, an immigrant to the US in the 1890s; a successful tailor and shoe designer; and then a celebrated self-taught artist, beloved of the surrealists"-- Zusammenfassung An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory. The exhibition “Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered” at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, curated by the author and developed as an extension of the book, is on view from September 22, 2022 to January 27, 2023. A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings of female figures, often nude, animals, and landscapes became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surrealists, his peak moment of visibility occurred in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of his work. The exhibition was widely reviewed—though mostly reviled—by the press, who jeeringly crowned Hirshfield “Master of the Two Left Feet” for his tendency to display the female body in that unorthodox fashion. After the artist’s death in 1946, his work was largely forgotten, but in Master of the Two Left Feet , art historian Richard Meyer rediscovers Hirshfield for twenty-first-century audiences, offering full-color reproductions that capture the vibrant imagination and sheer visual pleasure of Hirshfield’s paintings. The book also features a catalog of works compiled by curator Susan Davidson which provides the most comprehensive documentation of the artist’s work ever assembled. Ten years in the making, Master of the Two Left Feet presents Hirshfield’s unlikely career as a painter not only as a missing episode in the history of twentieth-century art but as a case study of the ways in which artists go missing from historical knowledge and public memory. By looking closely at Hirshfield and his milieu in 1940s Brooklyn, Meyer demonstrates how much we have yet to learn, and to see, of the visual past. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction 8 1 The Tailor 21 2 The Slipper Maker 33 3 The Dancer 49 4 The Face 59 5 The Unknowns 67 6 The Modern Primitive 77 7 The Surrealist 99 8 The Heiress 121 9 The Family 147 10 The Museum 157 11 The Nudes 173 12 The Jewish American 183 13 The Long Narrow Table 199 14 The Mistake 211 Afterword: The Seamstress 219 Endnotes 225 Catalog of Works 233 by Susan Davidson Acknowledgements 319...
