Joan Mitchell was one of the more notable painters of Abstract Expressionism in the period between 1950-1980, yet her fame has until now been largely restricted to professional circles. The collaborative effort of Jane Livingston, Linda Nochlin, Yvette Lee, Maxwell L. Anderson, Paintings Of Joan Mitchell is published to accompany a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum, and offers full-page color plates of Mitchell's paintings to accompany further insights on her craft and achievements. A vivid, highly recommended pick which stands alone from its exhibit foundations.

The Whitney Biennial is the kind of exhibition that critics love to hate.My recommendation is to ignore thae critics, see it for yourself and buy the catalog. This is a great book for those who love contemporary art. The essays on the exhibition and on the individual artist are informative and well written. The plates are also great.

Anderson's 1935 verse tragedy, Winterset, which won him the first New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, is based on the infamous murder case of the 1920s when the Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested for the alleged murder of a paymaster and a guard during a robbery in Massachusetts and were convicted and electrocuted despite the insubstantial evidence against them. Winterset was Anderson's second attempt at dramatizing the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the first being his prose drama, Gods of the Lightning (1928) which he wrote with Harold Hickerson and which dealt with almost the same story in a realistic and propagandistic mode. Winterset was written eight years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. By this time Anderson did not wish to write merely a protest drama, as he did in Gods of the Lightning, but one that would transcend the prevalent realistic mode in drama and achieve a certain grandeur unheard of in modern American dramatic scene. At this time Anderson wished that American theater would go beyond the point of "journalistic social comment" and, occasionally, attain the "upper air of poetic tragedy". He finally decided to write most of Winterset in blank verse because, to him, prose signified "the language of information and poetry the language of emotion". In one of his essays, Anderson writes that he believes "with the early Bernard Shaw that the theatre is essentially a cathedral of the spirit, devoted to the exaltation of men".

As the story unfolds in Winterset, one learns that after the execution of Bartolomeo Romagna, who is modelled after Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a professor writes an article about a possible witness for the defence who was never called to testify at the trial. As a result of this, three men come to New York looking for the key witness, Garth. They all come to New York on a quest: either to expose the truth or to suppress it. The whole plot of the play centers on a detective-like quest and the process of discovering the truth of a murder in which the investigators are drawn to the solving of a mysterious crime and the discovery of the true murderer.

This is an amazing story of love, loss, and discovery. The characters are amazing and memorable and Hesper is a great character caught in the sudden and terrible memory of a troubled childhood. This book takes place in the same community that my mother grew up in and where I have a summer home. My summer home is on a street adjacent to South Mountain Road. Rockland County, more specifically Pomona, NY and Ramapo, is the most wonderful setting for a story of such depth, since South Mountain Road and all of it's neighboring places hold such history and depth. Ms. Anderson makes a few mistakes in here references, she mispelled the name Concklin farmstand and referred to Route 45 as Route 202, but very minor mistakes. The scenery and location speaks as well as the story line and really explains who Hesper and her surrounding enviornments are. When I read I am transported back to South Mountain Road, the tree at the top of the road, and the smells and sounds of this wonderful place. Ms. Anderson has created a masterpiece that you cannot possible read and not fall in love with.

Hesper Anderson's lovely memoir, "South Mountain Road" is a riviting read. It is populated with a cornocopia of famous names ranging from the author's father, noted playwright Maxwell Anderson to Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Marlon Brando, Katherine Hepburn, Burgess Meredith, and many more. But what makes this so interesting is that all of these luminaries are mere extras in the story of Anderson and her on-going struggle to know and understand her parents. This is must reading whether you are interested in the private lives of public people or simply someone who has sought the acceptance and love of your parents.

Hesper Anderson, youngest child of playwright Maxwell Anderson, has written an honest, straightforward and very readable memoir. Ms. Anderson grew up in a community of successful and influential artists, authors, musicians and intellectuals. The title of the work is the name of the road in rural New York where she and her famous parents and neighbors lived. Ms. Anderson tells the story of her parents' troubled relationship and its lasting effects upon her.

Ms. Anderson has a beautiful, sensitive nature. She reveals her emotional life with heartbreaking candor. She clearly loves both of her parents, but nonetheless has seen right through some facades. Her famous father comes across as mysterious, remote and controlling. Ms. Anderson pointedly blames the cancer death of the first Mrs. Anderson and the suicide of her mother upon Maxwell Anderson. She reveals some shocking family secrets which she did not discover until after her mother's death. The discovery of those secrets helped bring some closure and understanding for Ms. Anderson. She also works through some painful secrets of her own, including her childhood fascination with an older famous neighbor. This neighbor takes advantage of this fascination with particular cruelty. He has an affair with her during a time of extreme emotional vulnerability, announces that he's getting married (to someone else) and walks out of her life. The final chapters of the book bring with them a sense of reconcilation and forgiveness.

This is not just a memoir of the daughter of a famous family -- by the time you reach the book's end, you've completely forgotten that the people are rich and famous. It is the story of a young girl's emotional journey.

"The Bad Seed" is packed with symbols. Rhoda is a murderous child who will stop at nothing to get what she desires.

Her braids were looped back like "hangman nooses." Hangman nooses are the ropes over which a hanged person dies. The hangma itself is the pillory upon which people were hanged.

"Penmark" is a nod to the mark of the pen; the "penmanship improvement medal" is yet another nod to the author's fascination with handwriting. Various references are made to character and penmanship. Rhoda is described as having very neat, precise handwriting.

The vegetation, e.g. the types of trees, plants and flowers mentioned cause one to believe that the Baltimore Penmarks have been relocated to a southern locale.

The movie adaptation of this story (the passable 1956 original and the dreadful 1985 remake) portray Leroy as Caucasian. Yet, in the book, upon reading his dialect and his grumblings about his "sharecropper boyhood," makes one wonder if Leroy is black. The names "Leroy" and "Thelma," his wife have traditionally, but not exclusively been used by black families; their speech patterns also create the impression that possibly they are black. 1950s prejudice often prevailed, so black characters more often than not were peripheral characters at best, stereotypes or villians at worst. Leroy fell into the latter category.

Lastly, Leroy's neighborhood on "General Jackson Street." It is described as a decaying, crumbling neighborhood where "nobody had nothing nice," and Leroy himself didn't have a car, not even something you "couldn't give to the junkman." General Jackson Street sounds like it could be a dividing line among the races in this genteel southern town; it could just simply be a less than satisfactory neighborhood where these characters reside. Leroy has to walk two miles to work at the apartment building where Rhoda lives. "Rich people's children," his wife Thelma calls them. She tells Leroy not to "mess with" these children; she tells him he'll be dragged down to the station house where the police will "kick his teeth in." Although Leroy is never racially identified in the book, the overall description of his character does raise the question of whether or not he was black.

Females, minorities, psychiatry, homosexuality, pedophilia = all of these are powerful themes that are woven into the fabric of this story. Leroy is a pedophile (the author, on the other hand was a pedophobe), Mrs. Breedlove and the Fern Sisters are described in hostile terms; Bessie Denker, Rhoda's maternal grandmother as well as Rhoda herself are the darkest characters in this line up. Hortense Daigle, the mother of Rhoda's slain classmate is portrayed in an unflattering light. Her behavior is quite understandable given the fact that her only child was killed, but I didn't like the way the author described her. She was one of the few sympathetic characters.

Mrs. Breedlove's brother is described as being gay; the Fern Sisters as repressed Victorian women who repressed their sexuality by remaining single and running that school. Freudian themes emerge here -- the sisters repressed sexuality, Emory's repressed homosexuality, Leroy's obsession with Rhoda and Mrs. Breedlove's antics. A bawdy, outspoken woman, Mrs. Breedlove is actually quite funny.

This book is quite a read!

It's a shame this book has become all but unknown behind the enormously successful movie with its God-awful copout ending (although Patty McCormick's deliciously chilling perfomance of its anti-heroine is a gem in itself), because the book is infinitely better than the movie (I can't speak for the Broadway production because I never saw it). In fact, most people who saw or heard of 'The Bad Seed' as a play or a movie never knew it was derived from William March's terrific book. March tells the story of Rhoda Penmark, eight years old, a devil lurking inside an angel's facade. To her adult neighbors, she's every parent's dream: obedient, unassuming, compliant, always neat and well-groomed, quiet, polite to her elders. She does her homework without being prodded and she gets all the answers correct on her Sunday school quiz. Those who know her more intimately suspect there's something ugly underneath all the surface charm; her peers can't stand her, her teachers see a disturbing lack of feeling or sensitivity in her, and her parents, who dote on her, wonder if she is capable of love, affection, remorse, or any of the characteristics that make us human. For Rhoda goes after what she wants with a single-minded purposefulness and anybody who gets in her way better watch out. Rhoda's father is absent throughout all but the last few pages of the book (he's away on a business trip that is important to his career advancement), so Christine, her mother, is left to deal with Rhoda on her own. Christine is a fasinating character, one of the most tragic in contemporary fiction, a decent, compliant, earnest woman, whose identity is totally bound up in being a good wife and a devoted mother; what she learns about her own history shatters her world, especially when she realizes that her daughter is the 'bad seed' she unwittingly transmitted from her own diabolical mother. And as Christine cannot accept that she is blameless in this transmission, that she did not cause her daughter's criminal behavior any more than she caused her own mother's, so she feels she must not drag anyone else, even her husband, into her private hell; she created it, so she must deal with it alone, and it undoes her. How else could Christine have acted, is left to the reader to speculate. I'm not going to tell how the book ended, except to say that it's a much more satisfying (because more realistic) ending than in the movie. But it's a spooky little gem of a horror story that deserves a much wider readership. It's well written, well plotted, and a great read. I loved it!

The term "bad seed" has become a much used phrase to describe a person who is thoroughly evil from birth. William March wrote "The Bad Seed" in the 1950's and it was later adapted for the stage and screen. After reading this compelling story, I can well understand its popularity.

Rhoda Penmark is an eight-year-old girl who is so self-contained, aloof and uncaring that her peers shun her. Rhoda's gentle parents, Kenneth and Christine, know that Rhoda is not exactly like other little girls. When she plays, she never gets dirty. She has trouble expressing genuine affection. On two occasions, a mysterious death has occurred (one involving an elderly lady and the other a pet dog), and Rhoda was the only witness. It turns out that Rhoda had a motive for wanting both the old lady and the dog dead. Is it possible that this innocent looking girl could be a murderess?

Things come to a head when the Penmark family moves to Alabama to start fresh. Kenneth is away on business while Christine tries to cope alone. Rhoda is a student at the Fern grammar school. She covets a gold medal that is given for penmanship at school, but the prize goes to a mamma's boy named Claude Daigle. Rhoda is incredulous and she refuses to accept her defeat. She hounds the boy to give her the medal that she feels is rightfully hers, until at an outing one day, Claude mysteriously drowns. You guessed it. Rhoda is the last person to have seen the boy alive.

The book focuses not so much on Rhoda as it does on her mother, Christine. March lets us observe through Christine's eyes her growing horror, as she realizes that her daughter may very well be a monster. When Christine finds the penmanship medal hidden among Rhoda's things, she is sure that Rhoda must have killed Claude Daigle to get the medal for herself.

March masterfully builds Christine's psychological horror as the book progresses. She learns that there is a secret in her own past that may explain her daughter's warped personality and she cannot bear the burden of guilt which this secret imposes on her.

In the skilled way of good suspense writers, March does not just pile on the horror. "The Bad Seed" has a great deal of humor, much of it centered on the character of Monica Breedlove. She is an insufferable and interfering busybody who talks incessantly and who thinks that she is an expert on psychological analysis. Another memorable character is Leroy, a caretaker who himself is evil and who is obsessed with Rhoda. Leroy recognizes too late that he is no match for the little girl, and that teasing Rhoda can be dangerous to his health.

A few passages in the book are heavy-handed. The author talks through the words of some passersby about the age of violence and anxiety in which we live and March seems to be conveying some message about the potential evil that lurks in all of us. These passages were not necessary, since the story of Rhoda is so filled with horror and dark irony, that it needs no tacked on message. "The Bad Seed" is a classic novel of psychological suspense and horror.

This is a survey of American culture, as manifested in everything from travel books, film, dance, to the fine arts. It lurches from subject to subject at times, but its strength is that it places the fine arts in their cultural context.

This, the first volume of a two volume work (this is by far the stronger of the two)may not contain the strongest prose in terms of capturing the moment in history when America finally began to assert her own unique voice in the visual arts, but it does boast many glorious images.

Maybe this book is nothing more than a glorified coffee table book, but what a fine, colorful one it is. The book is crammed full of beautiful reproductions of some of the finest work America's shores ever produced: Stella, Johns, Pollock, O'Keefe, Lawrence, Benton, Hopper and Calder all recieve detailed representation.

Being personally obsessed with the art of the Depression, I particularly valued the long, detailed chapter contained here.

Many hours have evaporated as I have lost myself in the many rich reproductions. This book, when enjoyed in union with Robert Hughes' excellent "American Visions" (which supplies the much needed rich prose), serves as a fine celebration of America's visual culture. A fine addition to any library.

I pre-ordered this book from Amazon as soon as I read about the exhibit at the Whitney. Ths book is a wonderful compendium on art of the 20th Century and is loaded with information and great photos of what will become the "classic" works of the 20th Century.

This is a collection of drawings & photos of models for the design of the Emory Centre For The Arts by Eisenman. It's arranged in order from "Conceptial Diagrams" to "Texts" To "Drawings (Plans/Elevations)" to COnstruction Drawings. Basically, lots of line & 3d drawings, photos of models & site. And Eisenman explains his design theories in the middle. Instesting, for those interested in Folding Methods in design and wonder how to deal with difficult issues like construction details, materials etc, and also the design strategies. Good reference!

i believe it was written to complete a grant,a few toaken pictures,& very dry reading. not recomended for artest or sculptor.