Harold Rosenberg
A Critic‘s Life
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- 36,99 €
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- 36,99 €
Publisher Description
Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in—and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas.
With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg’s life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds.” An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken portrays with vivid accounts from Rosenberg’s life.
Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg’s brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Yorker art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) remains a mystery in this detailed if uneven biography from curator Balken (Mark Tobey). Balken paints Rosenberg as an outsider by design, and recreates the people, places, and intellectual movements that influenced the fiercely independent thinker from his native Brooklyn to bohemian, leftist Manhattan in the 1930s. Here, Rosenberg got involved in the little magazine movement and such publications as Art Front. He found his most permanent and influential footing, Balken writes, within the emerging postwar American art scene. Clement Greenberg, his contemporary and art critic for the Nation and the Partisan Review, emerges as a foil and rival throughout, bringing the era's intellectual camps to bear—Balken is at her strongest discussing Rosenberg's ideas, as with his famous 1952 essay "The American Action Painters" and its concept of "action," which remains a thread through the narrative. Unfortunately, Balken sometimes loses track of her protagonist in the overcrowded scenery, leaving his personal life oblique, and her account will appeal most to academics and readers well-versed in mid-century politics and art, and able to distinguish the cast of hundreds. Historians will find it well-researched, but this is likely to leave general readers wanting. Illus.