I wrote another guest post for Art21 last week about Jack Tworkov’s new collection of writing. I’m just getting around to posting it on Two Coats. Sorry for the delay. Here’s an excerpt.
“Owing to its timeless insights about artmaking and life, art teachers traditionally assign Ashcan School painter Robert Henri�s 1923 collection of writing, The Art Spirit, to beginning painters. The newly-released collection, The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, seems destined to be another such classic. Edited and annotated by painter Mira Schor, the 500-page book includes letters, lectures, journal entries, and published essays from the 1930s to the 1980s in which Tworkov intersperses unpretentious philosophical inquiry with progress reports from the studio. One of the primary players among the New York School painters in the 1950s, Tworkov recognized that his ideas were often at odds with prevailing theories. Nevertheless, he was committed to teasing out not what he ought to believe, but what he actually believed. The book is rooted in Tworkov�s era, which spanned the rise and decline of American painting, and manages to entertain readers with amusing anecdotes about his famous cohort while also imparting wisdom gained from a lifetime spent in the studio….” Read the entire post here.
