LENOX, MA.- Hard Press Editions announces the February 2012 publication of Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt, Art Criticism, 1964-1978.
Amy Goldin (1926-1978) wrote about art with wit, verve and surgical precision. She hated pretension, eschewed the prosaic, favoring the underdog with a forte for locating trends that have become central issues today in art criticism.
Goldin’s critical writing inspired many American artists—particularly those of the Pattern & Decoration movement—including Robert Kushner, who first met Amy Goldin as an undergrad student in Visual Arts. Their friendship and collaborations resulted in several publications until Goldin's death in 1978. Since then, her essays have been inaccessible except to a handful cognoscenti. Perhaps Christopher Knight, chief art critic of the L.A. Times said it best: Amy Goldin is“the best-kept secret in postwar American art criticism."
Kushner has scrutinized Amy Goldin’s extensive writings on subjects as varied as Islamic Art, Conceptual Art, Folk Art, Decoration, Abstract Expressionism, Opticality and Black American Art distilling them down to this first-ever collection of her literary gems.Taken from the pages of Artnews, Artforum, Art Journal, New American Review, International Journal for Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Art in America and her unpublished manuscripts during the 60s and 70’s, these essays provide a bracing jolt of reality— like lemon juice on a fresh cut. They showcase her aggressive intellectual process that is, lamentably, out of favor these days.
When Goldin was awarded the Frank Jewett Mather Award conferred by the College Art Association for ‘Distinction in Art and Architectural Criticism during the Year 1974-1975,’ the announcement declared: “Amy Goldin is the rare critic who has dared to venture off the all-too-beaten track in current art writing. She has systematically challenged entrenched establishment and orthodox positions of all sorts—aesthetic, ideological, political—in art. She has examined subjects which other critics have not realized were important.”
To contextualize Goldin’s writing, the book includes critical appraisals of Amy Goldin from prominent art world writers Elizabeth Baker, Holland Cotter, Michael Duncan, Oleg Grabar, Max Kozloff, Irving Sandler, Joan Simon and Emma Zghal.
Robert Kushner is an internationally acclaimed painter and sculptor. His work is held in many museum collections around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Tate Collection, London; and the Kitakyushu Museum of Art, Japan. Kushner has also written reviews and articles for Art in America, Artforum as well as other publications. In 1997 Hudson Hills Press published the monograph, Robert Kushner: Gardens of Earthly Delight by Alexandra Anderson-Spivey. Kushner is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York. He lives and works in New York.
