num_pages: 62
description: Rackstraw Downes’s In Relation to the Three Essays from Three Decades 1973, 1981, 1996 asks, How does the young artist orient himself in relation to the whole cultural sprawl of his time? As his work gets included in a category of style, can he see what values that style expresses relative to the 360º spectrum of other points of view on life? If he focuses in on the used landscape, right down to some seemingly negligible weed or bit of trash, what thoughts does he have concerning the changes we have effected to the ecology of the entire planet? Here are some of the issues Downes addresses in these three essays that, dating from three different decades, reflect his changing preoccupations. RACKSTRAW DOWNES was born in England and after a literary education at Cambridge, came to the U.S., studied painting at the Yale School of Art and settled in New York. He paints his surroundings on site there as well as in rural Maine, industrial New Jersey, and mixed-use Texas. Recently he has had solo shows at the Marlborough Gallery and the Chinati Foundation. His work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Ludwig Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998, and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1999.In 1967 Rackstraw Downes started writing for Art News, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 1979 he edited a book of the art criticism of Fairfield Porter. In Relation to the Three Essays from Three Decades 1973, 1981, 1996 is the first book collection of Downes’s writings.
language: English
title: In relation to the whole : three essays from three decades, 1973, 1981, 1996
titlecomplete: In relation to the whole : three essays from three decades, 1973, 1981, 1996
ratings_count: 5
publisher: Edgewise