Master of the Two Left Feet by Richard Meyer

Master of the Two Left Feet by Richard Meyer

An account of the life and work of a once-famous self-taught American artist of the 1940s, and a study of how artists go missing from public memory.

A garment worker and slipper manufacturer with no training in art, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Against all odds, his wildly stylized paintings of female figures, often nude, animals, and landscapes became internationally known in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and the French surrealists, his peak moment of visibility occurred in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of his work. The exhibition was widely reviewed--though mostly reviled--by the press, who jeeringly crowned Hirshfield Master of the Two Left Feet for his tendency to display the female body in that unorthodox fashion.

After the artist's death in 1946, his work was largely forgotten, but in Master of the Two Left Feet, art historian Richard Meyer rediscovers Hirshfield for twenty-first-century audiences, offering full-color reproductions that capture the vibrant imagination and sheer visual pleasure of Hirshfield's paintings. The book also features a catalog of works compiled by curator Susan Davidson which provides the most comprehensive documentation of the artist's work ever assembled.

Ten years in the making, Master of the Two Left Feet presents Hirshfield's unlikely career as a painter not only as a missing episode in the history of twentieth-century art but as a case study of the ways in which artists go missing from historical knowledge and public memory. By looking closely at Hirshfield and his milieu in 1940s Brooklyn, Meyer demonstrates how much we have yet to learn, and to see, of the visual past.

The book accompanies the exhibition Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, at the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, September 22, 2022-January 27, 2023.

Meyer, Richard: - Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History, teaches courses in twentieth-century American art, the history of photography, arts censorship and the first amendement, curatorial practice, and gender and sexuality studies. His first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2013, he published What Was Contemporary Art?, a study of the idea of the contemporary in early twentieth-century American art, and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture, a survey focusing on the dialogue between visual art and non-normative sexualities from 1885 to the present. Professor Meyer is interested in the relation between the academic discipline of art history and the practice of museum curating. Prior to arriving at Stanford, he taught undergradaute curatorial courses at USC and the University of Pennsylvania, both of which culminated in museum exhibitions. In 2014, he will co-teach an undergraduate curatorial course with Connie Wolf, the Director of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, that will result in a collaboratively organized show at the museum. Outiside the context of university teaching, Meyer served as guest curator of Warhol's Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered at the Jewish Museum in New York and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and of Naked Hollywood: Weegee in LosAngeles at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780262047289
ISBN 10	0262047284
Title	Master of the Two Left Feet
Author	Richard Meyer
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	MIT Press Ltd
Year published	2022-09-13
Number of pages	292
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.