San Francisco artist Clay Spohn (1898--1977), one of the best artists of the modern era, originated art movements of the twentieth century and painted with great beauty. Using Spohn's Notebooks, David Beasley has traced his thought and career. This book is amply illustrated with Spohn's drawings and paintings placed to elucidate the text. Many paintings are in color as Spohn used color superbly. "I consider David Beasley's monograph on the work of Clay Spohn one of the most moving documents I have read on an artist, revealing a compassion and sense of justice rarely encountered in the field of aesthetics," - John Hultberg, artist. " Although little has been written about him, Spohn was among the most influential artists of his generation," - Susan Landauer, Art Historian.
Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, PhotographersTo museuca 86,000ms and artists.
His fascination with the Indian as a part of nature, as a mysterious element, underlay his paintings after this period. From now on his inspiration was largely from American sources. It was now that he harked back to his boyhood fascination with the colors and shapes of nature and tried to find the mode of painting which he had felt within himself in 1924 but had hesitated to develop until after he had experienced "all and every style." He knew now the direction to take but the journey was to be slow, meditative and courageous.
Spohn's show "Recollections of the South-West," comprising a dozen paintings, was exhibited in 1946 at the Rotunda Gallery in San Francisco. From four of them reproduced on color page 2, The Abode of the Potmaker, The Aborigine, Prisms of the Crystalline Desert, and Conquistador and Thunderbird, we see him revisiting the influences from his past, as for example, Purism in The Abode of the Potmaker and The Aborigine, and the myth in Conquistador and Thunderbird.
For the sheer power and terror that is starkly represented in the clash of Spanish and American Indian cultures, in both of which there is a sense of torture, self-mortification, and the excoriation of evil, which we see in Conquistador and Thunderbird, Spohn used the European sense of strict formality and a cubist-surrealist framework to express profound American sensitivities. The Thunderbird is a great eagle whose wing-beats cause thunder, whose opening and closing of its eyes bring lightning, while from its back falls a lake of rain, Since it does battle with the evil giant reptiles and underground monsters, represented in tin-painting by the Conquistador, the mythical Thunderbird becomes a symbol of good against evil On a personal level, Spohn had let loose his American cultural symbol to help him cast out the European influence in his art which he found was undermining his efforts to find his true expression
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Portuguese
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Already translated.
Translated by Letícia Rezende Ribeiro
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