Background
Debra Bricker Balken was born on January 7, 1954 in Rivers, Manitoba, Canada. She is the daughter of Scott K. and Alma (Clarkson) Bricker. Her parents divorced in 1990.
Chicago, Illinois, United States
In 1980 Debra Bricker Balken received a Master of Art degree at the University of Chicago.
Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Debra Bricker Balken was a professor at the Brown University.
Manhattan, New York, United States
Debra Bricker Balken was a professor at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
Providence, Rhode Island, United States
Debra Bricker Balken was a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States
In 2005, Debra Bricker Balken served as the Sterling and Francine Clark Visiting Professor in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
(This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove ...)
This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove since 1974. It contains color plates of all the works in the exhibition; the essays are profusely illustrated with black-and-white images not included in the exhibition. Apart from an out-of-print catalogue raisonné, this book is the largest and most comprehensive publication to date on Dove's work. Copublished with the Addison Gallery of American Art in association with the Phillips Collection.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262024330/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the ar...)
In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of Richard Nixon titled Philip Guston's Poor Richard. Produced two years before Watergate and three years before Nixon's resignation, these provocative, searing condemnations of a corrupt head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire. As Balken discusses in her accompanying essay, these drawings also reflect a dramatic transformation in Guston's work. In response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to question the viability of a private art given to self-expression. His betrayal of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal and political meaning largely engendered the renewal of figuration in painting in America in the 1970s.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226036219/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(In this incisive study, the curator and writer Debra Bric...)
In this incisive study, the curator and writer Debra Bricker Balken examines the work of the leading artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. At the same time she examines the myths surrounding the movement, the variation in the motivation and practice of artists grouped by art historians under the same heading, and the role played by critics in the movement's reception, both at the time and up to the present day. Of equal value to the general reader and the art historical scholar alike, Balken's text is a valuable addition to the literature on one of the most influential of all twentieth-century art movements.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1854373064/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(It is commonly believed that Regionalist artists Benton, ...)
It is commonly believed that Regionalist artists Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood reacted to the economic and social devastation of their era by harking back in tranquil bucolic paintings to a departed utopia. However, this volume compares their work to that of photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn and filmmakers such as Josef von Sternberg―all of whom documented the desolation of the Depression―and finds surprising commonalities. The book also notes intriguing connections between Regionalist artists and Modernists Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, countering prevailing assumptions that Regionalism was an anathema to these New York School painters and showing their shared fascination with the Midwest.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300135866/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(Renowned scholar Debra Bricker Balken here offers the fir...)
Renowned scholar Debra Bricker Balken here offers the first investigation into the interrelationship between these two great artists. She shows that while Dove’s sensual evocations of landscape, his abstractions of nature’s undulating rhythms and forms, offered inspiration for O’Keeffe, the influence of O’Keeffe’s work on Dove was equally significant. After 1930, Dove turned to O’Keeffe’s early works for renewed aesthetic inspiration, mining, as he put it, her "burning watercolors."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030013410X/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, th...)
Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, this fully illustrated, all-color catalogue is the first examination of the work of American sculptor John Storrs (1885-1956) to appear in over twenty years. This catalogue gives particular emphasis to one of the most innovative phases of Storrs's work from the late 1910s to the 1930s when he was finding inspiration in the new skyscrapers and other modern buildings that he saw in New York and Chicago.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0934552797/?tag=2022091-20
2010
(This beautiful publication is the first to focus exclusiv...)
This beautiful publication is the first to focus exclusively on Marin's output from the 1930s through the early 1950s, a corpus of nearly seventy works, which has been generally overlooked in art historical literature. Debra Bricker Balken resituates these works within the discourses of midcentury modernism, convincingly arguing that critics—such as Clement Greenberg—saw them as important precursors to Abstract Expressionism, influencing such artists as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Marin's painted abstractions of the Maine coast and Manhattan architecture were singled out for their invention, singularity, and authority, and forecast the new language of Abstract Expressionism.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/030014993X/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(This beautifully designed volume highlights over 250 artw...)
This beautifully designed volume highlights over 250 artworks in the Des Moines Art Center's permanent collections, by renowned artists such as Ai Weiwei, Takashi Murakami, Bruce Nauman, Martin Puryear, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon and Georgia O'Keeffe.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879003635/?tag=2022091-20
2014
(One of the foremost American artists to emerge from the 1...)
One of the foremost American artists to emerge from the 1940s, a decade that saw the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Tobey (1890–1976) is now recognized as a vanguard figure whose work anticipated the formal innovations of New York School artists such as Jackson Pollock. Surveying the artist’s career with works ranging from the 1920s to 1970, this fully illustrated volume reveals the extraordinarily nuanced yet radical beauty of Tobey’s painting, affirming his significant role in the development of abstraction.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0847859045/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(This in-depth assessment explores the work of Barbara Tak...)
This in-depth assessment explores the work of Barbara Takenaga whose detailed, mystical paintings draw from a wide range of sources from Japanese prints to Op Art. At once conceptual and decorative, Barbara Takenaga’s swirling, patterned paintings have been called "psychedelic" and "cosmic." Takenaga’s approach to painting is both highly structured and disciplined. In this collection of seventy paintings, the evolution of Takenaga’s celestial bodies and ecstatic compositions is traced over a 20-year period. The luminous reproductions allow readers to study her intricacies of form and color. The book includes an essay that examines Takenaga’s work in relation to historic precedents and current aesthetic developments; a brief consideration of Takenaga’s career by novelist Jim Shepard; and a poem by Geoffrey Young.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/379135700X/?tag=2022091-20
2017
Debra Bricker Balken was born on January 7, 1954 in Rivers, Manitoba, Canada. She is the daughter of Scott K. and Alma (Clarkson) Bricker. Her parents divorced in 1990.
In 1980 Debra Bricker Balken received a Master of Art degree at the University of Chicago.
Debra Bricker Balken has taught at numerous universities, including Brown University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2005, she served as the Sterling and Francine Clark Visiting Professor in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. Her upcoming projects include a retrospective exhibition on the work of Mark Tobey for the Addison Gallery of American Ait that will travel to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection to open with the Venice Biennale in 2017.
Debra's books include Philip Guston’s Poor Richard (2001) and Abstract Expressionism: Movements in Modern Art (2005) as well as exhibition catalogues such as Dove/O Keeffe: Circles of Influence (2009), After Many Springs: Regionalism, Modernism and the Midwest (2009), John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist (2010) and John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (2011).
(This beautifully designed volume highlights over 250 artw...)
2014(One of the foremost American artists to emerge from the 1...)
2017(In this incisive study, the curator and writer Debra Bric...)
2005(It is commonly believed that Regionalist artists Benton, ...)
2009(This beautiful publication is the first to focus exclusiv...)
2011(Published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, th...)
2010(In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the ar...)
2001(This in-depth assessment explores the work of Barbara Tak...)
2017(Renowned scholar Debra Bricker Balken here offers the fir...)
2009(This book accompanies the first major exhibition on Dove ...)
1997Debra Bricker Balken is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and of the American Museum Association.