Breuer's Bohemia - Crump James

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Résumé :
Breuer's Bohemia explores a vibrant period of postwar design and culture as seen through the influential New England houses designed by Marcel Breuer for his circle of clients and friends.

The iconic twentieth-century architect Marcel Breuer was a prolific designer of residential architecture, which tends to be obscured by his early renown as a Bauhaus furniture maker and his high-profile corporate and institutional projects. Breuer's Bohemia surveys the houses he designed in Connecticut and Massachusetts from the 1950s through the '70s, many of which were commissioned by culturally progressive clients--chiefly Rufus and Leslie Stillman and Andrew and Jamie Gagarin--who coalesced into a social circle. Included in this scene were prominent cultural figures such as Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Yves Tanguy and Kay Sage, Arshile Gorky, Philip Roth, and more, marking a unique intersection of midcentury architecture, art, and letters.

The publication of Breuer's Bohemia coincides with the feature-length documentary film of the same name by author and filmmaker James Crump, exploring Breuer's explosive residential practice on the East Coast. Through original research and interviews that will flow into both the book and the film, the voices of principal characters from Breuer's circle and notable professionals from the field of architecture help tell the story of Breuer's collaborations with his clients, while breathing new life into the history of a rich cultural atmosphere of which they all played a vital part. Heavily illustrated with vintage and contemporary photographs as well as rarely seen archival materials, Breuer's Bohemia is a unique glimpse of a twentieth-century milieu that produced an aesthetic, intellectual, and sometimes sybaritic community the likes of which no longer exists today.

Biographie:
James Crump is a writer, director, producer, and acclaimed art historian and curator whose recent films include the documentary Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson??(May 2020), Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival; Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, which premiered at the New York Film Festival with the Wall Street Journal declaring takes its place among the great art documentaries of the past half century; and Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco, winner of the Metropolitan Grand Jury prize at the 2017 DOC NYC Film Festival.

An acclaimed art critic and curator, Crump is also the author, coauthor, and editor of numerous books and has published widely in the fields of modern and contemporary art. His critical texts have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Archives of American Art Journal for the Smithsonian Museum, and Art Review, among other publications.