Research Catalog

Title

Donald Sultan : the disaster paintings / edited by Alison Hearst ; with an essay by Charles Wylie ; interview with the artist by Alison Hearst, and meditation by Max Blagg.

Publication

Fort Worth, Texas : Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth ; Munich : in association with DelMonico Books, Prestel, 2016.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Sultan, Donald.
• Hearst, Alison
• Wylie, Charles
• Blagg, Max
• Lowe Art Museum, host institution.
• Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, organizer, host institution.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum, host institution.
• North Carolina Museum of Art host institution.
• Sheldon Museum of Art, host institution.

Description

151 pages : illustrations (chiefly color); 29 cm

Summary

A critically important series in the oeuvre of American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Donald Sultan, The Disaster Paintings were created between 1984 and 1990. These works feature imposing, man-made structures, whose industrial qualities are reinforced by Sultan's preferred media, Masonite tiles and tar. The paintings' resulting sense of robust permanence is offset by the catastrophes Sultan includes therein, which provoke a jarring sense of fragility, impermanence, and transience. Such unexpected juxtapositions are privileged by the artist's process itself, which merges the industrial materials of Minimalism with representational painting, stylistically combining figuration and abstraction and making simultaneous reference to high and low culture. Painted on a large scale (the majority of the works in this series measure 8' x 8'), The Disaster Paintings embody great physicality in their process, subject matter, and finished form. They also reify the modern experience of industrialized societies with images of fire, accidents, and industrial mishaps, daring us to forget that calamities and adversity are woven into the very fabric of our existence. It is a timely moment in history to reconsider and reassess The Disaster Paintings.

Alternative Title

Disaster paintings

Subject

• Sultan, Donald > Exhibitions
• Sultan, Donald
• 1900-1999
• Disasters in art > Exhibitions
• Disasters in art

Genre/Form

• Exhibition catalogs
• Exhibition catalogs.

Note

• Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at Lowe Art Museum, Miami, 29th September-23rd December 2016; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, February 19-April 23, 2017; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, May 26-September 4, 2017; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, September 23-December 31, 2017; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, January 24-May 13, 2018.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Foreword and acknowledgments / Marla Price and Alison Hearst -- Mirrors in the landscape: Donald Sultan's 1980s Disaster paintings / Charles Wylie -- Interview with Donald Sultan / Alison Hearst -- Plates -- Symptoms of apocalypse: the Disaster paintings of Donald Sultan / Max Blagg -- Selected exhibition history and bibliography / Sarah Hymes.

ISBN

• 9783791355740 (hbk.)
• 3791355740 (hbk.)

LCCN

^^2016943500

OCLC

• 962073800
• SCSB-10405536

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library