"This book, published on the occasion of Walker Evans's (1903-1975) first retrospective exhibition in three decades at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presents a selection of mostly unpublished materials from the Walker Evans Archive, the vast collection of negatives and papers acquired in 1994 from the artist's estate by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Evans left to posterity a rich record of his creative process and inner life. From his earliest boyhood snap-shots to the seldom-seen color Polaroids made in the year before his death, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology traces the development of this American master. Previously unpublished writings - fiction, diaries, essays, criticism, translations and his early correspondence with the German artist, Hanns Skolle, his best friend at the time - open up surprising insights into Evans's intellectual path, while previously unknown photographs from the Metropolitan's collection of 40,000 negatives and transparencies reveal the artist at work. The anthology concludes with telling selections from Evans's seminal collection of vernacular imagery: picture postcards, printed ephemera, and a shockingly prescient album of newspaper clippings from the 1920s and 30s that prefigures Pop and Conceptual Art by three decades."--Jacket.
|
