Farewell the Tranquil Mind: The Art of Maxwell Gordon

Indianapolis: Birchwood Press, 2009. Hardcover. New in shrinkwrap.. Yellow cloth boards with embossed gradient lettering from teal to green-yellow. Unpaginated. Mainly color illustrations. The illuminated landscapes and still lives of the visionary painter Maxwell Gordon (1910-1983) were much celebrated in New York throughout the 1940s and 1950s (by Dore Ashton among others), exhibited at prestigious venues such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Then, in 1962, Gordon vanished from the art world map, and until now has remained largely invisible. More than a quarter-century after his death, Farewell the Tranquil Mind: The Art of Maxwell Gordon brings together the most extensive available record of his work, beginning with the whimsical expressionism of his early years, the social realism of his middle years and the hauntingly primitive dream-world of his final decades in Mexico and Israel. Gorgeously produced with over 100 full-color reproductions and a lengthy biographical essay by Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, Farewell the Tranquil Mind is a landmark tribute to an unsung genius of twentieth-century American art. -Amazon.