Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay
Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012
"Beautiful, haunted, evocative and so open to where memory takes you. I kept thinking that this is the book that I have waited for: where objects, and poetry intertwine. Just wonderful and completely sui generis." (Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes)
An unforgettable voyage across the reaches of America and the depths of memory, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay follows one incredible family to discover a unique craft tradition grounded in America¹s vast natural landscape. Looking back through the generations, renowned critic Christopher Benfey unearths an ancestry--and an aesthetic--that is quintessentially American. His mother descends from colonial explorers and Quaker craftsmen, who carved new arts from the trackless wilds of the frontier. Benfey¹s father escaped from Nazi Europe--along with his aunt and uncle, the famed Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers--by fleeing across the Atlantic and finding an eventual haven in the American South.
Bricks form the backbone of life in North Carolina¹s rural Piedmont, where Benfey¹s mother was raised among centuries-old folk potteries, tobacco farms, and clay pits. Her father, like his father before him, believed in the deep honesty of brick, that men might build good lives with the bricks they laid. Nurtured in this red-clay world of ancient craft and Quaker radicalism, Benfey¹s mother was poised to set out from home when a tragic romance cracked her young life in two. Salvaging the broken shards of his mother¹s past and exploring the revitalized folk arts resisting industrialization, Benfey discovers a world brimming with possibility and creativity.
Benfey¹s father had no such foundation in his young life, nor did his aunt and uncle. Exiled artists from Berlin¹s Bauhaus school, Josef and Anni Albers were offered sanctuary not far from the Piedmont at Black Mountain College. A radical experiment in unifying education and art, Black Mountain made a monumental impact on American culture under Josef¹s leadership, counting Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller among its influential students and teachers. Focusing on the natural world, innovative craftsmanship, and the physical reality of materials, Black Mountain became a home and symbol for an emerging vision of American art.
Threading these stories together into a radiant and mesmerizing harmony, Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay is an extraordinary quest to the heart of America and the origins of its art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As Mt. Holyoke English professor Benfey (A Summer of Hummingbirds) observes in his combined meditation on art in America and family history, "Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine." This aspect both intrigues and frustrates. The three-part title refers to his mother's red-clay world of rural North Carolina; his father's involvement with Black Mountain College, run by his uncle, artist Josef Albers; and from the 18th-century search for the so-called Cherokee clay of the North Carolina outback for making fine porcelain. These elements are mixed and remixed in unexpected ways. Whereas the results are often charming and even enchanting, the book can be exhausting: not unlike the long essays of the New York Review of Books, for which Benfey writes. His book is certainly constructed with skill around an exploration of the meander (originally a design element on a Greek vase), as central to this narrative as the Shield of Achilles is to Homer's. Benfey's own meander ends with Whistler's mother (like Benfey's, a North Carolinian). The title of Whistler's portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, might serve as the title of this fragmented memoir. 39 photos; 16 pages of color illus.
