The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth-Century Art

Nicolette Jones & John Jones

Hardcover | 16.51 x 3.05 x 24.13 cm | 352 pp

Tate Publishing | 2021 | 9781849767576 

In 1965, British artist John Jones left the UK with his young family to live in the USA. There they settled in Greenwich Village, New York, and spent several months on a road trip west, seeking out artists and interviewing as many as they could. All revealed something unique about their work and practice. Many spoke of the times they were living in – 1960s America, a political and cultural crucible. Some (Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono, for instance) became Jones’s personal friends.

Published here for the first time, this book presents a fascinating selection of Jones’s conversations with those artists, as chosen by his daughter, Nicolette. This is the story of art presented not through the filter of art critics, but from the mouths of the practitioners.

Featuring an array of well-known voices, The American Art Tapes offers an intimate portrait of the American art scene in the mid 1960s – a pivotal moment in twentieth-century art – and the thinking that gave rise to one of the most fertile creative periods in our recent history.

Featuring:
Roy Lichtenstein
Ad Reinhardt
Claes Oldenburg
Saul Steinberg
Robert Indiana
Man Ray
Helen Frankenthaler
Robert Motherwell
Louise Nevelson
Jim Dine
Robert Rauschenberg
Marcel Duchamp
Louise Bourgeois
Grace Hartigan
Yoko Ono
Jasper Johns
Isamu Noguchi
Willem De Kooning
Ed Ruscha
Lee Krasner