Master of the Two Left Feet

Included in the New Yorker’s BEST BOOKS OF 2022 SO FAR

“Superb.”
–The Times Literary Supplement

“The definitive book on the artist.”
– The Wall Street Journal

“A labor of love by the show’s curator, Richard Meyer.”
– the New Yorker

“Meyer elaborates the chief influence on Hirshfield’s art and its unwavering artifice…The book also contains a catalog of some 78 of Hirshfield’s paintings that is itself fascinating reading.”
–New York Times

“Morris Hirshfield, A Once Obscure Self-Taught Artist, Is Having A Major Resurgence.”
–ArtNews

Reviews of “Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered” at the American Folk Art Museum

“Morris Hirshfield Rises Again: The paintings of this self-taught artist slipped from view after his death in 1946…an extravagantly orchestrated exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum is one of the season’s best.”
– the New York Times

“The American Folk Art Museum’s energising exhibition Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered tells the story of a painter who found his calling late in life, was briefly hailed, then drummed out of the club of 20th-century American artists.”
–the Financial Times

“Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, is a revelation. Hirshfield’s work is uncannily original, all the more startling for having been mostly unseen since the artist’s death in 1946. His story reflects the exclusivity of the art establishment and its tendency to sideline work by self-taught or unaffiliated artists.”
–The Times Literary Supplement

“Now Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered at the American Folk Art Museum allows us to see almost half of the works produced by this eccentric painter of wide-eyed cats, wildly patterned dogs, spotted sheep, caparisoned circus elephants, the occasional fierce tiger, exotic birds and a surprising number of voluptuous women, clothed and unclothed. Organized by the Stanford University professor of art history, Richard Meyer, author of Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, the definitive book on the artist, the show is a retrospective of Hirshfield’s paintings—many unexpectedly large—loosely grouped into sections on animals, nudes and Jewish themes, plus a few landscapes and full-size preparatory drawings, sporadically contextualized by photographs.”
–the Wall Street Journal

“This biography of the self-taught painter Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946) is also a study of the vageries of artistic reputation.[…] Meyer situates Hirshfield’s idiosyncratic output in the popular imagery and fine art of the period, suggesting that he was savvier than his early admirers knew.”
–the New Yorker

Richard Meyer is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University. He is author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art and What Was Contemporary Art? (MIT Press) as well as coeditor, with Catherine Lord, of Art and Queer Culture, and coauthor, with Peggy Phelan, of Contact Warhol: Photography without End.

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