Touching The Art Hardback

A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do.

Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda's work as 'vulgar' and a 'waste of talent' once it became unapologetically queer.

As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys's paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself.

In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys's place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.

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