New Forms - New Media I

Artists: Lee Bontecou, Alberto Burri, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Jim Dine, Dan Flavin, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein, John Latham, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Antonio Tapies et al. 
Authors: Lawrence Alloway and Allan Kaprow 
Publisher: Martha Jackson Gallery, New York 
Date: 1960 
Condition: Printed card covers, some handling marks but generally in good condition; internally very clean and tidy, illustrated throughout in black and white interspersed with coloured paper dividers. A very rare item.
Provenance: William Scott RA

Published to accompany what is now recognised as an important exhibition held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960, this show pulled together over seventy exhibits across a range of media and generations. Jackson collaborated with several other innovative galleries of the period to pull this exhibition together, including Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis, Pierre Matisse, Betty Parsons and Bertha Schaeffer, gathering quite a range of artists into the display. 

Primarily American but with a good sprinkling of European artists, the show predates MoMA's The Art of Assemblage exhibition, by a year and was the first major showing of both contemporary and historical assemblage work.

Described by the writer John Canaday in the New York Times in June 1960 as '...With the cooperation of nineteen other galleries, Mrs. Jackson has put on display just about the gol' darnedest collection of seventy-two objects that you ever saw in your life. Even the elevator (the exhibition fills two floors) has a new canopy, inside, of ripped burlap with miscellaneous, disturbing objects attached.' 

The catalogue includes several installation photographs by Rudolph Burckhardt recording this significant event

Jackson followed the success of this exhibition up later in 1960 with New Forms - New Media II

A pioneer dealer in the contemporary art scene in New York in the 1950s and 1960s, Martha Jackson is familiar to British art collectors through her championing of several British artists, and hosted a number of solo and joint exhibitions of their work. The oft-quoted Three British Artists: Hepworth, Scott, Bacon from 1954 is a fine example, and indeed she remained William Scott's main American dealer until the 1970s.