Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival

Christopher Benfey

Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 2012 - Art - 291 pages

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 Americaıs 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. Benfeyıs 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 Carolinaıs rural Piedmont, where Benfeyıs 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, Benfeyıs mother was poised to set out from home when a tragic romance cracked her young life in two. Salvaging the broken shards of his motherıs past and exploring the revitalized folk arts resisting industrialization, Benfey discovers a world brimming with possibility and creativity.

Benfeyıs father had no such foundation in his young life, nor did his aunt and uncle. Exiled artists from Berlinıs 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 Josefıs 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.

What people are saying

Review: Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival

User Review  - Patricia - Goodreads

I persevered until I got to the half-way point of the book, and then I just had to quit. The author meanders around, talking mostly about his family history, and it just seems self-indulgent to me. I ...

Review: Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival

User Review  - Ann Sloan - Goodreads

This is not a book I would have selected to read, but then I have named this blog “All Books Considered.” And I was kind of assigned this book for the Artful Reading book club at Fort Worth's Kimbell ...

About the author

CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books, he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Benfey's most recent book, A Summer of Hummingbirds, won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival
• Author: Christopher Benfey
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 2012
• ISBN: 1594203261, 9781594203268
• Length: 291 pages
• Subjects: Art / American / General; Art / History / General; Biography & Autobiography / Artists, Architects, Photographers