  American
Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 ~ H. Barbara Weinberg (Editor,
Contributor), Carrie Rebora Barratt (Editor, Contributor), Margaret C. Conrads (Contributor),
E. Bruce Robertson (Contributor) – Hardcover: 240 pages
Metropolitan Museum of Art (October 27, 2009)
This beautiful volume explores American paintings of people engaged in the tasks
and pleasures of everyday life between the colonial era and World War I. These works
reflect key historical and cultural developments, including the growth of industrialization,
urbanization, and immigration; changing gender roles; and the shifting location
and meaning of the frontier.
Focusing on leading artists, from John Singleton Copley to John Sloan, the authors
address narrative content in colonial and early national portraits; genre scenes
of the Jacksonian period; images from the Civil War era; and works by American
Impressionists and realists in the decades before and after 1900. Like the exhibition
it accompanies, the book reflects transformations in artists’ aspirations
and viewers’ expectations as America evolved from isolated British outpost
to leading independent participant in international affairs.
  Visions
of the Susquehanna: 250 Years of Paintings by American Masters by Rob
Evans – Perfect Paperback: 80 pages Lancaster Museum of Art; first edition
(September 7, 2006)
The Susquehanna River is one of the great rivers of the United States and one
of the earliest to be explored. This handsome book, fully illustrated in color,
presents intimate and varied views of its waters and landscape, by the many prominent
American artists who have gravitated there to paint it over the last two and a
half centuries including Benjamin West, Thomas Moran, George Inness, Frederic
Edwin Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Charles Demuth
and such contemporary masters as Mark Innerst, Debra Bermingham, Leonard Koscianski,
Randall Exon, Stephen Hannock, and many others. Includes essays by art historians
David Dearinger and Leo Mazow.
Before 1948: American Paintings in Georgia Collections by Donald D.
Keyes (Editor), Heidi Domescik (Editor), Jennifer Deprima (Editor), Terry Kay
(Introduction) – Hardcover: 123 pages Georgia Museum of Art (January 1999)
This publication commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the Georgia Museum of
Art by illustrating and outlining the paintings included in the anniversary exhibition.
American works done before 1948 were selected by Donald D. Keyes, curator of paintings,
and highlight artists such as John Sloan, Leon Kroll, Gilbert Stuart, and Lilla
Cabot Perry. Novelist Terry Kay contributed the introduction.
Celebrating Florida: Works of Art from the Vickers Collection by Gary
R. Libby – Paperback: 144 pages University Press of Florida; 2nd ed edition
(September 1, 1996)
Celebrating Florida presents for the first time a full-color collection of 66
important paintings, drawings, and prints of Florida-based art. Featuring such
artists as Winslow Homer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, George Inness, William Glackens,
Martin Johnson Heade, Frank Shapleigh, and Herman Herzog, the book highlights
some of the world's most significant artists, who came to Florida from 1823 to
1950 to capture the Sunshine State.
Essays by noted historians Wendell Garrett and Erik Robinson discuss the settlement
of Florida and its birth as a state in 1845. Additional essays present an aesthetic,
historical, social, and cultural overview of the significance of the art as well
as biographical information about each artist.
Celebrating Florida is a Sesquicentennial publication, part of the celebration
of 150 years of Florida statehood.
Art in Florida: 1564-1945 The early chapters document the artistic
offerings of early explorers and naturalists like Mark Catesby and John James
Audubon, as well as the Seminole Indians and those who painted them, including
George Catlin and Charles Bird King. St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement,
also came to be the first center of art in Florida. After the Civil War, when
Northerners began to flock to Florida for health and pleasure, art found a place
in the thriving business of travel literature. This drew artist like brothers
Edward and Thomas Moran, who began to paint the beauty of Florida. In the 1880s,
St. Augustine, through the efforts of Henry Morrison Flagler, again became the
center of artistic endeavor, attracting artists like Martin Johnson Heade. At
the end of the century many prominent American artists arrived and painted the
Florida they found. This included Frederic Remington, George Inness, Hermann Herzog,
and Winslow Homer. In the first half of the twentieth century, Florida paintings
were created by such notables as John Singer Sargent, Jane Patterson, Martha Walter,
Milton Avery, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Harold Betts, Frank Weston Benson,
Ralston Crawford, and Andrew Wyeth. The final chapter covers government-sponsored
art in the 1930's, including murals in public buildings and the Index of American
Design.
Collected here are 160 illustrations of Florida art, 100 in color. The illustrated
paintings were gathered from public and private collections all over the country,
many reproduced here for the first time.
 Taos
Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950 by Dean A. Porter, Teresa Hayes Ebie,
Suzan Campbell – Hardcover, 400 pages (May 1999) Snite Museum of Art
Reader review: Taos Artists and Their Patrons is probably the finest study
to appear devoted to a single school of painting, that which arose in Taos in
New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors have thoroughly investigated
all aspects of patronage—exhibitions, individual advocates, institutional
support, and many other forms. At the same time, they have presented what must
be the finest study of the work of the artists active in Taos, embellished by
a wealth of marvellous images, beautifully reporduced. The book enjoys three major
accomplishments: it is a definitive study of the nature of American art patronage;
it is a thorough review of one of the most important regional schools of art in
this country; and it's a fabulous read!
|
 Art
In A Season Of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, And Patrons In Early America (Early
American Studies)
by Margaretta M. Lovell – Hardcover: 341 pages University of Pennsylvania Press
(April 30, 2005)
Focusing on the rich heritage of art-making in the eighteenth
century, this lushly illustrated book positions both well-known
painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their
economic lives, their families, and the geographies through
which they moved as they created notable careers and memorable
objects. In considering both painting and decorative arts simultaneously,
Art in a Season of Revolution departs from standard practice
and resituates painters as artisans. Moreover, it gives equal
play to the lives of the makers and the lives of the objects,
to studying both within the interdependent social and economic
webs linking local and distant populations of workers, theorists,
suppliers, and patrons throughout the mercantile Atlantic.
 
American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century (A Publication of the National
Gallery of Art, Washington) by Ellen G. Miles, Patricia Burda, Cynthia J. Mills,
Leslie Kaye Reinhardt – Hardcover: 440 pages Oxford University Press, USA (January
11, 1996)
The National Gallery's collection of eighteenth-century American
paintings includes some of its greatest treasures and most beloved
national icons. John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark,
Gilbert Stuart's The Skater (Portrait of William Granti) and
George Washington (Vaughan portrait)--as well as his portraits
of the first five presidents of the United States, the so-called
Gibbs-Coolidge portraits--and Edward Savage's Washington Family.
Ellen G. Miles, curator of painting and sculpture at the National
Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, presents new research
culled from letters, wills, and other previously unpublished
documents that offer a fresh perspective on the artists and
sitters, as well as new insight into the paintings. (This publication
is made possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation).
  The
Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneur from the Hudson River School to
the American Impressionists by Annette Blaugrund – Paperback: 143 pages
Univ of Washington Press (June 1997)
Just before the Civil War, the entrepreneur James B. Johnston
(1822-1887) commissioned the beaux-arts architect Richard Morris
Hunt (1827-1895) to design a building on Tenth Street in New
York City for the sole purpose of housing artists' studios (some
with living quarters) as well as a communal space for exhibitions.
This concept was entirely new to the city's artistic community,
and when the building was finished in January 1858, it quickly
achieved prominence among a wide circle of artists, architects,
designers, art dealers, collectors, and critics. This book accompanied
a 1997 exhibiton by that same name at the Parrish Art Museum.
The 150 objects in the exhibition include paintings, prints,
and photographs representing the work of artists who lived and
worked there as well as the building itself.
Hunt's innovative but entirely logical design for the three-story
building, provided for some twenty-three studios around a central
exhibition space that rose two stories and was topped by a glass
ceiling. In 1871 a photography studio was constructed in the basement,
and by 1873 the building was so fully occupied that an annex was
constructed next door. Tenants included not only artists but also
influential writers such as Henry T. Tuckerman and architects like
Hunt. At the outset the building was mostly occupied by American-born
and trained male landscape painters between the ages of nineteen
and forty-two. Among the best known early tenants were Emanuel Leutze,
Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Edwin Church. Martin Johnson Heade
also had a studio here.
 Early
Art and Artists in West Virginia by John A. Cuthbert – Hardcover: 301
pages West Virginia University (November, 2000)
The history of fine painting in West Virginia has long been
overshadowed by the state's recognized excellence in the areas
of folk arts. This beautiful, museum-quality book corrects that
oversight, documenting the life and work of approximately 1,000
painters who worked in the state before about 1930. From the
early small-town portraitists, to the scores of prominent landscapists
who depicted the state's legendary beauty, to the West Virginia
masters of the modernist movements, native and visiting artists
have practiced every style of American art. This lavishly produced,
oversized book features hundreds of full-color reproductions
from museums and private collections around the world.
American Realism by Edward Lucie-Smith – Hardcover,
Harry N Abrams, 1994
American Realism is Edward Lucie-Smith's eloquent and interesting discourse tracing the progress of American realist art from
the colonial period through postmodernism. It features a generous 250 illustrations and 115 gorgeous, full-color plates. Lucie-Smith's
underlying argument seems to be that realism more accurately reveals the American character than does abstract expressionism
or minimalism. This premise is developed by examining specific paintings and placing them in a cultural and historical context.
Of particular interest are the sections on Thomas Eakins, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Philip Pearlstein, Andy Warhol, and
Eric Fischl. —Madeline Crowley
Downriver:
Currents of Style in Louisiana Painting, 1800-1950 (Hardcover) by Estill Curtis Pennington – Hardcover: 208 pages
Pelican Publishing Company (February 1991)
|
