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Cultural upheavals have brought enormous change to the world of art. This sweeping history, covering more than 200 years, puts recent changes in a revealing new context. Here's the how and the why of changing perspectives that make and break reputations, often reversing who is considered a master one day and who is unknown the next. Each generation of experts believes their own taste is the last word, confident in their opinions about the art that was the best of their time. As the author writes, "People are inclined to view past changes in taste as unique misjudgments that will not happen again; they are incredulous that Botticelli was forgotten and Vermeer overlooked until the late 19th ce...
In this distinguished work, which Hilton Kramer in The New York Times Book Review called "surely the best book ever written on the subject," Barbara Novak illuminates what is essentially American about American art. She highlights not only those aspects that appear indigenously in our art works, but also those features that consistently reappear over time. Novak examines the paintings of Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, William Sidney Mount, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. She draws provocative and original conclusions about the role in American art of spiritualism and mathematics, conceptualism and the object, and Transcendentalism and the fact. She analyzes not only the paintings but nineteenth-century aesthetics as well, achieving a unique synthesis of art and literature. Now available with a new preface and an updated bibliography, this lavishly illustrated volume--featuring more than one hundred black-and-white illustrations and sixteen full-color plates--remains one of the seminal works in American art history.
Integrating history, literary criticism, and cultural studies, Imagining Italians vividly tells the story of two voyages across the Atlantic: America's cultural pilgrimage to Italy and the Italian "racial odyssey" in America. It examines how American representations of Italy, Italians, and Italian Americans engaged with national debates over immigration, race, and national identity during the period 1880–1910. Joseph P. Cosco offers a close analysis of selected works by immigrant journalists Jacob Riis and Edward Steiner and American iconographic writers Henry James and Mark Twain. Exploring their Italian depictions in journalism, photos, travel narratives, and fiction, he rediscovers the forgotten Edward Steiner and offers fresh readings of Riis's reform efforts and photography, James's The Golden Bowl and The American Scene, and Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.
Edward Weston (1886–1958) was one of the most celebrated photographers of the twentieth century. Jean Charlot (1898–1979), a classically trained French artist best known for his murals, woodcuts, and paintings celebrating Mexican culture, played a key role as a participant and chronicler of the Mexican Renaissance. This book, based on letters that Weston and Charlot exchanged from the early 1920s until Weston’s death in 1958, documents a friendship that says as much about art—about photography and fresco, practice, criticism, and history—as it does about the intersection of a number of fascinating characters, the ups and downs of the correspondents’ daily lives, the pursuit of their dreams and aspirations, and the support and encouragement they gave each other. Lew Andrews crafts a multivalent narrative that reconfigures our understanding of Weston, Charlot, and their era, shedding new light on specific events and artwork. While giving us rare insight into the everyday life of these artists, this work also supplies an important chapter in the history of twentieth-century art and photography, seen close up and from the inside.
The National Bureau of Economic Research organized a project to explore the economic issues facing the major art museums of the United States. For this purpose NBER defined economics broadly to include not only the financial situation of the museums but also the management and growth of museum collections, the museums' relationship with the public, and the role of the government in supporting art museums. This volume brings together nontechnical essays on these issues by economists associated with the NBER and personal statements by leaders of America's major national art museums and related foundations. It can be read not only by economists but also by museum officials and trustees. Museum ...
Traces the history of the Hudson River School of American painters, shows works by Church, Cole, and Inness, and describes the background of each painting.
Presents colour plates of over 70 paintings by the leading names in 19th- and 20th-century American art.
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"The spirit of independence which Murray so valued in herself and nurtured in other women was severely tested by the upheavals of the American Revolution. With strong loyalties to both Britain and America, she was torn by the conflict, especially when close relatives chose opposing sides and her third husband abandoned her, leaving her to defend the family estate alone. Her wartime experiences - wild midnight rides, accusations of being a spy, quartering both royal and rebel troops and brief imprisonment - vividly capture the turmoil of the Revolution and highlight the range of her political commitments."--BOOK JACKET.