Art - American - General

Robert L. McGrath leads a tour of New Hampshire's White Mountains through art and illustration spanning three centuries. He surveys--often at an exhilarating pace--the topographic and metaphoric landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains through the artistic and tourist life of the region as it...

Museums have become ground zero in America's culture wars. Whereas fierce public debates once centered on provocative work by upstart artists, the scrutiny has now expanded to mainstream cultural institutions and the ideas they present. In Displays of Power, Steven Dubin, whose Arresting Images...

Thirty illustrated essays highlighting a variety of Detroit artists. Essay'd 2: 30 Detroit Artists follows the welcome reception of last year's Essay'd: 30 Detroit Artists in presenting short, illustrated essays about artists who live and work in Detroit, or who have participated in the...

Thirty illustrated essays highlighting a variety of best-loved and little-known Detroit artists. Essay'd: 30 Detroit Artists highlights the individual contributors to Detroit's thriving and diverse art scene. Stemming from the popular website of the same name, Essay'd seeks to introduce readers to some of...

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...

A critical shift took place in contemporary American art in the late 1950s. Long dominated by Abstract Expressionism, the field took a new turn as two major alternatives appeared on the scene: Assemblage Art and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Together, these new styles redirected the course...

The Shingle Style embodied intellectual pluralism and cultural democracy--ideals fundamental to American belief and developed quickly and richly. After a period of reaction against the Shingle Style, it was revitalized, finding its first fully renewed expression in 1959 in a design for a beach...

Because western art is by definition topical, it is also by necessity representational, and often narrative. Western artists must therefore rely on a certain degree of realism to express themselves visually. While this tendency toward realism is out of keeping with abstract impressionism, which...

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has remarked, "Much of the social history of early America has been lost to us precisely because women were expected to use needles rather than pens." This book, part of the multivolume series of the International Quilt Study...

On February 22, 1916, Ralph Albert Blakelock's haunting landscape Brook by Moonlight was sold at auction for $20,000, a record price for a painting by a living American artist. The sale made him famous, newspapers called him America's greatest artist, and thousands flocked to...

As the people and economy of the United States struggled to recover during the Great Depression, 42 towns in North Carolina would benefit directly from the $83 million the federal government allocated for public art as part of the New Deal. The result was...

"Behind almost every painting is a fortune and behind that a sin or a crime." With these words as a starting point, Michael Gross, leading chronicler of the American rich, begins the first independent, unauthorized look at the saga of the nation's greatest museum,...

"Describes the life and work of American-born artist Maurice Robert Bebb (1891-1986), who participated in most of the important print societies of his day, including the Chicago Society of Etchers, the Print Makers of California, the Society of American Etchers, and the Prairie Print...

Join Paul "Cavs" Cavalieri on a journey through graffiti history and the evolution of a major cultural landmark. In this account, Cavs shares his experiences under the Bronx's East 238th Street bridge, which over the years has become a Bronx "Graffiti Hall of Fame,"...

Private History in Public examines history exhibits in small community museums and non-museum settings like bars, churches, and barbershops and argues that these exhibits promote dialogue on historical topics by engaging visitors with individualized perspectives.Author: Tammy S. GordonISBN-10: 075911935XISBN-13: 9780759119352Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield PublishersLanguage:...

Flesh Cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde cinema explores the groundbreaking representation of the body in experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on sexually explicit films by Andy Warhol, Barbara Rubin, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono and Paul Sharits, this...

Travelers in Kansas in search of fine art needn't restrict themselves to the state's many excellent museums. They need look no further than the walls of their own communities to discover a remarkable array of murals--artistic creations that are striking, democratic, and easily accessible....

An in-depth look at how democratic values have widened the American arts scene, even as it remains elite and cosmopolitan Two centuries ago, wealthy entrepreneurs founded the American cathedrals of culture--museums, theater companies, and symphony orchestras--to mirror European art. But today's American arts scene...

A bold new view of sentimental art's significance in American visual culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century In Moved to Tears, Rebecca Bedell overturns received ideas about sentimental art. Countering its association with trite and saccharine Victorian kitsch, Bedell argues that major...

Joseph Cornell and Astronomy provides an in-depth look at one artist's intense fascination with the science of astronomy. Joseph Cornell (1903-72) has often been viewed as a recluse, isolated in his home on Utopia Parkway, lost in the fairy tales and charming objects of...

"How almost true they sometimes almost ring!" Samuel Beckett's character rues his words. "How wanting in inanity!" A person could almost understand them! Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why...

The Biography Of A Painting is a book written by Ben Shahn that tells the story of an artwork from its creation to its eventual destruction. The painting in question is a mural that was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the...

It is a story that has gone down in the annals of American art history: a New Yorker visiting upstate Hoosick Falls is entranced by four pictures hanging in the window of a drugstore. Investigating further, he learns they are the handiwork of a...

This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Laura Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from...

This book presents a new look at landscape painting in the nineteenth century as it transformed from the depiction of known places to explorations of mood and time passing. Masterpieces in oil and watercolor illustrate the genre from its predominance in Britain to extraordinary...

Desire, in all of its complexity and excess, defined the American millennial moment. On the surface, to listen to the present political cacophony, things have changed, but not in the way people actually think and behave in private life. Though terror and trauma are...

Out of Earshot offers a reconfiguration of three of the nineteenth century's most prolific painters: Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), and Thomas Dewing (1851-1939). Asma Naeem considers how these painters turned, in ways significant for their individual artistic ventures, to themes of sound...

Active from 1940 to 1948, PM was a progressive New York City daily tabloid newspaper committed to the politics of labor, social justice, and antifascism--and it prioritized the intelligent and critical deployment of pictures and their perception as paramount in these campaigns. With PM...

Beginning with responses to fascism in the 1930s and ending with protests against the Iraq wars, David McCarthy shows how American artists--including Philip Evergood, David Smith, H. C. Westermann, Ed Kienholz, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, Chris Burden, Robert Arneson, Joyce Kozloff, Martha Rosler, and...

During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America's midwestern heartland; others deemed their painting dangerous, regarding its...

Andrew Wyeth is one of the best loved and most widely recognized artists in American history, yet for much of his career he was reviled by the art world's critical elite. Rethinking Andrew Wyeth reevaluates Wyeth and his place in American art, trying to...

Focusing on the thirty-three paintings that Philip Guston exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, this in-depth account reconsiders the history of postwar American art and the conception of figuration in modern art history. Through a myriad of cultural touchstones, including evidence from literary...

Using landscape photography to reflect on broader notions of culture, the passage of time, and the construction of perception, photographers Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe spent five years exploring the Grand Canyon for their most recent project, Reconstructing the View. The team's landscape photographs...

In Experimental Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut takes the reader into the heart of what we mean by "experimental" in avant-garde music. Focusing on one place and time--New York City, 1964--Piekut examines five disparate events: the New York Philharmonic's disastrous performance of John Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis;...

From the simple assertion that "words matter" in the study of visual art, this comprehensive but eminently readable volume gathers an extraordinary selection of words--painters and sculptors writing in their diaries, critics responding to a sensational exhibition, groups of artists issuing stylistic manifestos, and...

This new survey provides a complete history of American art and architecture from its seventeenth-century colonial beginnings to the latest installation and video work. Structured chronologically, the book defines the characteristics of the different periods and highlights the consistent forms, techniques, and styles that...

Boston in the 1740s: a bustling port at the edge of the British empire. A boy comes of age in a small wooden house along the Long Wharf, which juts into the harbor, as though reaching for London thousands of miles across the ocean....

Early in the Depression, Diego Rivera was commissioned by Edsel Ford to create a series of murals in the gallery of the Detroit Institute of Arts, giant frescos whose theme would be America's industrial might. This volume studies the astonishing results and gives us...

Charles Cushman (1896-1972) photographed a disappearing world in living color. Cushman's midcentury America--a place normally seen only through a scrim of gray--reveals itself as a place as vivid and real as the view through our window. The Day in Its Color introduces readers to...

Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, and Laurie Anderson are just some of the major American artists of the twentieth century. From the 1893 Chicago World's Fair to the 2000 Whitney Biennial, a rapid succession of art movements and different styles reflected...

From the Cadillac to the Apple Mac, the skyscraper to the Tiffany lamp, the world in which we live has been profoundly influenced for over a century by the work of American designers. But the product is only the end of a story that...

American architecture is astonishingly varied. From Native American sites in New Mexico and Arizona, and the ancient earthworks of the Mississippi Valley, to the most fashionable contemporary buildings of Chicago and New York, the United States boasts three thousand years of architectural history. It...

Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 traces the evolution and consequences of a new hybrid paradigm, which grants a heroic status to victims of national tragedies, and by extension to their families, thereby creating a class of privileged participants in the permanent memorial...

In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences with 4'33", his compositional ode to the ironic power of silence. From Cage's minimalism to Chris Burden's radical performance art two decades later (in one piece he had himself shot), the post-war American avant-garde shattered the divide between...

Encyclopedia of Jewish American Artists presents over 80 19th- and 20-century Jewish American artists, ranging from the critically neglected Theresa Bernstein, Ruth Gikow, and Jennings Tofel, to the well-known Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry Rivers. The subject matter of some of these artists...

A groundbreaking ecocritical exploration of American art that examines the complex and evolving relationship between art and the environment Public awareness of environmental issues has never been greater, nor has the need for imagining more sustainable and ethical habits of human action and thought,...

A New York Times critics' top art book of 2019, this volume tells the fascinating story of an art-world tastemaker who effectively defined American art in the 20th century The question "What is American art?" might conjure the hyperrealism of Raphaelle Peale and William...

Art AIDS America is the first comprehensive overview and reconsideration of 30 years of art made in response to the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This book foregrounds the role of HIV/AIDS in shifting the development of American art away from the cool...

Winner, Award of Merit for Non-Fiction, The Philosophical Society of Texas, 2015Before Abstract Expressionism of New York City was canonized as American postwar modernism, the United States was filled with localized manifestations of modern art. One such place where considerable modernist activity occurred was...

This new monograph on the art of Joe Zucker is a career-spanning survey that deals with all the artist's various bodies of work, from his grid paintings of the 1960s to his latest work, including the monumental 1000 Brushstrokes (2015- 2016). Zucker's art is...