Art - American - General

As one of Currier & Ives's leading artists, Frances ("Fanny") Bond Palmer (1812-1876) was a major lithographer whose prints found their way into homes, schools, barns, taverns, business offices, yacht clubs, and elsewhere, reaching a mass audience during her day. Her life was a...

In 1939, Vogue magazine invited commercial designer Raymond Loewy and eight of his contemporaries--including Walter Dorwin Teague, Egmont Arens, and Henry Dreyfuss--to design a dress for the "Woman of the Future" as part of its special issue promoting the New York World's Fair and...

This book, featuring the life and works of Ralph Blakelock, situates him in the context of American art. Representing over twenty years of study and the examination of several thousand works attributed to him, Beyond Madness reveals the unusual nature of Blakelock's life story...

How the Vietnam War changed American art By the late 1960s, the United States was in a pitched conflict in Vietnam, against a foreign enemy, and at home--between Americans for and against the war and the status quo. This powerful book showcases how American...

Harvey Quaytman's paintings are distinct for their inventive, whimsical exploration of shape, meticulous attention to surface texture, and experimental application of color. While his works display a rigorous commitment to formalism, they are simultaneously invested with rich undertones of sensuality, decorativeness, and humor--expressed, too,...

Agnes Martin's (1912-2004) celebrated grid paintings are widely acknowledged as a touchstone of postwar American art and have influenced many contemporary artists. Martin's formative years, however, have been largely overlooked. In this revelatory study of Martin's early artistic production, Christina Bryan Rosenberger demonstrates that...

The Reverend Howard Finster (1916-2001) was called the "backwoods William Blake" and the "Andy Warhol of the South," and he is considered the godfather of contemporary American folk and visionary art. This book is the first interpretive analysis of the intertwined artistic and religious...

Soon after the book's publication in 1982, artist David Hockney read Lawrence Weschler's Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin and invited Weschler to his studio to discuss it, initiating a series of engrossing...

Ever since he made his first portraits and self-portraits at the age of sixteen, David Hockney has been fascinated by people--"the human clay," as W. H. Auden put it--and how they have been represented throughout the history of art. As much as any other...

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies is a book by the painter James McNeill Whistler, published in 1890. The book was in part a response to, in part a transcript of, Whistler's famous libel suit against critic John Ruskin. Ruskin, in a review of...

Frederic Sackrider Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th-century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U. S. Cavalry. His style...

This fantastic collection of sketches by Robert A. Powell represent scenes that are Distinctly Kentucky. The symbols and subjects cover the diverse natural and man-made landmarks as well as activities that depict the colorful heritage of Kentucky. To fully represent our great state, subjects...

In early 2005, Richard Polsky decided to put his much-loved, hard-won Warhol Fright Wig, up for auction at Christie's. The market for contemporary art was robust and he was hoping to turn a profit. His instinct seemed to be on target: his picture sold...

In Working South, renowned watercolorist Mary Whyte captures in exquisite detail the essence of vanishing blue-collar professions from across ten states in the American South with sensitivity and reverence for her subjects. From the textile mill worker and tobacco farmer to the sponge diver...

Robert Henri is to be remembered distinctly as a painter of portraits. Under his brush the likeness becomes a living reality. One carries away from an examination of his work the impression of "unpreparedness" on the sitter's part. The sincerity seen in his portraits...

After my last book, Angels, Guardians of the Light was published by Hay House in 1995, my journey continued onward in multifaceted layers that consisted of travel, giving seminars and lectures, and later on being called into the ministry, which transitioned into healthcare chaplaincy....

Surveys the representations and constructions of the human being in American art. Humans are organisms, but "the human being" is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the...

Marlene Dumas - feminist view of the body No other series has been as formative for the way the artist saw herself or sees herself now in retrospect, nor indeed more decisive for what was to follow, than the portrait sequence Female from 1992/3....

Jonathon Keats' work as an artist and thinker is compelling for our time. Keats poses critical questions, asks us to fundamentally reconsider our assumptions, and proposes radical methods of response. In a time when the environment and human lifeways are experiencing unprecedented change, thought...

During the nineteenth century, Americans celebrated their towns and cities through printed landscapes. In Maine, lithographs were commissioned from such leading artists as Fitz Henry Lane and talented, lesser known local artists, such as Esteria Butler. This book reproduces many of these works and...

Michael Scott's landscapes embody the primacy of place. They draw from memory, archetypes, and iconic works of the American canon. His paintings aim not to capture a landscape's particularity, as such, but to infuse it with the regenerative spirit of nature itself. He brings...

This is not your father's Artist Biography. There are no essays waxing on about the work and meaning. This is a living collection of photos and notes that cover nearly 20 years documenting the life and projects of Artist Phil Hansen (still alive). For...

He was born to privilege and sought the world of art. She lived at the center of that world-a working artist encouraged by the famous artists in her extended family. Together, Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips founded The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.,...

Wild Spaces, Open Seasons traces the theme of hunting and fishing in American art from the early nineteenth century through World War II. Describing a remarkable group of American paintings and sculpture, the contributors reveal the pervasiveness of the subjects and the fascinating contexts...

Artists and filmmakers in the early twentieth century reshaped our vision of the American West. In particular, the Taos Society of Artists and the California-based artist Maynard Dixon departed from the legendary depiction of the "Wild West" and fostered new images, or brands, for...

In 1865, the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church and his wife, Isabel, traveled to Jamaica on a sojourn of recovery after the tragic deaths of their two young children Herbert and Emma. A time to mourn and escape from the constant reminders found...

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions--collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media--quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides...

In 1910 and 1914, a two-volume study of New York's native birds was issued as part of the State Museum's annual report. A vast catalog of hundreds of species, the survey was illustrated by Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874-1927), a rising star in scientific bird...

The last quarter century has been an extraordinary and turbulent period in the art world. It was a time of creative intensity during which a handful of artists, like Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, managed, in their different ways, to...

Elizabeth Murray has radically altered the structure of Modernist painting. Her shaped and constructed canvases, often topologically modeled in three dimensions or fitted together out of multiple jigsaw-like parts, treat figure and ground in unprecedented ways, giving the elastic shapes of classic Surrealism a...

Andy Warhol's oeuvre during the first decade of his career, before he became the godfather of pop, proved to be enormously influential on his life's work, yet remains little known. Drag & Draw highlights two series of drawings from this decade, when Warhol first...

With a magician's sleight of hand, Nauman's art makes disappearance visibleAt 76 years old, Bruce Nauman is widely acknowledged as a central figure in contemporary art whose stringent questioning of values such as good and bad remains urgent today. Throughout his 50-year career, he...

"I know it when I see it..." These words, famously spoken in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, became the rallying cry of the anti-obscenity lobby as their enraged howls became the soundtrack to a tumultuous mixture of modern art, homosexuality,...

I had already written three books in a tumultuous time of my life. I was compelled to write feeling the importance of my experiences to be known. For I knew I was not alone and did not want history to repeat itself. We live...

Since the early decades of the eighteenth century, European, and especially British, thinkers were preoccupied with questions of taste. Whether Americans believed that taste was innate--and therefore a marker of breeding and station--or acquired--and thus the product of application and study--all could appreciate that...

Dudley Carter-possibly the most famous artist you've never heard of... ". . . a lively and loving portrait of the great Northwest master, capturing the life and work of an artist as powerful as the ancient forests from which he drew his strength and...

With Artist as Author, Christa Noel Robbins provides the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th century abstract painting in the US. Taking a close look at this influential period of art history, Robbins describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting...

In 2017, Huntsville artist Lee Jamison embarked on a trip with sketchbook in hand, recording his impressions and recollections of East Texas, a region he has called home for about 45 years. Having built a solid reputation as a respected Texas Regionalist painter, Jamison,...

This richly illustrated volume explores the multiple and evolving meanings of diaspora, its condition, and its experiences as expressed through painting. Relations brings together artists who address questions of diaspora from diverse perspectives, methodologies, and aesthetic languages. With its own deep and complex history,...

Luise Kaish was a key figure in the New York art scene of the late 20th century, whose multidisciplinary and process-oriented practice contributed to various artistic discourses at the time. The strength and breadth of her work, her influential role in education, and the...

The first publication of the unknown poetry of a major twentieth-century sculptor In 1955, long before he became famous for his abstract metal sculptures, John Chamberlain lived at Black Mountain College, writing poetry alongside Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. By the time...

Water-colorist T. F. Hempel has been painting for more than 40 years, creating masterpieces of icons of the Quad Cities and the surrounding area. Subjects as different as boats and commercial buildings along with personal residences are all seen in Hempel's work. Enjoy this...

John Michael Vlach called Brothers in Clay "not only the best study of American stoneware pottery now available but also a fine model for the presentation and analysis of hand-based technologies." The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss noted, "Mr. Burrison has brought to this undertaking a...

For many people, "western art" immediately conjures images by Frederic Remington or Georgia O'Keeffe--but there's so much more. From early explorers' first sketches of the Rockies to the modern earth sculptures of Michael Heizer, images of the American West are as multifaceted as its...

Spirit: The Art of Robert Bissell includes more than 130 of Bissell's artworks that help illuminate the universal quest into the world of spirit. His familiar bears and rabbits are joined by elephants and humans as they find love and connection. Spirit guides offer...

A richly illustrated history of women's suffrage in the United States that highlights underrecognized activists Marking the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Votes for Women is the first richly illustrated book to reveal the history and complexity of the...

When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated--the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a...

We the people--these words embody the ethos of what it means to be an American citizen. As individuals we are a tapestry of colors and creeds; united we are a nation committed to preserving our hard-earned freedom. In this heart-stirring collection of watercolor portraits...

Now in Paperback In Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic reflects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America's great artists. Simic's spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for...

For many children of the sixties, the gift of a Schwinn was a ticket to freedom, a chance to feel the wind on their face and the steady rotation of rubber at their feet. The Schwinn took many through their childhood adventures, with memories...