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Description: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00005
Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form.

This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300196757
EISBN 9780300232646
Illustrations 100 illus
Print Status in print
Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00006
The Abstract Expressionist movement has long been bound up in the careers and lifestyles of about twelve white male artists who exhibited in New York in the 1940s. In this book Ann Eden Gibson reconsiders the history of the movement by investigating other artists—people of color, women, and gays and lesbians—whose versions of abstraction have been largely ignored until now.

Gibson argues that the origins and promotion of Abstract Expressionism were influenced by sexual and racial biases, and she shows how both the themes and physical appearance of Abstract Expressionism were gradually defined and refined by the white male artists who became its spokesmen, by critics, and by private and institutional supporters. She offers a justification for rethinking the definition of Abstract Expressionism through the work of such well-known contemporaries as Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Alfonso Ossorio, Aaron Siskind, Leon Polk Smith, Anne Ryan, and Hale Woodruff, as well as such lesser known artists as Ruth Abrams, Ronald Joseph, and Thelma Johnson Streat. Gibson contends that the current description of Abstract Expressionism has not only deprived it of such themes as masking, maternity, domesticity, and the experience of African American and Native American culture but has also limited it formally by excluding smaller, representational, and more personal work by canonical as well as noncanonical artists. She demonstrates that exposing the movement's true diversity makes this important heritage even more valuable than it was before.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date November 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300080728
EISBN 9780300229011
Illustrations 191
Print Status out of print
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00007
In the post-Civil War Era, American portraiture began to show a new complexity of character, a character at odds with itself and brimming with tensions between masculine and feminine sensibilities. David M. Lubin here examines three major works of portraiture, two paintings and one novel, from the 1880s: Thomas Eakins' The Agnew Clinic, John Singer Sargent's The Boit Children, and Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Discussing several contradictory tendencies evident in the three works, Lubin probes at greatest length the contradiction each artist sensed between masculine power and feminine passivity and relates this troublesome dichotomy to issues of property, propriety, social and authorial control, formalism, realism, and patriarchal family life. He argues that the conflict enacted depicts the pressures of a masculine-ordered bourgeois ideology and speaks of social problems in American culture both a century ago and today.

Act of Portrayal reveals not only how Eakins, Sargent, and James construct portraits but also how the subjects within those portraits view themselves or others, and how we, by our constructive, synthetic act of reading, add ourselves to the portrait-making process.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date January 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300032130
EISBN 9780300235845
Illustrations 23 Illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt
Spanning more than fifty years, this comprehensive volume collects the letters, journal entries, interviews, lectures, reviews, and remembrances of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004). Alexandra Truitt, the artist’s daughter and a leading expert on her work, has carefully selected these writings, most of which are previously unpublished, from the artist’s papers at Bryn Mawr College as well as private holdings.

Revelations about the artist’s life abound. Among Truitt’s earliest writings are excerpts from journals written more than a decade before her first artistic breakthrough, in which she establishes themes that would occupy her for decades. In later texts she shares uncommon insights into the practices of other artists and writers, both predecessors and peers. Like Truitt’s published journals, these writings offer a compelling narrative of her development as an artist and efforts to find her voice as a writer. They show that Truitt’s creative impulse to translate the inner workings of her mind into a symbolic language, so important to understanding her sculpture, predates her art.
Print publication date April 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260410
EISBN 9780300279016
Illustrations 63
Print Status in print
Description: American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00342
Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like — or “should” look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior “essence.” Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs.

Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the “essences” of “blood,” “character,” and “race.” She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of “American looks” were established in the first place.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1999 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691004778
EISBN 9780300273175
Illustrations 56
Print Status in print
Description: American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00011
American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings—of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk—served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation—arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time.

Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices—and not a blissful celebration of American democracy—that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.

*The eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1991 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300050196
EISBN 9780300232165
Illustrations 80
Print Status out of print
Description: American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00012
The sleek lines and gleaming facades of the architecture of the late 1940s and 1950s reflect a culture fascinated by the promise of the Jet Age. Buildings like Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at JFK Airport and Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant retain a thrilling allure, seeming to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this work, distinguished architectural historian Alice Friedman draws on a vast range of sources to argue that the aesthetics of mid-century modern architecture reflect an increasing fascination with "glamour," a term widely used in those years to characterize objects, people, and experiences as luxurious, expressive, and even magical.

Featuring assessments of architectural examples ranging from Mies van der Rohe's monolithic Seagram Building to Elvis Presley's sprawling Graceland estate, as well as vintage photographs, advertisements, and posters, this book argues that new audiences and client groups with tastes rooted in popular entertainment made their presence felt in the cultural marketplace during the postwar period. The author suggests that American and European architecture and design increasingly reflected the values of a burgeoning consumer society, including a fundamental confidence in the power of material objects to transform the identity and status of those who owned them.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date June 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300116540
EISBN 9780300230932
Illustrations 165
Print Status in print
Description: American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00013
American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression is a history of modern painting in the United States in the exciting period between 1913 and 1929—the years when the schools of modernism and conservatism struggled for dominance in American art.

It begins with the emergence of a school of realism, dubbed in derision the Ash Can School, an artistic outgrowth of the liberal reform movement and of the general cultural revolt at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The introduction of modernism through Alfred Stieglitz and his circle and the first great exhibition of modern art at the Armory Show in 1913 is described as a clean break from this establishment American academic tradition. The period ended with the coming of the Depression when the realist tradition reasserted itself in a new generation of American Scene and Regionalist painters.

This book investigates the impact of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Purism, etc., upon American artists; the original Dada and mechanistic experiments of Duchamp and Picabia in this country and their effects; the development of a native school of Cubist Realism; pseudo-scientific theories as a reaction among some more conservative artists to the new movements; and the many experiments and eventual assimilation of modernism by leading artists of the period.
Print publication date January 1970 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691003016
EISBN 9780300249699
Illustrations 155
Print Status out of print
Description: An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design,...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00254
In 1915 the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) embarked upon a mission to energize the American textile industry.  Curators sought to innovate a distinctly “American” design idiom drawing on a more universal “primitive” language. Ethnographic objects were included in study rooms; designers gained access to storage rooms; and museum artifacts were loaned to design houses and department stores. In order to attract designers and reluctant manufacturers, who quickly responded, collections were supplemented with specimens including fur garments from Siberia, Persian costumes, and Javanese textiles. This book positions the project at the AMNH in the broader narrative of early 20th-century design education in New York, which includes the roles of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum.
Print publication date October 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300199437
EISBN 9780300264562
Illustrations 111
Print Status in print
Description: American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00253
The formation of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 by a small, dedicated group of painters transformed the perception of what had long been considered a marginal medium. Artists of all ages, styles, and backgrounds took up watercolor in the 1870s, inspiring younger generations of impressionists and modernists. By the 1920s many would claim it as “the American medium.”

This engaging and comprehensive book tells the definitive story of the metamorphosis of American watercolor practice between 1866 and 1925, identifying the artist constituencies and social forces that drove the new popularity of the medium. The major artists of the movement—Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, William Trost Richards, Thomas Moran, Thomas Eakins, Charles Prendergast, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, and many others—are represented.
Print publication date March 2017 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300225891
EISBN 9780300262292
Illustrations 346
Print Status out of print
Description: America’s Rome: Volume I—Classical Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00010
This remarkable book is one of a two-volume set that examines the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. William L. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over two centuries.

Volume I focuses on the influence of classical Rome, showing how the Forum and the Colosseum inspired American thoughts of ideal republics and powerful empires, how the Campagna was an ambiguous image of Arcadia or wasteland in the aftermath of empire, and how the Pantheon and the galleries of antique sculpture presented a pagan challenge to American ideas of divinity, beauty, and sexuality.

America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome is also available on the A&AePortal.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1989 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9789998004733
EISBN 9780300243925
Illustrations 173
Print Status out of print
Description: America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00014
This remarkable book, one of a two-volume set, discusses the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over the course of two centuries.

In this volume, Vance begins by examining the three foremost Roman Catholic symbols: the bambino, the madonna, and the pope. He traces for the first time the evolution of American writing on popes from the late eighteenth century to the election of Pope John Paul II, including fictional depictions of an American pope. Then, he explores the predominantly negative American reaction to Catholic baroque sculpture and architecture in the nineteenth century.

In the section on contemporary Rome, the author addresses American attitudes toward Rome’s earliest attempts at democratization, toward its aristocratic social structures, and toward the political changes that occurred after World War II.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1989 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300044539
EISBN 9780300243932
Illustrations 34
Print Status in print
Description: The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00117
Geology was in vogue in nineteenth-century America. People crowded lecture halls to hear geologists speak, and parlor mineral cabinets signaled social respectability and intellectual engagement. This was also the heyday of the Hudson River School, and many prominent landscape painters avidly studied geology. Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, John F. Kensett, William Stanley Haseltine, Thomas Moran, and other artists read scientific texts, participated in geological surveys, and carried rock hammers into the field to collect fossils and mineral specimens. As they crafted their paintings, these artists drew on their geological knowledge to shape new vocabularies of landscape elements resonant with moral, spiritual, and intellectual ideas.

Rebecca Bedell contributes to current debates about the relationship among art, science, and religion by exploring this phenomenon. She shows that at a time when many geologists sought to disentangle their science from religion, American artists generally sidestepped the era's more materialist science, particularly Darwinism. They favored a conservative, Christianized geology that promoted scientific study as a way to understand God. Their art was both shaped by and sought to preserve this threatened version of the science. And, through their art, they advanced consequential social developments, including westward expansion, scenic tourism, the emergence of a therapeutic culture, and the creation of a coherent and cohesive national identity.

This major study of the Hudson River School offers an unprecedented account of the role of geology in nineteenth-century landscape painting. It yields fresh insights into some of the most influential works of American art and enriches our understanding of the relationship between art and nature, and between science and religion, in the nineteenth century. It will draw a broad audience of art historians, Americanists, historians of science, and readers interested in the American natural landscape.
Print publication date January 2002 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691102917
EISBN 9780300249675
Illustrations 76
Print Status in print
Description: Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00286
In the mid-1960s, at the height of his creative powers, Andy Warhol produced hundreds of three-minute cinematic portraits, called "Screen Tests." Although rarely screened now, these short films captured a virtual who's who of the avant-garde, including such cultural icons as Edie Sedgwick, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dalí, and Susan Sontag. In this initial volume of the authorized catalogue raisonné of Warhol's films, Warhol authority Callie Angell examines all 189 people captured by Warhol's lens. Stills from many of the films appear here for the first time. Drawing on 13 years of original research into the Screen Test subjects and their relationships to Warhol, Angell provides an unprecedented look at the pop art master's working method, and a unique record of his colorful social and professional life.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

The second volume of this catalogue raisonné project (The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963–1965, edited by John G. Hanhardt [2021]) will be available on the A&AePortal at a later date.

 
Print publication date January 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780810955394
EISBN 9780300266382
Illustrations 794
Print Status out of print
Description: Anne Brigman: The Photographer of Enchantment
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00256
In this first monograph devoted to Anne Brigman (1869–1950), Kathleen Pyne traces the groundbreaking photographer’s life from Hawai‘i to the Sierra and elsewhere in California, revealing how her photographs emerged from her experience of local place and cultural politics. Brigman’s work caught the eye of the well-known photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who welcomed her as one of the original members of his Photo-Secession group. He promoted her work as exemplary of his modernism and praised her Sierra landscapes with female nudes—work that at the time separated Brigman from the spiritualized upper-class femininity of other women photographers. Stieglitz later drew on Brigman’s images of the expressive female body in shaping the public persona of Georgia O’Keeffe into his ideal woman artist. This nuanced account reasserts Brigman’s place among photography’s most important early advocates and provides new insight into the gender and racialist dynamics of the early twentieth-century art world, especially on the West Coast of the United States.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date June 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249941
EISBN 9780300263640
Illustrations 154
Print Status in print
Description: Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00271
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, burgeoning American cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia seemed increasingly chaotic. Noise, odors, and a feverish level of activity on the streets threatened to overwhelm the senses. Growing populations placed new demands on every aspect of the urban landscape—streets, parks, schools, asylums, cemeteries, markets, waterfronts, and more. In this unique exploration of the early history of urban architecture and design, leading architectural historian Dell Upton reveals the fascinating confluence of sociological, cultural, and psychological factors that shaped American cities in the antebellum years.

Through contemporary travel accounts, diaries, and correspondence, as well as maps, architectural drawings, paintings, and prints—many previously unpublished—Upton investigates not only how buildings were designed, streets were laid out, and urban space was put to use, but also why. He offers original insights into the way cities were imagined, and an extensive selection of illustrations recreates the various features of the urban landscape in the nineteenth century.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

*Many of the black-and-white images in the original print edition have been replaced by color images in this ePortal version."
Print publication date September 2008 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300124880
EISBN 9780300265828
Illustrations 164
Print Status in print
Description: Antifascism in American Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017
Between 1933 and 1945, American painters of widely divergent political views and artistic styles shared a belief that their art should aid in the fight against fascism. In this engrossing book, Cécile Whiting presents the first thorough study of the politically motivated art of this period.

Whiting shows how the various manifestations of antifascist art negotiated the competing demands of artistic conventions, aesthetic and political theories, and historical developments. The author explores the art produced by the radical Left in the early 1930s and social-realist art of the late 1930s. She looks at the way in which Stuart Davis reconciled modernism with antifascist politics by celebrating American democracy through semi-abstract paintings, and how the regionalists Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry strengthened American patriotism with nationalist myths and propaganda for the Allied cause. Whiting explains that as such overtly political and nationalist art came under fire for resembling the propaganda of the enemy, social realists and regionalists alike sought to endow some of their paintings with more universal appeal. She concludes by examining the myth paintings of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, which not only captured a sense of the chaos and violence of the war but also challenged the way Nazi, regionalist, and social-realist artists used myth for nationalist political purposes. The dominance of abstraction in the post-war art world, says Whiting, was the direct legacy of this contentious artistic debate on how best to use art in the service of antifascism.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1989 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300042597
EISBN 9780300232189
Illustrations 107
Print Status out of print
Description: Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition
Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis.

Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia—not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree, but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners, and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's—and his own—tendency toward denial of both death and environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new possibilities for the environmental movement today and new ways of understanding American history.
Print publication date January 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300176407
EISBN 9780300276640
Illustrations 54
Print Status in print
Description: Art & Graphic Design: George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00305
This fascinating study of the role that graphic design played in American art of the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the work of George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Examining how each of these artists utilized typography, materiality, and other graphic design aesthetics, Benoît Buquet reveals the importance of graphic design in creating a sense of coherence within the disparate international group of Fluxus artists, an elusiveness and resistance to categorization that defined much of Ruscha’s brand of Pop Art, and an open and participatory visual identity for a range of feminist art practices. Rigorous and compelling scholarship and a copious illustration program that presents insightful juxtapositions of objects—some of which have never been discussed before—combine to shed new light on a period of abundant creativity and cultural transition in American art and the intimate, though often overlooked, entwinement between art and graphic design.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249859
EISBN 9780300269338
Illustrations 152
Print Status in print
Description: Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting
In the London circles of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederic Leighton, the notion of “art for art's sake” became a shared concern: if art is not created for the sake of preaching a moral lesson, or supporting a political cause, or making a fortune, or any other objective, what might art be? Art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn traces the emergence of the debates over this issue in the 1860s and 1870s, focusing especially on the Rossetti, Whistler, Leighton, and other protagonists of the Aesthetic Movement and their paintings—some of the most haunting and memorable images in modern art. The English painters' search for the formula to best express the idea of “art for art's sake” was a unified and powerful artistic undertaking, Prettejohn demonstrates, and the Aesthetic Movement made important contributions to the history of modern art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2007 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300135497
EISBN 9780300278590
Illustrations 128
Print Status in print
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00199
Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with quality reproductions of artworks, it offers a resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures—including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederick Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman—are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists.

A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.
Print publication date April 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171689
EISBN 9780300257335
Illustrations 127
Print Status in print
Description: Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926–1956
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00025
This remarkable book is the first to examine in abundant detail the relation between visual artists and the American Communist movement during the twentieth century. Andrew Hemingway charts the rise and decline of the Communist Party’s influence on art in the United States from the Party’s dramatic rise in prestige during the Great Depression to its effective demise in the 1950s. Offering a full account of how left-wing artists responded to the Party’s various policy shifts over these years, Hemingway shows that the Communist Party exerted a powerful force in American culture, even after the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939.

The author scrutinizes the works of an array of leftist artists, many of great interest but largely forgotten today. He demonstrates that American art produced within the Communist Party’s orbit was far more diverse and had a much more complex relationship with modernism than has been previously understood. Refusing to march in lockstep to Party requirements, artists and critics in and around the Party accepted no single aesthetic line and engaged in heated debates. Hemingway offers radical new interpretations of some familiar works, reassesses the role of the John Reed Clubs and the work of artists in the federal art programs, and revises accepted thinking about art in the United States during the Cold War. In short, he offers a distinguished and original political history that recovers the rich artistic and intellectual legacy of the American left.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date October 2002 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300092202
EISBN 9780300247015
Illustrations 193
Print Status in print
Description: The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00129
One of the most important artists of the twentieth century, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting over the course of his career. Rothko also wrote a number of essays and critical reviews during his lifetime, adding his thoughtful, intelligent, and opinionated voice to the debates of the contemporary art world. Although the artist never published a book of his varied and complex views, his heirs indicate that he occasionally spoke of the existence of such a manuscript to friends and colleagues. Stored in a New York City warehouse since the artist’s death more than thirty years ago, this extraordinary manuscript, titled The Artist’s Reality, is now being published for the first time.

Probably written around 1940–41, this revelatory book discusses Rothko’s ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of “American art,” and much more. The Artist’s Reality also includes an introduction by Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, who describes the discovery of the manuscript and the complicated and fascinating process of bringing the manuscript to publication. The introduction is illustrated with a small selection of relevant examples of the artist’s own work as well as with reproductions of pages from the actual manuscript.

The Artist’s Reality will be a classic text for years to come, offering insight into both the work and the artistic philosophies of this great painter.

This is the first edition; the second edition (2023) is also available on the A&AePortal.
Print publication date September 2004 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300102536
EISBN 9780300233612
Illustrations 9
Print Status out of print
Description: The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (second edition)
Mark Rothko’s classic book on artistic practice, ideals, and philosophy, now with an expanded introduction and an afterword by Makoto Fujimura

Stored in a New York City warehouse for many years after the artist’s death, this extraordinary manuscript by Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was published to great acclaim in 2004. Probably written in 1940 or 1941, it contains Rothko’s ideas on the modern art world, art history, myth, beauty, the challenges of being an artist in society, the true nature of “American art,” and much more.
 
In his introduction, illustrated with examples of Rothko’s work and pages from the manuscript, the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, describes the discovery of the manuscript and the fascinating process of its initial publication. This edition includes discussion of Rothko’s “Scribble Book” (1932), his notes on teaching art to children, which has received renewed scholarly attention in recent years and provides clues to the genesis of Rothko’s thinking on pedagogy.
 
In an afterword written for this edition, artist and author Makoto Fujimura reflects on how Rothko’s writings offer a “lifeboat” for “art world refugees” and a model for upholding artistic ideals. He considers the transcendent capacity of Rothko’s paintings to express pure ideas and the significance of the decade-long gap between The Artist’s Reality and Rothko’s mature paintings, during which the horrors of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb were unleashed upon the world.
Print publication date July 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300269871
EISBN 9780300276954
Illustrations 9
Print Status in print
Description: Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00335
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) emerged onto the Los Angeles art scene with paintings that incorporated consumer products, such as Spam and Sun-Maid raisins. In this revelatory book, Jennifer Quick looks at and beyond the consumer imagery in Ruscha’s work, examining it through the tools, techniques, and habits of mind of commercial art and design. Quick shows how his training and early work as a commercial artist helped him become an incisive commentator on the presence and role of design in the modern world.

Back to the Drawing Board explores how Ruscha mobilized commercial design techniques of scale, paste-up layout, and perspective as he developed his singular artistic style. Beginning with his formative design education and focusing on the first decade of his career, Quick analyzes previously unseen works from the Ruscha archives alongside his celebrated paintings, prints, and books, demonstrating how Ruscha’s engagement with commercial art has been foundational to his practice. Through this insightful lens, Quick affirms Ruscha as a powerful and witty observer of the vast network of imagery that permeates visual culture and offers new perspectives on Pop and conceptual art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300256925
EISBN 9780300272611
Illustrations 131
Print Status in print
Description: Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00235
Barnett Newman (1905–1970), one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, has captivated critics, scholars, and the general public for decades. This definitive catalogue raisonné presents Newman’s entire oeuvre—paintings, drawings, sculpture, graphics, an architectural model, lost and unfinished works, and ephemera. Featured elements include color reproductions; extensive provenance, exhibition, and publication histories; and a listing of the contents of the artist’s library at the time of his death.

In addition to the catalogue raisonné prepared by Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, the book offers revelatory essays on the artist, his career, and his working methods and features fascinating photographs of Newman, his studios, and his installations. Richard Shiff draws on new documentation to explain why Newman chose to create abstract art, how he achieved “fullness” in his paintings, and how his works exemplify the social functions of an artist. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro reveals extraordinary details about Newman’s studio practice and materials and techniques, information not available to the public before because Newman only allowed his wife to observe him at work. Mancusi-Ungaro also discusses the fate of works that were damaged while traveling to exhibitions or by vandals.

*The eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date October 2004 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300101678
EISBN 9780300259780
Illustrations 451
Print Status out of print
Description: Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk...
James Glisson (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00280
Celebrating two collectors’ passion for Americana and the window it provides into the everyday beauty of the past

Becoming America offers a multifaceted view of one of the foremost collections of 18th- and 19th-century American folk and decorative art from the rural Northeast. Essays by leading specialists discuss the culture of furniture workshops, exuberant painted decoration, techniques of sewing and quilting, and poignant stories about the families depicted in the portraits. The collection itself includes Shaker boxes, a beaded Iroquois hat, embroidered samplers, metalwork, scrimshaw, handwoven rugs, ceramics, and a weather vane. The majority of these works have never before been published. With lively essays and profuse illustrations, this handsome volume brings to life the aesthetic of early Americans living in the countryside and is an essential exploration of the period’s taste and style.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
James Glisson (Editor)
Print publication date April 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300247565
EISBN 9780300266399
Illustrations 233
Print Status in print
Description: Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00277
Winner of the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, sponsored by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA)

In 1916, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890–1962), a young African American elevator attendant, at Boston’s Hotel Vendome. McKeller became the principal model for Sargent’s murals in the new wing of the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, among the painter’s most ambitious works. Sargent’s nude studies and sketches from this project attest to a close collaboration between the two men that unfolded over nearly ten years. Featuring drawings given by Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner and published in full for the first time, a portrait of McKeller, and archival materials reconstructing his life and relationship with Sargent, this book opens new avenues into artist-model relationships and transforms our understanding of Sargent’s iconic American paintings. Essays offer the first biography of McKeller and a window onto African American life in early-20th-century Boston. They also address the artist’s sexuality, his models, and questions of race and identity.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date February 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249866
EISBN 9780300266146
Illustrations 136
Print Status in print
Description: Circulation
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00191
As a category in art history, circulation is rooted in the contemporary context of Internet culture and the digital image. Yet circulation, as a broader concept for the movement of art across time and space in vastly different cultural and media contexts, has been a factor in the history of the arts in the United States since at least the eighteenth century.

The third volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Circulation brings together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Thierry Gervais, Tom Gunning, J. M. Mancini, Frank Mehring, and Hélène Valance, who map the multiple planes where artistic meaning has been produced by the circulation of art from the eighteenth century to the present. The book looks at both broad historical trends and the successes and failures of particular works of art from a wide variety of artists and styles. Together, the contributions significantly expand the conceptual and methodological terrain of scholarship on American art.

Terra Foundation Essays
Volume 3
Author
Print publication date June 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171610
EISBN 9780300256826
Illustrations 57
Print Status in print
Description: Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting...
Richard Read (Editor), Kenneth Haltman (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00293
This volume of essays frames a comparative history of landscape painting in Australia and the United States through recent considerations of the Anthropocene, arguing that careful and deep analysis of specific nineteenth-century artworks reveals issues of environmental concern both past and present. Carefully drawn from two symposia held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth in 2016 and at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne the following year, the volume includes eight essays and a conversation between artists. Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between brings together the fresh insights of scholars and artists from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States and provides a resource for thinking critically about the historical, imperial, and environmental information that can be gleaned from looking closely at landscape paintings.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Richard Read (Editor), Kenneth Haltman (Editor)
Print publication date July 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171696
EISBN 9780300267778
Illustrations 78
Print Status in print