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.

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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.

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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 human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

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As nations in the Americas gained independence in the early nineteenth century, a pictorial landscape tradition emerged. By 1840, landscape painting had become the primary medium for articulating conceptions of land and nation in the development of North and South American cultural identity. Picturing the Americas offers the first comprehensive treatment of this genre on both American continents, bringing into dialogue the landscape traditions of artists practicing between 1840 and 1940.

The book includes works by U.S. artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Georgia O’Keeffe; Canadian artists Joseph Légaré, Frances Anne Hopkins, and Lawren Harris; Mexico’s José María Velasco, Uruguay’s Joaquín Torres-García, and Brazil’s Tarsila do Amaral, among many others. Leading scholars offer a Pan-American perspective on these landscape traditions: essays consider the emergence of modernism, as well as how the development of landscape imagery reflects the intricately intertwined geographies and sociopolitical histories of the peoples, nations, regions, and diasporas of the two continents.

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As American settlement expanded westward in the 1860s, the U.S. government undertook large-scale investigations of its new territories. Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860–1880 presents memorable glass-plate photographs from these federal surveys. The selection includes breathtaking views of such iconic sites as Yosemite, as well as lesser-known ethnographic portraits taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William H. Jackson, and William Bell, among others. The accompanying essays discuss how the photographs were used to promote white settlement, how their distribution at home and abroad contributed to the aggrandizement of the American West, and how the exploitative ideology underlying the use of photography extended to attitudes toward both American landscapes and American Indians.

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Samuel F. B. Morse’s (1791–1872) Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33) is one of the most significant, and enigmatic, works of early 19th-century American art. It is also one of the last works Morse painted before turning his attention to the invention of the telegraph and Morse code.

A signature painting in the collection of the Terra Foundation for American Art, Gallery of the Louvre underwent an extensive conservation treatment in 2010–11 and was the focus of three symposia held at the Yale University Art Gallery (April 2011), the National Gallery of Art (April 2012), and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (April 2013). This collection of essays, carefully drawn from the proceedings of these scholarly sessions, brings together the fresh insights of academics, curators, and conservators, who focus on the painting’s visual components and its cultural contexts. The book accompanies a multi-year tour of the painting to prominent museums across the country.

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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.

Scale is perhaps the most spectacularly overlooked aspect of artistic production. As photographic and digital reproductions have essentially dematerialized art, critical and historical research dealing with scale—both within the American critical tradition and abroad—has become scattered and insufficiently theorized. However, by posing a specific challenge, such research forces a heightened recognition of both the properties of materials and the deep technical knowledge of makers. A reconsideration of scalar relationships in American art and visual culture therefore reveals original insights.

With a wealth of new research from Glenn Adamson, Wendy Bellion, Wouter Davidts, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Christopher P. Heuer, Joshua G. Stein, and Jason Weems, Scale explores viewers’ physical relationship to Barnett Newman’s abstract canvases, the arduous engineering behind the creation of Mount Rushmore, and the charged significance of liberty poles in the landscape of eighteenth-century New York, among other topics that range from studies of specific works of art to significant conceptual and theoretical concerns.

In his noteworthy theoretical essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that humans by nature cannot fully grasp life as lived. If this is so, how capable are we of expressing our experiences in works of art? Despite this formidable challenge, for the past thirty years, scholarship in American art has assumed that works of art are coded and has analyzed them accordingly, often with constructive results.

The fourth volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Experience considers the possibility of immediacy, or the idea that we can directly relate to the past by way of an artifact or work of art. Without discounting the matrix of codes involved in both the production and reception of art, contributors to Experience emphasize the sensibility of the interpreter; the techniques of art historical writing, including its affinity with fiction and its powers of description; the emotional charge—the punctum—that certain representations can deliver. These and other topics are examined through seven essays, addressing different periods in American art.

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

The history of American art is a history of objects, but it is also a history of ideas about how we create and consume these objects. As Picturing convincingly shows, the critical tradition in American art has given rise to profound thinking about the nature and capacity of images and formed responses to some of most pressing problems of picturing: What is an image, and why make one? What do images do?

The first volume in a new series on critical concerns in the history of American art, Picturing brings together essays by a distinguished international group of scholars who discuss the creation and consumption of images from the early modern period through the end of the twentieth century. Some of the contributions focus on art critical texts, like Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Cézanne, while others have as their point of departure particular artworks, from a portrait of Benjamin Franklin to Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographs of the California Coast. Works that addressed images and image making were not confined to the academy; they spilled out into poetry, literature, theater, and philosophy, and the essays’ considerations likewise range freely, from painting to natural history illustrations, travel narratives, and popular fiction. Together, the contributions demonstrate a rich deliberation that thoroughly debunks the notion that American art is merely derivative of a European tradition.

With a wealth of new research and illustrations, Picturing significantly expands the terrain of scholarship on American art.

Terra Foundation Essays
Volume 1

Bearing witness to the changing economic landscape amid the Cold War, artists in the 1960s created works that critiqued, reshaped, and sometimes reinforced the spirit of capitalism. At a time when currency and finance were becoming ever more abstracted—and the art market increasingly an arena for speculation—artists on both sides of the Atlantic turned to economic themes, often grounded in a human context. The Artist as Economist examines artists who approached these issues in critical, imaginative, and humorous ways: Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers incorporated the iconography of printed currency into their paintings, while Ray Johnson sought to disrupt and reinvent circuits of commerce with his mail art collages. Yves Klein and Edward Kienholz critiqued conceptions of artistic and monetary value, as Lee Lozano and Dennis Oppenheim engaged directly with the New York Stock Exchange. Such examples, which author Sophie Cras insightfully situates within their historic economic context, reveal capitalism’s visual dimension. As art and economics grow more entangled, this volume offers a timely consideration of art’s capacity to reflect on and reimagine economic systems.

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