American Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston


Book Description

-- Represented are major holdings or works by John Singleton Coplay, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. -- The Collection ranges from Colonial portraits to works by Hopper, Stella, O'Keeffe and Pollock. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, owns one of the nation's preeminent collections of American paintings. Every painting in the Museum's collection - more than 1,600 in all - is recorded and illustrated in this book, the first comprehensive catalogue of the collection to appear in nearly thirty years. The American holdings at the Museum grew by gift and purchase, and this catalogue and its introductory essay trace the evolution of the collection from an important gathering of local artists to its present status as a truly encyclopedic representation of American art. Extensive new research, resulting in a significant number of changed attributions and titles (summarizes in the book's five indices), make this catalogue an indispensable tool for scholars and American art enthusiasts alike.




Goya


Book Description

Francisco Goya has been widely celebrated as the most important Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the last of the Old Masters and the first of the Moderns, and an astute observer of the human condition in all its complexity. The many-layered and shifting meanings of his imagery have made him one of the most studied artists in the world. Few, however, have made the ambitious attempt to explore his work as a painter, printmaker, and draftsman across media and the timeline of his life. This book does just that, presenting a comprehensive and integrated view of Goya through the themes that continually challenged or preoccupied him, and revealing how he strove relentlessly to understand and describe human behavior and emotions even at their most orderly or disorderly extremes. Derived from the research for the largest Goya art exhibition in North America in a quarter century, this book takes a fresh look at one of the greatest artists in history by examining the fertile territory between the two poles that defined the range of his boundlessly creative personality.




Quilts and Color


Book Description

Quilts and Color presents more than sixty graphically bold American quilts from the Pilgrim/Roy Collection, one of the finest and largest collections of quilts in the world. These collectors recognized that quilt makers often grappled with the same concerns as many modern artists. Influenced by twentieth-century art developments such as Abstraction, Op Art and the Colour Field movement, Paul Pilgrim and Gerald Roy were among the first to appreciate quilts as more than simply decorative bedcovers, womens fancy work, or symbols of a rustic past. Reproduced brilliantly and arranged by ideas based in colour theory Vibrations, Mixtures, Gradation Harmonies, Contrasts, Variations, Optical Illusions and Singular Visions each quilt in this book is celebrated as a unique work of art. The accompanying text also sheds light on the social and cultural history of the quilts as well as the practices and aspirations of their mostly anonymous makers, who created such works of enduring beauty and arresting visual impact.




The Boston Raphael


Book Description

The riveting story of a museum director caught in a web of local and international intrigue while secretly pursuing a forgotten Renaissance painting-the Boston Raphael. On the eve of its centennial celebrations in 1969, the Boston MFA announced the acquisition of an unknown and uncatalogued painting attributed to Raphael. Boston's coup made headlines around the world. Soon, an Italian art sleuth began investigating the painting's export from Italy, challenging the museum's ownership. Simultaneously, experts on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to debate its very authenticity. The museums charismatic director, Perry T. Rathbone, faced the most challenging crossroads of his career. The Boston Raphael was a media sensation in its time, but the full story of the forces that converged on the museum and how they intersected with the challenges of the Sixties is now revealed in full detail by the director's daughter.




Arts and Crafts Jewelry in Boston


Book Description

"A vibrant and active community of jewelry makers at the turn of the century in Boston, united by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, created works of wearable art that came to define the 'Boston look' -- characterized by colorful stones and brilliant enamels in exquisitely designed and hand crafted settings. Frank Gardner Hale, the most prominent and prolific figure in this community and a leader of the city's Society of Arts and Crafts, worked alongside many important makers, among them Josephine Hartwell Shaw, Edward Everett Oakes, Margaret Rogers, and Elizabeth Copeland. This book reproduces dozens of ornaments in dazzling color, accompanied by design drawings from the extensive Frank Gardner Hale Archive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The authoritative text by scholars of jewelry and design history explores how Hale and his contemporaries expressed Arts and Crafts principles in the creation of jewels of enduring allure"--inserted publisher's note.




The Invention of the American Art Museum


Book Description

American art museums share a mission and format that differ from those of their European counterparts, which often have origins in aristocratic collections. This groundbreaking work recounts the fascinating story of the invention of the modern American art museum, starting with its roots in the 1870s in the craft museum type, which was based on London’s South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum. At the turn of the twentieth century, American planners grew enthusiastic about a new type of museum and presentation that was developed in Northern Europe, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Called Kulturgeschichte (cultural history) museums, they were evocative displays of regional history. American trustees, museum directors, and curators found that the Kulturgeschichte approach offered a variety of transformational options in planning museums, classifying and displaying objects, and broadening collecting categories, including American art and the decorative arts. Leading institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, adopted and developed crucial aspects of the Kulturgeschichte model. By the 1930s, such museum plans and exhibition techniques had become standard practice at museums across the country.




Writing the Future


Book Description

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat's works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries--and sometimes collaborators--A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture. Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat's work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat's extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.




Fabric of a Nation


Book Description

A mother stitches a few lines of prayer into a bedcover for her son serving in the Union army during the Civil War. A formerly enslaved African American woman creates a quilt populated by Biblical figures alongside celestial events. A Diné women weaves a blanket for a U.S. Army soldier stationed in the Southwest. A quilted Lady Liberty, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln mark the resignation of Richard Nixon. These are just a few of the diverse and sometimes hidden stories of the American experience told by quilts and bedcovers from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Spanning more than four hundred years, the fifty-six works of textile art in this book express the personal narratives of their makers and owners and connect to broader stories of global trade, immigration, industry, marginalization, and territorial and cultural expansion. Made by Americans of European, African, Native, and Hispanic heritage, these engaging works of art range from family heirlooms to acts of political protest, each with its own story to tell.




Della Robbia


Book Description

The glazed terracotta technique invented by Luca della Robbia, along with his exceptional skill as a sculptor, placed him firmly in the first rank of Renaissance artists in the fifteenth century. This quintessentially Florentine art - taking the form of dazzling multicoloured ornaments for major buildings, delicately modelled and ingeniously constructed freestanding statues, serene blue-and-white devotional reliefs, charming portraits of children, and commanding busts of rulers, along with decorative and liturgical objects - flowed in abundance from the Della Robbia workshops for a hundred years. Developed further by each generation, the closely held technique achieved new heights of refinement and durability in modelling and colour, combining elements of painting and sculpture into a new and all but eternal medium. In the 19th century, revived interest in the Renaissance and in the Della Robbia brought their works into major collections beyond Italy, particularly in England and the United States. Recently, renewed attention from art historians, backed by sophisticated technical studies, has reintegrated the Della Robbia into the mainstream of Renaissance art history and illuminated their originality and accomplishments. This beautifully illustrated book invites readers to experience one of the great inventions of the Renaissance and the enduring beauty it captured.




Ansel Adams


Book Description

Ansel Adams sublime photographs of trees are the subject of this beautiful and elegant homage to the most graceful form in nature. 50 tritone photos.