Film and Modern American Art


Book Description

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art–film nexus at successive historic moments.




Modern Art in America 1908-68


Book Description

A radical re-evaluation of American modernism through four generations of artists and their work – now in paperback. "That rarity of rarities, an opinionated but not eccentric scholarly history by a veteran museum curator whose every page crackles with original thinking and bears the stamp of a preternaturally sharp eye? Excellent reproductions and crisp typography complement the lucid prose." —Wall Street Journal Twentieth-century art in America has long been understood in two very separate distinct halves: pre-World War II, often considered as inferior and provincial; and the triumphant, international post-war work that made a complete break with everything that went before. Agee discovers exciting new connections between artists and artworks, which strongly suggest that 1945 was not such a dividing line in art history after all. His fresh research offers an innovative approach and a brilliant take on art history.




American Modern: Hopper to O'Keeffe


Book Description

The Museum of Modern Art is known for its prescient focus on the avant-garde art of Europe, but in the first half of the twentieth century it was also acquiring work by Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz, and other, less well-known American artists whose work sometimes fits awkwardly under the avant garde umbrella. American Modern presents a fresh look at MoMA’s holdings of American art from that period. The still lifes, portraits, and urban, rural, and industrial landscapes vary in style, approach, and medium: melancholy images by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth bump against the eccentric landscapes of Charles Burchfield and the Jazz Age sculpture of Elie Nadelman. Yet a distinct sensibility emerges, revealing a side of the Museum that may surprise a good part of its audience and throwing light on the cultural preoccupations of the rapidly changing American society of the day.




Painting Professionals


Book Description

Thousands of women pursued artistic careers in the United States during the late nineteenth century. According to census figures, the number of women among the ranks of professional artists rose from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent between 1870 and 1890.




Modern Art in the USA


Book Description

This chronologically organized and comprehensive anthology of readings tells the whole story of art in America from 1900 to the present. It focuses on the themes, issues, and controversies that occurred throughout the century--using selections that are contemporary with the art--by artists, critics, exhibition organizers, poets, politicians, and other writers on culture. Some recurring themes and issues include issues of identity; the changing nature of modernism and modernity; nationalism; art as individual or community expression; the nature of public art; and the role of criticism, censorship, and government intervention. Texts by well-known writers include Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Donald Kuspit, and Kate Linker. A guide for those interested in both the standard interpretations of American art and in alternative readings.




The American Art Book


Book Description

Covering three centuries, this vibrant, fresh overview ranges from Puritan portraits to the American Impressionists to the videos and digital works of today's most intriguing conceptual artists. 500 color illustrations.




Twentieth-Century American Art


Book Description

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 the extreme changes in American culture and society, as well as America's position within the international art world. This exciting new look at twentieth century American art explores the relationships between American art, museums, and audiences in the century that came to be called the 'American century'. Extending beyond New York, it covers the emergence of Feminist art in Los Angeles in the 1970s; the Black art movement; the expansion of galleries and art schools; and the highly political public controversies surrounding arts funding. All the key movements are fully discussed, including early American Modernism, the New Negro movement, Regionalism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Neo-Expressionism.




From Hopper to Rothko


Book Description

This book explores the development of modern American art through the works of its signature artists. This collection of rarely seen masterpieces from The Phillips Collection traces the development of American art from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism. During the Gilded Age, American artists like Julian Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, Ernest Lawson, and others developed landscape paintings which set the course for modern art in America. Revelations such as these are common within the pages of this book, which examines Duncan Phillips's interest in collecting and his promotion of living artists. Including essays by European and American experts, this publication of 68 works by 50 artists presents paintings by Maurice Prendergast, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, and Richard Diebenkorn. Together these magnificent works tell the tale of a nation and artistic expression growing in confidence and diversity.




Asian American Art


Book Description

Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 is a first-ever survey exploring the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian Ancestry active in the United States before 1970, and features ten essays by leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and more than 400 reproductions of artwork and photographs of artists, together creating compelling narratives of this heretofore forgotten American art history.




A Modern World


Book Description

"Draws upon the renowned collection of American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery to explore the appearance and dissemination of modern design in the United States. This catalogue organizes roughly 300 examples of silver, glass, industrial design, furniture, medals, jewelry, and printed textiles into thematic groups that chart the aesthetic and social trends that defined American design from the Jazz Age to the Space Age. The authors consider modernism broadly--from handmade luxury goods to mass-produced housewares--establishing a context for the objects within larger international developments in architecture, avant-garde art, and scientific innovation."--Publisher description.