A complete picture of Robert Spencer, one of the most recognizable of the Pennsylvania impressionist painters. From his beginnings as the son of a minister and early interest in painting, through his volatile home life and battle with depression, to his death by suicide, The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds presents the definitive portrait of a great American artist.
Artist Kate Freeman Clark (1875–1957) left behind over one thousand paintings now stored at a gallery bearing her name in her hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi. But it was not until after her death in 1957 at the age of eighty-one that citizens even discovered that she was a painter of considerable stature. In her will, Clark left the city her family home, her paintings stored at a warehouse in New York for over forty years, and money to build a gallery, much to the surprise of the Holly Springs community. As a young woman, Clark studied art in New York and took classes with some of the greatest American artists of the day. From the start Clark approached the study of art with discipline and tenacity. She learned from William Merritt Chase when he opened his own school in 1895. For six consecutive summers at his Shinnecock Summer School of Art in Long Island, she mastered the plein air technique. Chase trained many female students, yet he recognized Clark as “his most talented pupil.” The book prints, for the first time, excerpts from Clark's delightful journal of the artist's experience at Chase's school, giving readers firsthand reporting of an artist-led school in the early twentieth century. Clark returned to Holly Springs in 1923. Mysteriously, sadly, she never resumed painting and lived the last years of her life in quietude. The Artist's Sketch shines a light on Clark, finally bringing her out of obscurity. This book also introduces Clark's art to a new generation of readers and highlights current projects and important work being done in Holly Springs by the Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery and the Marshall County Historical Museum, the two institutions that, since her death, have worked hard to keep Kate Freeman Clark's legacy alive.
Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction offers a fresh and revealing assessment of the artist’s prolific and innovative painterly career. The comprehensive exhibition and accompanying catalogue will feature approximately seventy paintings and works on paper by Hofmann from 1930 through the end of his life in 1966, including works from public and private collections across North America and Europe. Curator Lucinda Barnes builds on new scholarship published over the past ten years and the 2014 catalogue raisonné to present Hofmann as a unique synthesis of student, artist, teacher, and mentor who transcended generations and continents. His singular artistic achievement drew on artistic influences and innovations that spanned two world wars and transatlantic avant-gardes. Over the last fifty years Hofmann has come to be understood primarily from the vantage of his late color-plane abstractions. Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction expands our understanding and reinvigorates our appreciation of Hofmann through an inclusive presentation of his artistic arc, showing the vibrant interconnectedness and continuity in his work of European and American influences from the early twentieth century through the advent of abstract expressionism. Exhibition dates: Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA): February 27–July 21, 2019 The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: September 21, 2019–January 6, 2020
"This magnificent new book . . . has assembled a definitive collection of impressionistic works from the Bucks Country region of eastern Pennsylvania. . . . Excellent!"—Bloomsbury Review
The first book to celebrate the dramatic Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, setting and renowned art collection of the Brandywine River Museum of Art and its historic homes, studios, and sites relating to three generations of the Wyeth family. The Brandywine River Museum of Art is home to one of the country’s renowned collections of American art. This stunning book reveals the beauty of the museum’s remarkable holdings, housed in a renovated nineteenth-century mill building with a steel- and-glass addition overlooking the Brandywine River, and of its three historic properties—the N. C. Wyeth home and studio, the Andrew Wyeth studio, and the Kuerner Farm, which inspired over 1,000 works by Andrew Wyeth—all National Historic Landmarks. This volume features fifty of the museum’s most beloved paintings, by artists such as John Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, William Trost Richards, Horace Pippin, and Andrew Wyeth, along with immersive photographs of the 300-acre landscape surrounding the museum and historic structures. The introduction by curator Christine Podmaniczky includes a brief history of this unique institution, its art collection, and the intimate places where the Wyeth family lived and painted. This handsome volume will appeal not only to museum visitors but also to art lovers everywhere.
More than 300 four-color and black-and-white illustrations by one of America's preeminent painters are collected here, along with illuminating text from the artist's letters, magazine articles about his work, and many other sources. The result: a fully realized portrait of a golden age illustrator whose work appeared in then Saturday Evening Post, a classic edition of Treasure Island, and elsewhere for 42 years.
