With essays by art historian Tom Wolf and printmaking professor Ronald Netsky, this illustrated exhibition catalogue explores the career of one of America's most accomplished printmakers, Bolton Coit Brown (1864–1938). Focusing mostly on the artist's use of lithography but also including a selection of his oil paintings, this retrospective explores Brown's unique and formidable contributions to American printmaking, as well as the seminal role he played in bringing the arts to Woodstock, New York.
Most of the early explorers of the Sierra Nevada were private individuals, rather than members of government expeditions. The more literate ones had accounts of their achievements published in newspapers and journals. Many of these wilderness travelers have been immortalized by having their names placed on mountains, lakes, and streams. Frank Dusy; Wales, Wallace, and Wright; Theodore S. Solomons; Bolton C. and Lucy Brown; Joseph N. and Marion LeConte; Lt. N. F. McClure; Cornelius Beach Bradley; James E. Hutchinson. In this volume are their personal stories. They are foremost among the few who pioneered the routes that are followed by so many at the present day.
For well over a century, New York has been a microcosm of the art and craft of American printmaking. Until 1825, printmaking in America was almost entirely an artisan's craft. Then, with the arrival of lithography, the realization arose that printmaking could also be a fine art. The essays published in this collection contribute to the body of scholarship by identifying important but hitherto insufficiently studied aspects of the graphic arts and treating them authoritatively. Their subjects concern prints in New York State, whose great metropolitan city was, after 1825, the acknowledged center of nearly everything important in the graphic arts in the U.S. The history of American prints from 1825 on is enormously rich, yet until the 1970s it was the least studied and understood aspect of the history of art in North America. It is a history more deeply rooted in popular culture and more closely tied, for a long time, to the world of commerce than the other arts. The usually small-scale, sometimes ephemeral, and often highly subtle (or highly unsubtle) nature of prints makes it easy to overlook them. The collection of essays included here were originally presented at the Twelfth Annual North American Print Conference, held in 1981 in Syracuse, New York. Locally organized, these conferences have been held during the last decade throughout the U.S. and Canada to further the study of the history of the pictorial graphic arts in North America. Contributors include several leading historians of the graphic arts of nineteenth-century America. Their chapters bring to life and flesh out figures who were previously little more than names, establish facts that correct long-held erroneous assumptions, introduce many prints of exceptional interest that have remained out of the public view for generations, and provide a rich, new context for many familiar images.
By 1900, tiny General Grant National Park, founded to protect a magnificent sequoia grove and one of the world's largest trees, had become virtually encircled by commercial logging enterprises. This island of preservation became the port of call for a new generation of mountain explorers heading towards the vast alpine wilderness to the east. This new generation of wilderness visionaries--including legendary preservationist and founder of the Sierra Club John Muir and the artist Bolton Brown--forged an alliance that fought to protect this breathtaking landscape. After decades of effort, Congress designated the vast Kings Canyon National Park in 1940, encompassing the sequoias of General Grant as well as some of the most spectacular mountain scenery in North America.
For more than a century, a Gilded Age mansion on the south side of New York City's Gramercy Park has been home to the National Arts Club (NAC), its magnificent interior a refuge from hectic city life. In this special catalog, Lowrey, curator of the club's permanent collection, documents selected works by Artist Life Members, artists who were given lifetime memberships in the club in exchange for one of their works (the program ended in 1950 with the advent of the abstract expressionists). The father of well-known American sculptor Alexander Calder, Alexander Stirling Calder, was an Artist Life Member, and his sculpture of the painter George Bellows is among the many artworks included here. Also featured are an A-to-Z listing of Artist Life Members and a brief history of the NAC. The catalog section includes full-color reproductions and descriptions of the artworks as well as brief biographies of the artist. Many members' works show European influences, particularly impressionism and the Barbizon school, while others are distinctly American, as in the Ash Can school. A fine and fitting tribute to the NAC legacy that will be of interest to club, academic, and large public libraries. 75 colour & 175 b/w illustrations
