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The Art and Thought of John La Farge: Picturing Authenticity in Gilded Age America offers an unprecedented portrait of one of the most celebrated artists of the Gilded Age and opens a window onto nineteenth-century American culture. The book reveals how the work of John La Farge contributed to a rich philosophical dialogue concerning the trustworthiness of human perception. In his struggle against a 'common truth' of iconic symbols presented by a new mass visual culture, La Farge developed a subversive approach to visual representation that focused attention not on the artwork itself, but on the complex, real encounter of artist, subject and medium from which the artwork came. Katie Kresser charts La Farge's efforts to assert his own reality - his own intrinsic uniqueness - in a postwar society that increasingly based personal identity on standardized vocational labels and economic productivity. La Farge's work is contrasted with that of Kenyon Cox, James Whistler and Henry Adams, all of whom (for La Farge) had fallen prey to the crass new visual environment - albeit in very different ways. This innovative study suggests that La Farge dealt with issues still relevant in a world characterized by ubiquitous mass media and the proliferation of 'normative' visions.
John La Farge, A Biographical and Critical Study is the first biography in a century of the American painter, illustrator, muralist, stained-glass artist, and writer. Examining La Farge's career from his youth to his late rebound as a decorative artist-from New York City and New England to Europe to Japan to the South Seas-this is also the only biography to date composed independently of the artist and his estate.
Vanishing paradise" offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams. Childs explores how these artists wrestled with the elusiveness of paradise and portrayed colonial Tahiti in ways both mythic and modern.
John La Farge, A Biographical and Critical Study is the first biography in a century of the American painter, illustrator, muralist, stained-glass artist, and writer. Examining La Farge's career from his youth to his late rebound as a decorative artist-from New York City and New England to Europe to Japan to the South Seas-this is also the only biography to date composed independently of the artist and his estate. Drawing on primary documentation culled from archives and contemporary newspapers and journals, the biography thoroughly documents La Farge's career and artwork. Earlier biographies avoided the darker aspects of his complex and conflicted life, which had dramatic effects on his work. The study also offers critical analysis of the artist's works, showing influences from other artists and giving contemporary and modern responses. La Farge authority James L. Yarnall scrutinizes how posterity has viewed the artist throughout the century since his death. The book is copiously illustrated with black-and-white and color images.
"Glass can be decorative or utilitarian, and its forms often reflect technological innovations and social change. Drawing on an insightful selection from the Yale University Art Gallery and other collections at Yale, American Glass illuminates the vital and often intimate roles that glass has played in the nation's art and culture. Spectacularly illustrated, the publication showcases eighteenth-century mold-blown vessels, nineteenth-century pressed glass, innovative studio work, and luminous stained-glass windows by John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany, the latter reproduced as a lush gatefold. These are considered alongside beguiling objects that broaden our expectations of glass and speak to the centrality of the medium in American life, including one of the oldest complex microscopes in the United States, an early Edison light bulb, glass-plate photography, jewelry, and more. With an essay on the history of collecting American glass and discussions of each object that present new scholarship, this engaging book tells the long and rich history of glass in America--from prehistoric minerals to contemporary sculptures"--Dust jacket front flap.
Before Vatican II, before the race riots of the 1940s, the white Jesuit priest John Lafarge decried America’s treatment of blacks. In the first scholarly biography of Lafarge, David W Southern paints a portrait of a man ahead of his church on the race issue who nevertheless did not press hard enough in ridding it of an institutional bias against African-Americans. Southern follows Lafarge from his birth into the Social Register in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1880, to his death in 1963, just months after his participation in the March on Washington. According to Southern, Lafarge was the foremost Catholic spokesman on black-white relations in America for more than thirty years. In a series of books and articles—he served on the staff of the influential Jesuit weekly America from 1926 until his death—he significantly improved the image of the Church in the eyes of black, Jewish, and Protestant leaders. In 1934 he founded the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, the most important Catholic civil rights organization in the pre-Brown era. His declaration in 1937 that racism is a sin and a heresy so impressed the pope that he employed Lafarge to write an encyclical on the subject. Although lauded in his time for his achievements in race relations, Lafarge, Southern contends, espoused too gradualist an approach. Southern maintains that Lafarge was fettered by a fierce loyalty to the Church, a staunch clericalism, an intense concern with the image of Catholicism in Protestant America, an aristocratic background, and Eurocentric thinking—producing in him an abiding paternalism and lingering ambivalence about black culture, and a tendency to conceal the Church’s discriminatory practices rather than reveal them. Moreover, he was too slow to condemn segregation and approve the nonviolent direct action of Martin Luther King, Jr. Still, Southern sees in Lafarge a redeeming capacity for liberal growth, citing his inspiration of a younger, more militant generation of Catholics and his joining in the 1963 march. Based on extensive archival research, John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism fills a serious gap in Catholic social history and race-relations history. An impressive, engrossing biography, it also casts light on the broader historical issues of the Church’s attitudes and practices toward African-Americans since the Civil War, Catholic liberalism before Vatican II, and the seeds of unrest that manifest themselves today in the rapidly growing black Catholic community.
Chronicles the extraordinary career of Father John LaFarge, a prominent American Roman Catholic clergyman, a civil rights activist and editor of America. The book examines his youth in Rhode Island, through the founding of the Catholic Interracial Council, the writing of his encyclical on racism (at the request of Pope Pius XI in 1938), and his continued presence in the civil rights movement.
A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920 will change standard theory on American art history with a new paradigm that places the origins of American modernism in the late 1870s. Crucially, it also demonstrates how the Tonalist movement became the driving force in the development of a distinctly American art form: mystic, visionary, and nostalgic, yet essentially modern in its progressive dynamic of non-narrative abstraction--a fundamentally expressive and symbolic art that set its seal on American art then and now. --Book Jacket.
