Joel Barber spent 20 years studying and collecting wild fowl decoys from Nova Scotia to North Carolina. Mr. Barber's authoratative volume is the only text written for the true collector and contains all there is to be known on the subject: how to recognize the locality from which a decoy comes, the world of famous decoy makers, the scarcity of certain types of decoys and more.
This book presents watercolor renderings along with a selection of the artifacts in the Index of American Design, a visual archive of decorative, folk, and popular arts made in America from the colonial period to about 1900. Three essays explore the history, operation, and ambitions of the Index of American Design, examine folk art collecting in America during the early decades of the twentieth century, and consider the Index's role in the search for a national cultural identity in the early twentieth-century United States.
"Published in conjunction with the exhibition, Winslow Homer and the poetics of place, June 5 - September 6, 2010, which was organized by the Portland Museum of Art, Maine." -- p. 71.
"Mary Cassatt's letters, like her art, are filled with revealing details. This selection of 208 letters -- most never published before -- provide new and vivid insights into this complex, intensely private woman."--JACKET.
A long-overdue reexamination of beloved American artist Grandma Moses, restoring her rightful place within the canon of mid-century American Art. One of the best-known artists of her time, and a true American legend, Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860 1961) was often marginalized as a latter-day "folk" painter or a phenomenon of popular media. Accompanying a traveling exhibition, this new book looks closely at the paintings themselves and the artist's compelling biography to reassert her role in the development of a culture of modernist art at mid-century. Presenting fresh research, several scholars examine Moses s name, public persona, painted world, and wildly popular place in American pop culture; address the myth of the self-taught artist; and contextualize her work alongside such contemporaries as Horace Pippin, Elie Nadelman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Morris Hirshfield.
Fall in love with these funny, striking, and surreal pups. William Wegman's whimsical photographs of his Weimaraner dogs have been celebrated in the art world and enjoyed by pet lovers for nearly four decades. In this entirely new volume, renowned photography curator William A. Ewing presents more than 300 images from the artist's personal archive, unearthing previously unseen gems alongside the iconic images that have made Wegman—along with dressed-up dogs Man Ray, Fay Ray, and others—beloved worldwide. Presented in sixteen thematic chapters, William Wegman: Being Human foregrounds the photographer's penchant for play and his evergreen ability to create images that are at once funny, striking, and surreal. Audiences of all ages will fall in love—for the first time, or all over again—with Wegman and his friends.
"Engravings for the people" a fresh appraisal of the printmakers Currier & Ives and their vision of America Currier & Ives was a powerhouse of 19th-century publishing and had an immeasurable influence on American visual culture. Founded in New York in 1834 by Nathaniel Currier, the company expanded to include a new partner, James Merritt Ives, after 1857. Currier & Ives produced millions of affordably priced copies of over 7,000 original lithographs, living up to its self-appointed title as "The Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints." The firm took advantage of New York City's booming arts culture in the latter half of the 19th century, but its output was not seen as fine art by critics, nor was it intended as such. Its prints were first and foremost commodities; the choice subjects often determined by popularity and sales figures. Currier & Ives perpetuated Victorian ideals in its depictions of family, history, politics and urban and suburban life. But these prints also served as an important record of a nation in the midst of an extraordinary transformation from a rural and agricultural landscape to an industrialized and urbanized global power. Along with their popular appeal, Currier & Ives's images offer a new opportunity to uncover the complexities and contradictions of our history and help shape our understanding of America's past.
Edgar Degas's influence upon Mary Cassatt has long been acknowledged, but her role in shaping his artistic production and in preparing the way for his warm reception in America is fully examined for the first time. These two major figures of the impressionist movement shared a keen observer's eye, as well as an openness to experimentation.
One of a series of systematic catalogues of the National Gallery of Art's collection, this comprehensive volume discusses in detail 310 objects that comprise one of the world's outstanding repositories of American naive paintings. Works by renowned folk artists such as Edward Hicks, Erastus Salisbury Field, and Ammi Phillips are represented in depth and placed in stylistic as well as historical context. This catalogue is an indispensable tool for historians of Amerian painting and folk art, and for students of American life and culture. Thorough documentation and commentary are provided for the first time on some of the most intriguing images produced in America in the past two hundred years.
