While browsing the stacks of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago some years ago, noted historian Neil Harris made a surprising discovery: a group of nine plainly bound volumes whose unassuming spines bore the name the Chicagoan. Pulling one down and leafing through its pages, Harris was startled to find it brimming with striking covers, fanciful art, witty cartoons, profiles of local personalities, and a whole range of incisive articles. He quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a Chicago counterpart to the New Yorker that mysteriously had slipped through the cracks of history and memory. Here Harris brings this lost magazine of the Jazz Age back to life. In its own words, the Chicagoan claimed to represent “a cultural, civilized, and vibrant” city “which needs make no obeisance to Park Avenue, Mayfair, or the Champs Elysees.” Urbane in aspiration and first published just sixteen months after the 1925 appearance of the New Yorker, it sought passionately to redeem the Windy City’s unhappy reputation for organized crime, political mayhem, and industrial squalor by demonstrating the presence of style and sophistication in the Midwest. Harris’s substantial introductory essay here sets the stage, exploring the ambitions, tastes, and prejudices of Chicagoans during the 1920s and 30s. The author then lets the Chicagoan speak for itself in lavish full-color segments that reproduce its many elements: from covers, cartoons, and editorials to reviews, features—and even one issue reprinted in its entirety. Recalling a vivid moment in the life of the Windy City, the Chicagoan is a forgotten treasure, offered here for a whole new age to enjoy.

The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age

Arts & Photography

Neil Harris

Graphic Design

University of Chicago Press

Brothers Sterling and Stephen Clark―heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune―were among the twentieth century’s most influential art collectors. This volume examines their magnificent collections, their personal lives and public profiles, and their significant roles in the history of American museums. While the brothers shared a love for great art, they collected in different ways. Sterling was a private collector; his French Impressionist masterpieces, including thirty-eight Renoirs, and works by such American artists as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Frederic Remington, and Mary Cassatt now form the distinguished collection of the Clark. Stephen, a businessman and museum trustee, acquired modern works by such masters as Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh, often with specific museum collections in mind―including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Handsomely produced, this book features over two hundred illustrations of the works from Sterling’s and Stephen’s collections. It also includes essays by distinguished scholars, an illustrated chronology, and a previously unpublished checklist of works purchased by Stephen Clark.

The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings

Michael Conforti

James A. Ganz

Gilbert T. Vincent

History & Criticism

Clark Art Institute

Resorts of the Catskills

History

Alf Evers

Elizabeth Cromley

Betsy Blackmar

Americas

St.Martin's Press

"The miracle of La Grande Jatte is its coincidence of critical distinction and popular celebration. High, low, mass, and popular cultures meet in mutual delight, continuing to revel in the mysteries of that Parisian Sunday."―from "The Park in the Museum" by Neil Harris "Bedlam," "scandal," and "hilarity" were among the epithets used to describe the effect of what is now considered Georges Seurat's greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris in 1886. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte―1884, an extensive landscape peopled with over forty figures, took the artist almost two years to complete. This sumptuous book, created to accompany a major exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, provides a fascinating, in-depth examination of the gestation, execution, and influence of Seurat's masterpiece. La Grande Jatte has been part of the Art Institute of Chicago's collection since 1926. Bringing together all known studies and drawings directly related to the painting, this volume provides a visual and contextual survey of Seurat's working methods and aesthetic priorities, as well as the evolutionary process that culminated in his singular achievement. Included are more than fifty-five preparatory works, ranging from rich conté crayon drawings to oil sketches on small wood panels to larger studies painted on canvas. In their quantity, intricacy, and variety, these works reveal a compositional process that harks back to Old Master traditions and methods, which had been largely abandoned by Seurat's immediate predecessors, the Impressionists. The many studies attest to the artist's ambitions for his masterpiece and open up a broader context for understanding the work. Seurat scholar Robert L. Herbert makes new revelations about the painting's relationship to its preparatory studies, stressing Seurat's empirical craftmanship. He compares La Grande Jatte to paintings by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Signac and analyzes the ways that twentieth-century critics, including Meyer Schapiro, T.J. Clark, and Linda Nochlin, have viewed the picture. He proposes that the enduring fascination of the famous canvas comes from Seurat's mixture of fashion and irony. Also giving new perspectives in this book, the noted cultural historian Neil Harris charts how and why La Grande Jatte attained its revered status at the Art Institute of Chicago and throughout the United States. Additionally, the exhibition's cocurators examine the painting's place in the museum's collection. Essays by Art Institute conservators show how Seurat transferred and altered figures from studies to final canvas and elucidate the exact nature of his pigments and brushwork. Color scientist Roy Berns traces the efforts to digitally recapture the original hues of Seurat's time-altered masterpiece. A landmark publication, this book provides dazzling proof of why La Grande Jatte is among the most frequently reproduced paintings in the world and why it continues to fascinate scholars and art lovers today.

Seurat and the Making of 'La Grande Jatte'

Robert L. Herbert

University of California Press

The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years 1790-1860

Touchstone

What was the place of the artist in a new society? How would he thrive where monarchy, aristocracy, and an established churchâ€”those traditional patrons of painting, sculpture, and architectureâ€”were repudiated so vigorously? Neil Harris examines the relationships between American cultural values and American society during the formative years of American art and explores how conceptions of the artist's social role changed during those years.

The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860

George Braziller

This lovely volume features an informative text complemented by beautiful illustrations of Tiffany's stunning accomplishments, including the famous lamps, stained-glass windows, mosaics, jewelry, paintings, enamels, bronzes, and much more.

Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany

Alastair Duncan

Martin Eidelberg

Individual Artists

Harry N. Abrams

MASTERWORKS OF LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY (HARDBACK) /ANGLAIS

Soft cover book titled MASTERWORKS OF LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Antiques & Collectibles

Thames and Hudson

Provides a catalog of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photographs

Art, Design, and the Modern Corporation: The Collection of Container Corporation of America, A Gift to the National Museum of American Art

Martina Roudabush Norelli

Decorative Arts & Design

Smithsonian Institution Press

Business Economics: Theory and Application

Taylor&Francis

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Books by Neil Harris