The first in-depth look at Cézanne’s powerful influence in shaping early 20th-century American art Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is one of the great geniuses in the history of art, and his work has influenced a multitude of artists throughout Europe. Across the Atlantic, Cézanne’s paintings had a similarly catalytic effect on artists emerging in the United States during the early 20th century. Cézanne and American Modernism is the first book devoted specifically to his impact on American art and its eager reception there. It shows how American painters and photographers cemented Cézanne’s legacy by spreading their respect and admiration for his vision with their own art, writings, and exhibitions.
Examining Cézanne’s influence on more than a generation of American artists, this handsomely illustrated book features paintings and photography by Paul Strand, Marsden Hartley, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Arshile Gorky, Charles Sheeler, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Maurice Prendergast, Morgan Russell, Max Weber, and many others. Cézanne’s far-reaching transformative impact on each artist’s aesthetic vision is explored, while extensive essays shed new light on a wide range of subjects from American collectors of his work and his shaping of modernism in the American West to the lasting resonance of his art on Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

Cézanne and American Modernism

Arts & Photography

Rothkopf, Katherine

Stavitsky, Gail

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Extensive gallery catalog/book from the exhibit at the Montclair Art Museum featuring the works of Andy Warhol.

Warhol and Cars: American Icons

Andy Warhol

Montclair Art Museum

Published in conjunction with an exhibition devoted to the encaustic medium, Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art in America examines a painting method first used by the ancient Greeks and Romans. The word “encaustic” derives from the Greek term “enkaustikos,” meaning “to burn in.” The basic technique calls for dry pigments to be mixed with molten wax on a warm palette and applied to any ground or surface. A heat source is passed close to the surface, burning in and fusing the colors. Currently enjoying a widespread revival among painters, sculptors, and even printmakers, the encaustic medium’s resurgence has been bolstered by the availability of commercially prepared paints and the availability of electrically heated equipment. In this lavishly illustrated volume, featuring more than 100 art works, Gail Stavitsky examines the twentieth-century encaustic renaissance. She discusses the work of such well-known artists as Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Lyndia Vengalis, and many others who have turned to this ancient medium to express their aesthetic, philosophical, and environmental concerns. The other two essays in this volume are “Encaustic Painting and Revivals: A History of Discord and Discovery” by Danielle Rice and “Encaustic Painting as a Contemporary Paint Medium” by Richard Frumess.

Waxing Poetic

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Rutgers University Press

One of America’s leading Pop artists, Roy Lichtenstein was a master of stereotype. Bringing sophisticated analyses to visual conventions, he had a distinct flair for using irony to exploit past and existing styles. Today, his name is typically associated with whimsical renderings of comic strips and advertisements—paintings marked by their bold colors, prominent black outlines, and patterns of Ben Day dots. Beyond his fascination for icons of popular culture, however, Lichtenstein had a little-known, but deep appreciation for the objects and images of American Indian culture. This book explores in detail and fully illustrates a virtually unknown collection of his paintings and works on paper that were influenced by his encounters with Native American subjects. Lichtenstein’s cubist abstractions from the early 1950s reflect his interest in European modernism, specifically the work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Paul Klee. The Native American subjects of these works also suggest the artist’s interest in nineteenth-century sources such as George Catlin, the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer, the German artist Charles Wimar, and the American artist John Vanderlyn. Lichtenstein himself characterized the paintings from this period as “reinterpretations of those artists concerned with the opening of the west . . . with the subject matter of cowboys, Indians, treaty signings—a sort of Western official art in a style broadly influenced by modern European painting.” The themes and compositions of these often-ignored early works are revisited in Lichtenstein’s 1979 “Amerindian” paintings and related drawings and prints. His paintings from this period were primarily inspired by his extensive collection of catalogues of Native American design motifs. Lichtenstein also attended powwows at the nearby Shinnecock Indian reservation in Southhampton, Long Island. For Lichtenstein, Native American art provided a historical base for American art, reminiscent of African art’s relationship to early European modernism. This catalogue, including forty color illustrations, is the first to examine the compelling details of this foundation.

Roy Lichtenstein: American Indian Encounters

Published on the occasion of the 1983 exhibition From Vienna to Pittsburg, The Art of Henry Koerner at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.

Henry Koerner from Vienna to Pittsbury

Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

The Montclair Art Museum &amp;; heralded by Art and Antiques as &amp;; . . . a model of the best that America&amp;;s regional museums have to offer today&amp;; &amp;; has been a significant visual arts center for more than eighty-five years. Established in 1914 as the Garden State&amp;;s first public art museum with the vision and generosity of community leaders and pioneering collectors of American and native American Art, the Museum&amp;;s holdings have become an important cultural repository both for New Jersey and the nation. Many devotees of American art have enjoyed the Museum&amp;;s individual works at different exhibits around the country.
This beautiful volume offers an illustrated cross section of a collection of 15,000 works. The more than 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs featured here reveal the museum collection&amp;;s breadth and many recent acquisitions. A special section covers the Museum&amp;;s important concentration of works by America&amp;;s greatest landscape painter George Inness, whose presence in Montclair may be said to have inspired the founding of the Museum. Another significant section features works of the Morgan Russell Collection and Archive, a collection of more than 9,000 works on paper that record the complexities of the artist&amp;;s aesthetic and intellectual adventures, especially his development as part of the first declared American modern art movement, Synchromism, from 1912 to 1914. The Montclair Art Museum is one of a surprisingly small number of U.S. museums dedicated solely to art produced in this country, and it is remarkable for its shared focus on native American art produced by the many indigenous culture groups of North America and on works produced by European and other settlers in the post-colonial period. This volume combines Native and other American art within a range of artistic media in provocative and insightful ways, and its commentaries reflect the careful scholarship and commitment to public education for which the Museum is well known.

Montclair Art Museum: Selected Works

Birmingham, Mary

Fischer, Diane P.

Johnson, Twig

THE UNSEEN CINDY SHERMAN: EARLY TRANSFORMATIONS 1975/1976. A slim and scholarly volume featuring 15 black and white illustrations from the Montclair Art Museum 2004 exhibition. Essay by Gail Stavitsky.The Unseen Cindy Sherman, curated by MAM's Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, offers a little-known selection of works by this leading contemporary artist. Primarily culled from family collections, the exhibition comprises early photographs and photographic assemblages created by Sherman as a college student, when she had begun to use herself as the subject of staged photographs. These early works vividly illustrate Sherman's early explorations of the myriad constructions of self and female identities as a young woman, and her interest in challenging conventions of beauty and behavior.

The Unseen Cindy Sherman: Early Transformations, 1975/1976

Walt Kuhn (1877–1949) is best known for his bold, modernist paintings of showgirls and circus performers. He was deeply involved with theater and the circus for much of his life, and his work was informed by years of close observation. Combining a modernist impulse with a showman’s instincts, Kuhn created portraits that penetrate the veneer of burlesque shows and circuses as well as vigorously rendered still lifes. Kuhn was one of the principal organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, and from about 1922 to 1925, he also turned theater professional, writing and directing satirical skits and pantomimes. In the late 1920s, his mature style emerged through a unique melding of modernist principles with an updated realism. This first major exhibition catalogue of Kuhn’s work in decades, timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show, brings his work back into the spotlight.

Walt Kuhn: American Modern (DC MOORE GALLER)

Sessions, Ralph

DC Moore Gallery

The International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, consisted of more than 1,300 works of art by American and European artists. During its original run in New York, Chicago, and Boston from mid-February to mid-May of 1913 and in the subsequent scholarship on the topic, most attention has centered on the avant-garde European artists, particularly Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Henri Matisse, even though art by Americans comprised two-thirds of the works on view in this legendary show. The New Spirit is the first exhibit and catalogue to focus primarily on the American art in the Armory Show. While works by such renowned artists as Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, John Marin, Charles Sheeler, and George Bellows are included, The New Spirit highlights paintings, sculpture, watercolors, and prints by artists like Leon Kroll, Middleton Manigault, D. Putnam Brinley, Jerome Myers, Allen Tucker, Jonas Lie, E. Ambrose Webster, Chester Beach, and George Grey Barnard—talented individuals who remain at the periphery of mainstream American art history.

The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913

McCarthy, Laurette E.

Duncan, Charles H.

the Montclair Art Museum

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