A New Look: Samuel F. B. Morse's Gallery Of The Louvre

Peter John Brownlee

Terra Foundation For American Art

Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with high-quality reproductions of artworks, it offers an unprecedented resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and full-color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures—including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederic Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman—are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists. A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.

Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources

Arts & Photography

Davis, John

Leja, Michæl

History & Criticism

Chicago’s fine arts have long languished in the shadow of the city’s architectural riches, but their time has finally come, most prominently as the focus of the final major exhibition at Chicago’s Terra Museum of American Art. The attendant catalog of the Terra Museum’s fall 2004 exhibition, "Chicago Modern, 1893-1945: Pursuit of the New", is the first-ever survey by a major art museum of early American modernist works created by Chicago artists. At the opening of the twentieth century, Chicago was regarded as the quintessential modern city that would provide fertile soil for a new national art. The debut of impressionism at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 bore early witness to this expectation as it marked the arrival of modern art in Chicago. In the midst of great local controversy, and echoing debates raging at the time in New York and Paris, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago incorporated modernism into its curriculum, a move that led Chicago-trained artists to experiment in and reinterpret the prominent art movements of their time. Here, for the first time, this work is showcased. This volume focuses on the rich body of artistic work produced during the city’s artistic “golden age,” the period from the 1893 Exposition through the end of World War II. Noted art scholars contribute to the volume with essays that explore how Chicago painters created a unique niche in these transformative international art movements—from the impressionism of the 1800s to the social realism and surrealism of the 1930s and 1940s—and forged a regional consciousness through experimental means. This detailed and lavishly illustrated catalog examines the larger issues and concerns that shaped art in Chicago during this period, offering a new and valuable addition to regional American art scholarship and a fitting farewell for one of Chicago’s most beloved art museums. Contributors: Wendy Greenhouse Elizabeth Kennedy Daniel Schulman Susan Weininger

Chicago Modern, 1893-1945: Pursuit of the New

Waves battering the weathered rocks on a shore, young boys sailing carefree on open waters: Winslow Homer’s raw, evocative seascapes are among the most distinctive and powerful in American art. Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea offers here a fresh exploration of Homer and his career-long preoccupation with the relationship between humans and the waters that define their world. This exhibition catalog organizes Homer’s sea-centered works by four periods that correspond to geographic locations: Gloucester, Massachusetts and other early East Coast seascapes; Cullercoats, England; Prout’s Neck in Maine; and notations from his trips to tropical regions such as the Bahamas and fishing retreats such as the Adirondacks in New York. Distinguished European and American scholars, in a series of incisive essays, argue that Homer’s seascapes need to be reevaluated. While acknowledging that most understand his paintings as premier examples of American realism, the contributors show that they are also distinctly modern in a way that set Homer radically apart from his contemporaries. Nowhere is this more evident than in his seascapes, where abstractions and expression battle his pictorial realism. The moving emotional undertones of his seascapes emerge in the compelling full-color reproductions featured in the catalog, as his paintings simultaneously capture the unique landscape of their geographic settings, the universality of man’s relationship to the sea, and issues of pictorial representation in general. Published in conjunction with exhibitions at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Musée d’Art Américain in Giverny, Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea offers a new view of an American master.

Winslow Homer: Poet of the Sea

Lured by the ineffable beauty represented in Claude Monet’s artwork and the promise of painting en plein air, artists from America and across Europe flocked to the French village of Giverny in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming it from a sleepy hamlet to a colorful and thriving artists’ community. Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915 evokes the longevity of impressionism and highlights the role Giverny played in the movement’s ascendance, placing Giverny in the context of other European artists’ colonies of its era. 
Making use of reproductions of period postcards, paintings, photographs, and previously unpublished documents, editor Katherine M. Bourguignon traces the evolution of the impressionist style in this idyllic and international setting. Fellow contributors address the interactions of the artists of Giverny with Monet, the utopian experiment of a collective artistic enterprise, the emergence of the rural innkeeper as a new class of patron, and the American impressionists who, inspired by their experience in France, often formed artists’ colonies back in the United States and participated in the ongoing tradition of French-American cultural exchange. 
Accompanying exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Américain Giverny and at the San Diego Museum of Art, Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915 captures the creative spirit and aesthetic that enlivened this artistic haven a century ago.

Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915

As American settlement expanded westward in the 1860s, the U.S. government undertook large-scale investigations of its new territories. Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860–1880 presents memorable glass-plate photographs from these federal surveys. The selection includes breathtaking views of such iconic sites as Yosemite, as well as lesser-known ethnographic portraits taken by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, William H. Jackson, and William Bell, among others. The accompanying essays discuss how the photographs were used to promote white settlement, how their distribution at home and abroad contributed to the aggrandizement of the American West, and how the exploitative ideology underlying the use of photography extended to attitudes toward both American landscapes and American Indians. The images are all drawn from French public collections, which hold an astonishing number of these U.S. survey photographs. Accompanying an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Américain Giverny, Images of the West provides a critical new examination of a bygone era.

Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860-1880

History

The Gilded Age of the United States—a time of dazzling prosperity and decorative opulence at the close of the nineteenth century —inspired an equally extravagant artistic outpouring, particularly in portraiture of high-society women. Depicting women dressed in lush ball gowns, with regal bearing and beguiling expressions, these portraits were acquired in large numbers by the French government of the era. Paintings by celebrated American artists such as John White Alexander, Thomas Eakins, William T. Dannat, and John Singer Sargent and photographs taken by Gertrude Käsebier, George Henry Seeley, Edward Steichen, and Clarence H. White remain in French public collections today, and they are the subject of the Musée d’Art Américain Giverny exhibition Portrait of a Lady. This accompanying volume, with texts in both English and French, includes eighty full-color reproductions of these portraits and provides critical insight to the varied representations of femininity in art. Portrait of a Lady brings a new perspective to the Gilded Age: a period of fruitful exchange between French and American artists, between painting and photography, between tradition and avant-garde—all linked to the myth of “woman,” a myth that is both eternal and constantly changing. 

Portrait of a Lady: Peintures et photographies américaines en France, 1870-1915

Frustrated by the art world’s elitism and the snobbish exclusivity of the academy’s juries, eight American painters united in 1908 to upend the establish norms and stage their own exhibition of modernist art. Led by the charismatic Robert Henri, they came to be known as "The Eight," and their two-week show at New York’s Macbeth Galleries drew a multitude of visitors, who crowded into the galleries to critique the much-publicized work of these "revolutionary" artists. Their paintings of urban scenes marked a significant departure from the prevailing style—which emphasized physical and natural beauty—and met with critical success.
The established chronicle maintains that the Eight were rendered dysfunctional and artistically irrelevant after European modernism arrived in the United States at the 1913 Armory Show. The Eight and American Modernisms revises this account and reevaluates these respected artists’ careers, including their late works. Accompanying a traveling exhibition, this lushly illustrated volume challenges the accepted wisdom about the evolution of the modernist style.
In addition to Henri, "The Eight" included William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John French Sloan, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, and Maurice Prendergast.

The Eight and American Modernisms

The history of American art is a history of objects, but it is also a history of ideas about how we create and consume these objects. As Picturing convincingly shows, the critical tradition in American art has given rise to profound thinking about the nature and capacity of images and formed responses to some of most pressing problems of picturing: What is an image, and why make one? What do images do?             The first volume in a new series on critical concerns in the history of American art, Picturing brings together essays by a distinguished international group of scholars who discuss the creation and consumption of images from the early modern period through the end of the twentieth century. Some of the contributions focus on art critical texts, like Gertrude Stein’s portrait of Cézanne, while others have as their point of departure particular artworks, from a portrait of Benjamin Franklin to Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographs of the California Coast. Works that addressed images and image making were not confined to the academy; they spilled out into poetry, literature, theater, and philosophy, and the essays’ considerations likewise range freely, from painting to natural history illustrations, travel narratives, and popular fiction. Together, the contributions demonstrate a rich deliberation that thoroughly debunks the notion that American art is merely derivative of a European tradition. With a wealth of new research and full-color illustrations, Picturing significantly expands the terrain of scholarship on American art.

Picturing (Terra Foundation Essays)

HUNTER, Matthew

Kelsey, Robin

Scale is perhaps the most spectacularly overlooked aspect of artistic production. As photographic and digital reproductions have essentially dematerialized art, critical and historical research dealing with scale—both within the American critical tradition and abroad—has become scattered and insufficiently theorized. However, by posing a specific challenge, such research forces a heightened recognition of both the properties of materials and the deep technical knowledge of makers. A reconsideration of scalar relationships in American art and visual culture therefore reveals original insights. Scale is the second volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series. With eighty color illustrations and a wealth of new research from Glenn Adamson, Wendy Bellion, Wouter Davidts, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Christopher P. Heuer, Joshua G. Stein, and Jason Weems, it explores viewers’ physical relationship to Barnett Newman’s abstract canvases, the arduous engineering behind the creation of Mount Rushmore, and the charged significance of liberty poles in the landscape of eighteenth-century New York, among other topics that range from studies of specific works of art to significant conceptual and theoretical concerns.

Scale (Terra Foundation Essays)

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Terra Foundation For American Art publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Terra Foundation For American Art