Traces Sargent's life, including his childhood in Europe, looks at his sketches, watercolors, and portraits, and discusses Sargent's style

John Singer Sargent

Hills, Patricia

Children's Books

Whitney Museum/Abrams

Perpetual Mirage: Photographic Narratives of the Desert West

The catalogue for an unprecedented exhibition opening in June 1996 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Perpetual Mirage is the first fully illustrated history of the desert West and the first full-scale study of one of the most distinctive American publishing traditions - the photographic book. Since the mid-19th century, photographs of the American Southwest - its towering mountains, majestic canyons, and unusual wildlife - have been presented to the public primarily in books. These photographic books enabled the images to speak directly to the viewer. In the hands of the early photographic pioneers, the photograph functioned as a tool of scientific exploration, promoted commercial (and political) development of the West, and educated and thrilled people who would never visit the exotic and remote sites captured by the camera. In later years, the masterful photographs of artists such as Ansel Adams contributed to the definition of photography as an independent artistic medium. Even more important, these landscape photographers helped raise public consciousness about the region's fragility and its essential role in a vital, interlocking ecosystem. The photographic legacy of the American Southwest includes the magnificent survey albums of the mid-19th century, through which most Americans first saw the region's exotic plants, ancient cliff dwellings, and natural wonders; turn-of-the-century ethnographic reports, most notably, The North American Indian project of Edward S. Curtis; illustrated travel guides such as those by Edward Weston; books by Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, which marshaled the environmental movement; and the photo-text documents of Dorothea Lange.

Arts & Photography

Castleberry, May

Photography & Video

Unknown Terrain: The Landscapes of Andrew Wyeth

A profusely illustrated volume, the textual complement to a forthcoming exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, follows the development of Andrew Wyeth's landscape painting in critical essays and color reproductions of more than 125 works. 30,000 first printing.

Venn, Beth & Adam D. Weinberg

History & Criticism

Best known for recasting familiar objects in unfamiliar textures, media, and dimensions, Claes Oldenburg has long challenged his audience to rethink the everyday with works such as French Fries and Ketchup (1963) and Soft Toilet (1966). Oldenburg's masterful drawings reveal another facet of this pioneering artist, inviting viewers to enter his "fantasy' as they explore Oldenburg's relationship with the medium, from sensitive early explorations to veteran campaigns as a refined and accomplished draftsman. Drawing is crucial to Oldenburg's art: drawings note the beginning of an idea; they develop the thought; they give birth to his sculptures. The medium offers a flexibility particularly suited to the artist's extraordinary visions, enhancing the effectiveness of his manipulations of scale and perspective in sculpture. Pieces such as Proposed Colossal Monument for Central Park North, N.Y.C.- Teddy Bear (1965); Various Positions of a Giant Lipstick to Replace the Fountain of Eros, Piccadilly Circus, London (1966); Proposal for a Cathedral in the Form of a Colossal Faucet, Lake Union, Seattle (1972); and Blueberry Pie a la Mode, Sliding down a Hill (1996) usher viewers into a chimerical world of the mundane made significant.

Claes Oldenburg Drawings in the Whitney Museum of American Art

Lee, Janie C.

For about ten years, beginning with the Armory Show in 1913, New York City was host to the odd-sounding accents and queerer-looking paintings and constructions of a mixed bag of European and American avant-gardists. Besides the inscrutable figure of artist Marcel Duchamp, the European contingent included such iconoclastic visitors as the playboy painter Francis Picabia, the composer Edgard Varese, the diplomat Henri-Pierre Roche (author of Jules et Jim and adviser to the extraordinary collector John Quinn), and painters Albert Gleizes and Jean Crotti. Among the Americans were the photographer/painter/constructor Man Ray, the Precisionist painter and Fortune photographer Charles Sheeler, the Futurist Joseph Stella, and the Pennsylvania artists Charles Demuth and Morton Schamberg. New York Dada is the first comprehensive study devoted exclusively to the accomplishments of these vanguard artists in America in the period 1915-23 - among the most underappraised, though most influential periods in the history of American art. Within months after the word "Dada" was discovered by a group of refugee artists and writers living in Switzerland, news of the movement reached artists in New York, who, by then, had already made works of art and engaged in activities that were similar in spirit to those produced by their European counterparts. For this groundbreaking book, Francis M. Naumann has interviewed virtually all the survivors and has amassed a wealth of rare photographs and newspaper clippings, including pictures of early installations of modern art in homes and exhibitions, to capture the spirit of New York Dada in a work that is both informative and captivating. In view of the current trendto investigate the potential of a conceptually oriented approach to art and to the art-making process, it is perhaps no coincidence that New York Dada is now finally recognized for the important role it played in the formative phases of a modernist aesthetic.

Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York

NAUMANN, Francis & VENN, Beth (eds.)