Alfred Hutty And The Charleston Renaissance

Alfred Hutty was one of the founding members of the Charleston Etchers Club in 1923, a time when etchings were used by printmakers to celebrate the essence of the Holy City. Hutty captures the facets of Charleston life. Featured are approximately sixty scenes of the Low Country in etchings, pencil drawings, and drypoint.

Mack, and a catalogue of known prints by Hutty.

Charleston, South Carolina, today enjoys a reputation as a destination city for cultural and heritage tourism. In A Golden Haze of Memory, Stephanie E. Yuhl looks back to the crucial period between 1920 and 1940, when local leaders developed Charleston's trademark image as "America's Most Historic City." Eager to assert the national value of their regional cultural traditions and to situate Charleston as a bulwark against the chaos of modern America, these descendants of old-line families downplayed Confederate associations and emphasized the city's colonial and early national prominence. They created a vibrant network of individual artists, literary figures, and organizations--such as the all-white Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals--that nurtured architectural preservation, art, literature, and tourism while appropriating African American folk culture. In the process, they translated their selective and idiosyncratic personal, familial, and class memories into a collective identity for the city. The Charleston this group built, Yuhl argues, presented a sanitized yet highly marketable version of the American past. Their efforts invited attention and praise from outsiders while protecting social hierarchies and preserving the political and economic power of whites. Through the example of this colorful southern city, Yuhl posits a larger critique about the use of heritage and demonstrates how something as intangible as the recalled past can be transformed into real political, economic, and social power.

A study of the life, work, and extraordinary influence of an innovative architect Albert Simons came of age during the vibrant years of the Charleston Renaissance in the early twentieth century. His influential social circle included artists, musicians, writers, historians, and preservationists, many supporting the cultural revival that was reshaping the city. Through his architectural design and passion for preservation, Simons contributed tremendously to the cultural environment of the Charleston Renaissance. His work helped to mold the cityscape and set a course that would both preserve the historic South Carolina city and carry it forward, allowing it to become the thriving urban center it is today. Simons brought both a sense of history and place, born of his deep roots in Charleston, as well as a cosmopolitanism developed during his years of training at the University of Pennsylvania and travels on the European continent. The melding of those sensibilities was a perfect match for the age and made him a true Charleston Renaissance Man. While he preferred the more traditional Beaux-Arts, Classical, and Colonial Revival styles, Simons had the unique ability to balance traditional and modern styles. He believed preservation in Charleston was about retaining the city's architectural heritage but doing so in a way that allowed the city to grow and progress—to be a living city. Looking forward and simultaneously looking back is quintessentially Charleston and a hallmark of Simons's life and work. Featuring more than 100 color and black and white photographs and illustrations alongside author Ralph Muldrow's compelling storytelling, this fascinating book reveals the deep connection between Simons and the Charleston cityscape. With a foreword by Witold Rybczynski, the award-winning author of numerous books including Charleston Fancy: Little Houses and Big Ideas in the Holy City, Muldrow's Charleston Renaissance Man is a celebration of Charleston's unique architectural character and the architect who embodied the Charleston Renaissance.

"The Charleston Renaissance chronicles a dynamic period of Southern history, detailing the artistic legacy of native and national artists whose collective image-making led to Charleston's transformation from a faded Southern capital to a premier tourist destination. Martha Severens, as art historian, curator, and former Charleston resident, introduces readers to the city's traditions and lore, and delineates their impact on the art of the day. Through her examination of the major local figures of the period - Alfred Hurry, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, and Verner - as well as the impressive list of visiting artists - including Birge Harrison, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Lilla Cabot Perry, and many more - Severens expands upon the existing scholarship, adding new depth and dimension to both the period and the place. Ultimately, by connecting the artistic advances in Charleston to the greater American art scene, Severens brings clarity to the "ancient, beautiful" city's vital role in Southern art and American regionalism."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"The essays tell how these and other individuals faced the tensions and contradictions of their time and place. While some traced their lineage back to the city's first families, others were relative newcomers. Some broke new ground racially and sexually as well as artistically; others perpetuated the myths of the Old South. Some were censured at home but praised in New York, London, and Paris. The essays also underscore the significance and growth of such cultural institutions as the Poetry Society of South Carolina, the Charleston Museum, and the Gibbes Art Gallery."--BOOK JACKET.

The radical changes wrought by the rise of the salon system in nineteenth-century Europe provoked an interesting response from painters in the American South. Painterly trends emanating from Barbizon and Giverny emphasized the subtle textures of nature through warm color and broken brush stroke. Artists' subject matter tended to represent a prosperous middle class at play, with the subtle suggestion that painting was indeed art for art's sake and not an evocation of the heroic manner. Many painters in the South took up the stylistics of Tonalism, Impressionism, and naturalism to create works of a very evocative nature, works which celebrated the Southern scene as an exotic other, a locale offering refuge from an increasingly mechanized urban environment. Scenic Impressions offers an insight into a particular period of American art history as borne out in seminal paintings from the holdings of the Johnson Collection of Spartanburg, South Carolina. By consolidating academic information on a disparate group of objects under a common theme and important global artistic umbrella, Scenic Impressions will underscore the Johnsons' commitment to illuminating the rich cultural history of the American South and advancing scholarship in the field, specifically examining some forty paintings created between 1880 and 1940, including landscapes and genre scenes. A foreword, written by Kevin Sharp, director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, introduces the topic. Two lead essays, written by noted art historians Estill Curtis Pennington and Martha R. Severens, discuss the history and import of the Impressionist movement—abroad and domestically—and specifically address the school's influence on art created in and about the American South. The featured works of art are presented in full color plates and delineated in complementary entries written by Pennington and Severens. Also included are detailed artist biographies illustrated by photographs of the artists, extensive documentation, and indices. Featured artists include Wayman Adams, Colin Campbell Cooper, Elliott Daingerfield, G. Ruger Donoho, Harvey Joiner, John Ross Key, Blondelle Malone, Lawrence Mazzanovich, Paul Plaschke, Hattie Saussy, Alice Ravenel, Huger Smith, Anthony Thieme, and Helen Turner.

A Southern Collection presents select masterworks from the permanent collection of the Morris Museum of Art on the occasion of the institution's inaugural exhibition. Drawn from a comprehensive survey collection of painting in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present day, the museum's opening exhibit explores an artistic terrain as rich and diverse as the South itself, arranged in categories that reflect critical chronological developments in the art world. A survey of painting activity in the South begins with the travels of itinerant portrait artists working prior to the Civil War. At the same time, landscape painting encompasses a sensitive response to the swamps, bayous and fertile fields of the South. Late in the nineteenth century strong and vivid genre painting competes with the nostalgic effects realized by Southern impressionists, whose shimmering, liquid images are invested with an elusive spirit of place. In this century, those strains of realism and naturalism that characterize the classic body of Southern writing appear in the representational art of painters who defied the modern abstract dictum. And finally, the exciting, compelling works of a current generation of both self-taught artists and sophisticated contemporary painters complete this fascinating, though sometimes neglected, chapter in American art history.