Art For The Nation

Published to coincide with an exhibition in the Queen's House in November 2006, 'Art for the Nation' is a celebration of key oil paintings in the National Maritime Museum collection.

Exhibition includes approximately 2% of the acquisitions made during the 1990s.

The Nation magazine, since its founding in 1865, began what has become, for better or worse, art criticism as a cultural institution in the United States. This eclectic collection features contributors like Christopher Hitchens on “degenerate art,” Heywood Broun on the Artists Congress of 1936, Katherine Anne Porter on children’s art, Marianne Moore on the death of Nation art critic Paul Rosenfeld, and Langston Hughes on “Negro Art.” The volume also includes contributions from many well-known artists: Stuart Davis, Marsden Harley, Alfred Stieglitz, John Marin, Kenyon Cox, Guy Pene Du Bois, Louis Lozowick, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Celebrated writers on art such as Bernard Berenson, Clement Greenberg, Lawrence Alloway, Hilton Kramer, Max Kozloff, John Berger, and Arthur Danto give readers first-hand accounts of the debuts of artists ranging from John Singer Sargent to Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning as well as the famous lawsuit between John Ruskin and James McNeill Whistler (reported by a youthful Henry James), the destruction of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center murals and Richard Nixon’s views on art. More recently writers like E.L. Doctorow and Katha Pollitt have weighed in on the recent culture wars over arts funding and free expression.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name held at Tate Modern, London, July 12-October 22, 2017; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, February 3-April 23, 2018; and Brooklyn Museum, New York, September 7, 2018-February 3, 2019.

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era in the 1970s. Drawing on art works, media coverage, reviews, writings and the private papers of key Irish and international artists, critics and commentators including Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, Clement Greenberg, James Johnson Sweeney, Herbert Read and Brian O'Doherty, the study explores the significant contribution of Irish modernist art to post-independence cultural debate and diverging notions of national Irish identity. Through an analysis of major controversies, the book examines how the reputations of major Irish artists was moulded by the prevailing demands of national identity, modernization and the dynamics of the international art world. Debate about the relevance of the work of leading international modernists such as the Irish-American sculptor, Andrew O'Connor, the French expressionist painter, Georges Rouault, the British sculptor Henry Moore and the Irish born, but ostensibly British, artist Francis Bacon to Irish cultural life is also analysed, as is the equally problematic positioning of Northern Irish artists.

"Case studies explore the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, whose efforts to use art to create a Jewish nationality in Palestine raise important issues of national identity, and the discovery in 1932 of the third-century Synagogue of Dura Europos, a symbol for scholars struggling against the Third Reich. Among those who supported or challenged concepts of Jewish art, Margaret Olin considers the nineteenth-century rabbinical scholar David Kaufmann, the philosopher Martin Buber, the critic Clement Greenberg, and the filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

Focusing on Latvia, (between 1905 and 1940), Suzanne Pourchier-Plasseraud, has chosen a nation without an ancient state history of its own, to illustrate the evolution of the concept of national identity into a claim for independence, with the help of art and artists.

An in-depth look at one of the richest collections of American art, assembled by Electra Havemeyer Webb, renowned collector and founder of Shelburne Museum. Electra Havemeyer Webb assembled Shelburne Museum’s trove of American paintings in the late 1950s, creating a renowned and rich survey of American portraits, landscapes, marine paintings, sporting art, still lifes, and genre scenes from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. During an era that preferred European modernism and abstraction, Webb’s visionary endeavor presented a new story of the United States: an attractive and industrious nation with its own valuable artistic traditions. This handsome book features the best of Shelburne’s American paintings, including works by colonial painters John Wollaston and John Singleton Copley, portraits by William Matthew Prior and Ammi Phillips, Hudson River School landcapes by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and John Frederick Kensett, and scenes of American life by Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and many more. The collection is also notable for its great depth in the works by Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Carl Rungius, Grandma Moses, and Ogden Pleissner.