European Muses American Masters 1870 1950

Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Jacqueline Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices. Most American audiences in the interwar period disapproved of figural abstraction and held modernist painting in contempt, yet the critics who first expressed appreciation for Johnson, Kuniyoshi, and Weber praised their bright palettes and energetic pictures--and expected to find the residue of the minority artist's heritage in the work itself. Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. Making Race is a history of a past phenomenon which has ramifications for the present.

An exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection which comprises sixty-three modern paintings, sculptures and works on paper by fifty artists. The Abstract Expressionist paintings that form the heart of this collection were nearly all created in New York City.

Winner of the Ruth Emery Award (2018) Rare Light is a collection of essays exploring little known facets of the life and career of a major American Impressionist painter. J. Alden Weir (1852–1919) painted some of his finest canvases while living in Windham in eastern Connecticut’s picturesque “Quiet Corner,” and this rural location played a crucial role in Weir’s artistic development. The four essays that comprise this book offer in-depth contextual information about the architecture, culture, environment, and history of the region, allowing us to see Connecticut as it appeared in Weir’s lifetime. Interweaving photos, paintings, and letters—some never before published—Rare Light documents the artist’s sense of Windham as a place for social gatherings, physical and psychic rest, and art making. Taken together, the essays celebrate the interconnectedness of art, architecture, family, history, and place. Includes essays by Charles Burlingham Jr., Rachel Carley, Anne E. Dawson, and Jamie Eves.

"This fully illustrated catalogue features entries on more than one hundred significant works by artists including Stieglitz Circle painters Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Arthur Dove; Precisionists Charles Demuth, Ralston Crawford, George Ault, and Charles Sheeler; and Philadelphia modernists Arthur B. Carles, Hugh Henry Breckenridge, and Earl Horter. Sculptures by Elie Nadelman, John Storrs, Alberto Giacometti, and Louise Nevelson are included. Of special note is Thomas Hart Benton's painting The Apple of Discord and a rare landscape drawing by American Regionalist Grant Wood."--BOOK JACKET.

It has long been observed that Impressionists and their followers heeded Charles Baudelaire's call to paint "modern life." Paris and the Countryside explores modernity, a cultural notion, with a parallel emphasis on the development of modernism, an art historical concept. Essays focus on the city and the countryside. Together they examine the notions of modernity and modernism in late nineteenth-century France, acknowledging, summarizing, and interpreting the wide array of artistic responses to the modern world.

Lists exhibits in the United States, Europe, and Canada, with highlights, cost, hours, addresses, and other data.