Maine And American Art

In this expansive volume devoted to one of the premier art collections in the U.S., the rich and full picture of Maine's central role in American art from the early nineteenth century to the present is chronicled. Published on the occasion of Maine's bicentennial, the book considers more than 200 major works of American art from the Farnsworth Art Museum's impressive holdings and details how the state has figured prominently in the development of American art. The volume includes artists as diverse as Andrew Wyeth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francesco Clemente, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alex Katz, among others. Through their work, a fascinating depiction of the state--and indeed of the development of American art--emerges. The volume will feature two historic sites: the Farnsworth Homestead (the National Register of Historic Places home of founder Lucy Copeland Farnsworth) and the National Historic Landmark Olson House, inspiration for some 300 works by Andrew Wyeth, including Christina's World. The book also considers Lucy Copeland Farnsworth's distinctive vision to create a museum, library, and historic house, placing her among the few and still under-recognized women who created museums throughout the United States in the early twentieth century.

A lavish selection of nearly 250 works from the Farnsworth Museum's permanent collection.

At First Light chronicles twenty-six extraordinary artists of the last two hundred years who have lived and worked in Maine. Published to coincide with the state's bicentennial in 2020, the volume considers the significant contributions artists have made to a deeper and more profound understanding of Maine's history, its land and its peoples. Maine's unique and breathtaking landscape--from its rugged coastline, quaint harbors, majestic mountains, and verdant forests--continues to have a powerful effect on the artists who are drawn to its shores. Written and expertly researched by some of the foremost scholars and curators in the field, each chapter focuses on a different artist, featuring the artists' artworks and anchored by breathtaking contemporary photography of their homes, studios, and surroundings. From picturesque bungalows to grander structures with beautiful vistas, the houses and studios featured are as diverse as the artists who have inhabited them. The artists featured include fan favorites to lesser known yet important figures from the eighteenth century to the present day, working in a range of media from painting to photography to sculpture, including: Jonathan Fisher, Winslow Homer, Frank Weston Benson, Charles Herbert Woodbury, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Marguerite and William Zorach, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Eliot Porter, Fairfield Porter, Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Ashley Bryan, Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, Bernard Langlais, Robert Indiana, David C. Driskell, Molly Neptune Parker, Richard Tuttle, and William Wegman.

In this expansive volume devoted to one of the premier art collections in the U.S., the rich and full picture of Maine's central role in American art from the early nineteenth century to the present is chronicled. Published on the occasion of Maine's bicentennial, the book considers more than 200 major works of American art from the Farnsworth Art Museum's impressive holdings and details how the state has figured prominently in the development of American art. The volume includes artists as diverse as Andrew Wyeth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francesco Clemente, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alex Katz, among others. Through their work, a fascinating depiction of the state--and indeed of the development of American art--emerges. The volume will feature two historic sites: the Farnsworth Homestead (the National Register of Historic Places home of founder Lucy Copeland Farnsworth) and the National Historic Landmark Olson House, inspiration for some 300 works by Andrew Wyeth, including Christina's World. The book also considers Lucy Copeland Farnsworth's distinctive vision to create a museum, library, and historic house, placing her among the few and still under-recognized women who created museums throughout the United States in the early twentieth century.

Marsden Hartley had a lifelong personal and aesthetic engagement with Maine, where he was born in 1877 and where he died at age sixty-six. As an important member of the artistic circle promoted by Alfred Stieglitz, Hartley began his career by painting the mountains of western Maine. He subsequently led a peripatetic life, traveling throughout Europe and North America and only occasionally visiting his native state. By midlife, however, his itinerant existence had taken an emotional toll, and he confided to Stieglitz that he wanted “so earnestly a ‘place’ to be.” Finally returning to the state in his later years, he transformed his identity from urbane sophisticate to “the painter from Maine.” But while Maine has played a clear and defining role in Hartley’s art, not until now has this relationship been studied with the breadth and richness it warrants. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} Marsden Hartley’s Maine is the first in-depth discussion of Hartley’s complex and shifting relationship to his native state. Illustrated with works from throughout the painter’s career, it provides a nuanced understanding of Hartley’s artistic range, from the exhilarating Post-Impressionist landscapes of his early years to the late, roughly rendered paintings of Maine and its people. The absorbing essays examine Hartley’s view of Maine as a place of light and darkness whose spirit imbued his art, which encompassed buoyant coastal views, mournful mountain vistas, and portraits of Mainers. An illustrated chronology provides an overview of Hartley’s life, juxtaposing major personal incidents with concurrent events in Maine’s history. For Hartley, who was strongly influenced by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, Maine was an enduring source of inspiration, one powerfully intertwined with his past, his cultural milieu, and his desire to create a regional expression of American modernism.

An extraordinary private collection of watercolors and drawings by Andrew Wyeth depicting the subjects memorialized in his legendary painting Christina's World, one of the best-known works of American art. This book presents rarely seen watercolors and drawings Andrew Wyeth made of his friend Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro, and the weathered Maine farmstead where they lived. It features moving portraits and serene interior and exterior views of the house and the surrounding land, now memorialized in Wyeth's 1948 tempera painting Christina's World, one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art and now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some forty-five works from the collection of the Marunuma Art Park in Japan, rarely shown before in the United States, are accompanied by works from the Farnsworth as well as by historical photographs of Wyeth, the Olsons, and the house. Otoyo Nakamura writes about the history of this collection of Wyeth works, and Michael Komanecky addresses the place of the Olson farm in Wyeth's career over three decades, and how Christina's World and the Olson House have inspired pilgrimages for fans of Wyeth's work. Despite its isolated location and seasonal schedule, Olson House draws thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The Olson House, acquired by the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1991, has been recommended for National Landmark status.

Beginning in 1847, Henry David Thoreau made three trips to the mostly unexplored Maine woods. Along the way he recorded his observations on the wildlife (flora and fauna), the weather, terrain, and on the nature of the people he met along the way, including loggers, rivermen, and his Abnaki guides. In Thoreau's Maine Woods, photographer Dan Tobyne captures the essence of the Maine Thoreau discovered and described in his book. The combination of short excerpts with stunning imagery carries Thoreau's work to a higher level, presenting it in both glowing words and pictures.

Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.