Prints and Printmakers of New York State, 1825-1940

Prints and Printmakers of New York State, 1825-1940
Author: David Tatham
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1986-08-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780815602040

For well over a century, New York has been a microcosm of the art and craft of American printmaking. Until 1825, printmaking in America was almost entirely an artisan's craft. Then, with the arrival of lithography, the realization arose that printmaking could also be a fine art. The essays published in this collection contribute to the body of scholarship by identifying important but hitherto insufficiently studied aspects of the graphic arts and treating them authoritatively. Their subjects concern prints in New York State, whose great metropolitan city was, after 1825, the acknowledged center of nearly everything important in the graphic arts in the U.S. The history of American prints from 1825 on is enormously rich, yet until the 1970s it was the least studied and understood aspect of the history of art in North America. It is a history more deeply rooted in popular culture and more closely tied, for a long time, to the world of commerce than the other arts. The usually small-scale, sometimes ephemeral, and often highly subtle (or highly unsubtle) nature of prints makes it easy to overlook them. The collection of essays included here were originally presented at the Twelfth Annual North American Print Conference, held in 1981 in Syracuse, New York. Locally organized, these conferences have been held during the last decade throughout the U.S. and Canada to further the study of the history of the pictorial graphic arts in North America. Contributors include several leading historians of the graphic arts of nineteenth-century America. Their chapters bring to life and flesh out figures who were previously little more than names, establish facts that correct long-held erroneous assumptions, introduce many prints of exceptional interest that have remained out of the public view for generations, and provide a rich, new context for many familiar images.

Adirondack Prints and Printmakers

Adirondack Prints and Printmakers
Author: Caroline M. Welsh
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1998-05-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780815605195

Since the late eighteenth century, the Adirondacks—first characterized as a "Dismal Wilderness" and then a "Sportsman's Paradise"—has challenged cartographers, scientists, sportsmen, travelers, and artists. In a volume that covers nearly three hundred years of artistic achievement, Adirondack Museum curator Caroline M. Welsh includes essays that were originally presented at the 1995 North American Print Conference at the Adirondack Museum. Comprehensive in scope and lavishly illustrated, the book embodies the artistic spectrum from the documentary to the aesthetic. Paintings of Adirondack scenery were frequently reproduced as prints. Lithographs after original paintings disseminated affordable fine art to a broad middle class, exemplifying a pervasive nineteenth-century faith that art. By 1850, this northern expanse became a sanctuary for artists. Inspired by the drama of the landscape, the purity of the light, and the grandeur of its rugged wilderness, artists flocked to the region. From Winslow Homer, Dr. Arpad Gerster, and the French naturalist Jacques Gerard Milbert to Canadian artist David Milne, Adirondack Prints and Printmakers underscores the importance of the wilderness landscape in American art and culture and the role that prints have played to document, promote, and celebrate the Adirondacks.

The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe

The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe
Author: DavidS. Areford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 135153968X

Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways?both positive and negative?was quickly realized.

The American Art-Union

The American Art-Union
Author: Kimberly A. Orcutt
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1531507018

The first comprehensive treatment in seventy years of the American Art-Union’s remarkable rise and fall For over a decade, the New York–based American Art-Union shaped art creation, display, and patronage nationwide. Boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state, its meteoric rise and its sudden and spectacular collapse still raise a crucial question: Why did such a successful and influential institution fail? The American Art-Union reveals a sprawling and fascinating account of the country’s first nationwide artistic phenomenon, creating a shared experience of visual culture, art news and criticism, and a direct experience with original works. For an annual fee of five dollars, members of the American Art-Union received an engraving after a painting by a notable US artist and the annual publication Transactions (1839–49) and later the monthly Bulletin (1848–53). Most importantly, members’ names were entered in a drawing for hundreds of original paintings and sculptures by most of the era’s best-known artists. Those artworks were displayed in its immensely popular Free Gallery. Unfortunately, the experiment was short-lived. Opposition grew, and a cascade of events led to an 1852 court case that proved to be the Art-Union’s downfall. Illuminating the workings of the American art market, this study fills a gaping lacuna in the history of nineteenth-century US art. Kimberly A. Orcutt draws from the American Art-Union’s records as well as in-depth contextual research to track the organization’s decisive impact that set the direction of the country’s paintings, sculpture, and engravings for well over a decade. Forged in cultural crosscurrents of utopianism and skepticism, the American Art-Union’s demise can be traced to its nature as an attempt to create and control the complex system that the early nineteenth-century art world represented. This study breaks the organization’s activities into their major components to offer a structural rather than chronological narrative that follows mounting tensions to their inevitable end. The institution was undone not by dramatic outward events or the character of its leadership but by the character of its utopianist plan.

Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures

Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures
Author: Erin Pauwels
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2023-07-19
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 0271096446

Napoleon Sarony was once one of the most famous names in American photography. During the Gilded Age, his grand portrait studio with its one-story-high marquee reproducing the photographer’s signature in golden letters was a New York City landmark visited by celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Twain. Sarony’s story represents a central chapter in the history of photography. Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures documents Sarony’s career as New York City’s premier portrait photographer and details a moment when the birth of celebrity culture and growth of mass media helped promote popular acceptance of photography as fine art. Sarony’s larger-than-life public image was crucial to demonstrating photography’s creative potential. At a time when photographers were commonly regarded as straitlaced entrepreneurs or technicians, Sarony circulated self-portraits in outlandish costumes to assert himself as a flamboyantly eccentric artist. These photographic performances forged an authoritative link between the so-called father of artistic photography in America and the stylish celebrity portraits that emerged from his studio by the tens of thousands. Reconstructing Sarony’s biography and bringing to light never-before-published portraits, Erin Pauwels provides an illuminating view of how one artist’s quest for creative recognition fueled the rise of celebrity culture and artistic photography in the United States. This book will appeal to historians of photography and nineteenth-century American visual culture, as well as anyone interested in this master of the medium of photography and his celebrity subjects.

Getting the Picture

Getting the Picture
Author: Jason E. Hill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-09-09
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1000211320

Powerful and often controversial, news pictures promise to make the world at once immediate and knowable. Yet while many great writers and thinkers have evaluated photographs of atrocity and crisis, few have sought to set these images in a broader context by defining the rich and diverse history of news pictures in their many forms. For the first time, this volume defines what counts as a news picture, how pictures are selected and distributed, where they are seen and how we critique and value them. Presenting the best new thinking on this fascinating topic, this book considers the news picture over time, from the dawn of the illustrated press in the nineteenth century, through photojournalism’s heyday and the rise of broadcast news and newsreels in the twentieth century and into today’s digital platforms. It examines the many kinds of images: sport, fashion, society, celebrity, war, catastrophe and exoticism; and many mediums, including photography, painting, wood engraving, film and video. Packed with the best research and full colour-illustrations throughout, this book will appeal to students and readers interested in how news and history are key sources of our rich visual culture.

A PeopleÕs Art History of the United States

A PeopleÕs Art History of the United States
Author: Nicolas Lampert
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1595583246

Most people outside of the art world view art as something that is foreign to their experiences and everyday lives. A People’s Art History of the United States places art history squarely in the rough–and–tumble of politics, social struggles, and the fight for justice from the colonial era through the present day. Author and radical artist Nicolas Lampert combines historical sweep with detailed examinations of individual artists and works in a politically charged narrative that spans the conquest of the Americas, the American Revolution, slavery and abolition, western expansion, the suffragette movement and feminism, civil rights movements, environmental movements, LGBT movements, antiglobalization movements, contemporary antiwar movements, and beyond. A People’s Art History of the United States introduces us to key works of American radical art alongside dramatic retellings of the histories that inspired them. Stylishly illustrated with over two hundred images, this book is nothing less than an alternative education for anyone interested in the powerful role that art plays in our society.