Twentieth-Century America

Twentieth-Century America
Author: Douglas Tallack
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2014-07-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131787059X

The multi-volume Longman literature in English series aims to provide students of literature with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical and cultural context. This book looks at cinema, painting and architecture in 20th-century America, as well as the culture of politics.

Picturing the City

Picturing the City
Author: Rebecca Zurier
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2006-09-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520220188

"Zurier vividly locates the Ashcan School artists within the early twentieth-century crosscurrents of newspaper journalism, literary realism, illustration, sociology, and urban spectatorship. Her compassionate study newly assesses the artists' rejection of 'genteel' New York, their alignments with mass media, and their innovative ways of seeing in the modern city."—Wanda M. Corn, author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-35 If the Ashcan School brought a special and embracing eye to the city, Rebecca Zurier in her richly contextual and impressively interdisciplinary book explains and evokes that historically specific urban vision in all its richness. Finally, in Picturing the City, we have the study these painters have long deserved. And we gain new and delightful access to New York City at the moment of its emergence as a compelling embodiment of metropolitan modernity."—Thomas Bender, Director, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University "Picturing the City is both meticulous and wide-ranging in its assessment of the Ashcan artists and their passionate efforts to represent New York. It charts their pleasures and problems, warmth and prejudices, generosity and differences, originality and formula. It takes seriously their habits as journalists and provides the most complete sense of their immersion in a world of urban spectatorship and vision. Rebecca Zurier has written a wonderful, timely book that will be a benchmark for any future discussions of them."—Anthony W. Lee, author of Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco "Rebecca Zurier takes us on an intellectually exhilarating and breathtakingly beautiful visual voyage through turn-of-the-century New York City as the Ashcan painters saw it. As we watch them learn a new way of looking in the commercially dynamic, sensual New York of a century ago, we too see that time and place with fresh eyes. Inevitably, thanks to Zurier, the way we look at city life today will change as well."—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

North American Prints, 1913-1947

North American Prints, 1913-1947
Author: David Tatham
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2006-06-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780815630715

In this collection of essays, eight contemporary scholars examine the rich diversity in the subject, style, and geography of printmaking from 1913-1947, a singular period of artistic creation. Also, three distinguished printmakers, who were active during the 1930s and 1940s, share their recollections of those decades, offering rare, firsthand accounts of the political, social,and cultural elements that influenced the artists and their work. David Tatham has chosen two watershed events, the Armory Show of 1913 and the important Brooklyn Museum exhibition of 1947, as the temporal bookends for this collection. Recognizing this era as wholly distinct from what had gone before and what was to come after it in graphic arts, the volume’s contributors illuminate the period’s spirited and vital debate about style, content, and the role of prints in society. Offering fresh assessments and newly understood historical contexts, the essays bring well-deserved attention to artists whose work has often been neglected, while it reexamines the works of well-known artists. This volume represents an important contribution to the study of printmaking by illustrating the way in which historical and contemporary graphic arts occupy a vital and central presence in the culture of our times.

Made in U.S.A.

Made in U.S.A.
Author: Sidra Stich
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1987-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520057562

Made in U.S.A. takes a new look at American art of the 1950s and 1960s and shows us how American it was. This is a provocative study of those artists who appropriated everyday images form the world of mass media and suburban living and forced their viewers into a sometimes witty, sometimes bittersweet, confrontation with the realities of living in late twentieth-century America.

Art/talk

Art/talk
Author: Alwynne Mackie
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 1989
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780231066488

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.

American Lithographers, 1900-1960

American Lithographers, 1900-1960
Author: Clinton Adams
Publisher: Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1983
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Chronicling the developments and significance of lithography in the United States, Adams offers not only a detailed survey of the medium between 1900 and 1960, but also a personal recollection of the many figures who shaped its course. He presents the story of the artists and their printers, their personal interrelationships, and their creative work in what he calls a "beautiful but obstinate medium." While the names of printers Albert Sterner, Bolton Brown, George Miller, and Joseph Pennell are pivotal in this story, most of the leading artists of the century have been attracted to lithography, among them George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Reginald Marsh, Jackson Pollock, and Charles Sheeler. ISBN 0-8263-0660-8 : $65.00.

Machine in the Studio

Machine in the Studio
Author: Caroline A. Jones
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 582
Release: 1996
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226406497

Drawing on extensive interviews with artists and their assistants as well as close readings of artworks, Jones explains that much of the major work of the 1960s was compelling precisely because it was "mainstream" - central to the visual and economic culture of its time.

The Shock of the New

The Shock of the New
Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2013-08-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0307815552

A beautifully illustrated hundred-year history of modern art, from cubism to pop and avant-guard. More than 250 color photos.

Stuart Davis

Stuart Davis
Author: Lowery Stokes Sims
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 335
Release: 1991
Genre: Painters
ISBN: 0870996274

A volume on Stuart Davis, an American artist of the 20th century. He forged a personal and varied iconography inspired by the upheaval of the city, the tranquility of the seaside, industry and the automobile, cafe society, sports, jazz music and his year-long stay in Paris.

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art

Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and America’s First Museum of Modern Art
Author: Pamela Carter-Birken
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1648892604

He was born to privilege and sought the world of art. She lived at the center of that world—a working artist encouraged by the famous artists in her extended family. Together, Duncan Phillips and Marjorie Acker Phillips founded The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the first museum of modern art in America. It opened in the grand Phillips family home in 1921, eight years before New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and only a few weeks after they wed. Duncan took the lead in developing the collection and showcasing it. Marjorie kept space and time to paint. Duncan considered Marjorie a partner in the museum even though she was not directly involved in all purchasing and presentation decisions. To him, her influence was omnipresent. Although Duncan’s writings on artists and art history were widely published, he chose not to provide much instruction for visitors to the museum. Instead, he combined signature methods of displaying art which live on at The Phillips Collection. Phillips had viewers in mind when he hung American art with European art—or art of the past with modern art, and he frequently rearranged works to stimulate fresh encounters. With unfettered access to archival material, author Pamela Carter-Birken argues that The Phillips Collection’s relevancy comes from Duncan Phillips’s commitment to providing optimal conditions for personal exploration of art. In-depth collecting of certain artists was one of Phillips’s methods of encouraging independent thinking in viewers. Paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Jacob Lawrence, and Mark Rothko provide testament to the power of America’s first museum of modern art.