This beautifully written study looks at the haunting, melancholy horror films Val Lewton made between 1942 and 1946 and finds them to be powerful commentaries on the American home front during World War II. Alexander Nemerov focuses on the iconic, isolated figures who appear in four of Lewton's small-budget classics--The Curse of the Cat People, The Ghost Ship, I Walked with a Zombie, and Bedlam. These ghosts, outcasts, and other apparitions of sorrow crystallize the anxiety and grief experienced by Americans during the war, emotions decidedly at odds with the official...
This beautifully written study looks at the haunting, melancholy horror films Val Lewton made between 1942 and 1946 and finds them to be powerful comm...
What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863with Abraham Lincoln in attendanceto explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov s inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem Anecdote of the Jar, in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening s performance of Macbeth reached across...
What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a per...
Andrew Wyeth is one of the best loved and most widely recognized artists in American history, yet for much of his career he was reviled by the art world s critical elite. Rethinking Andrew Wyeth reevaluates Wyeth and his place in American art, trying to reconcile these two opposing images of the man and his work. In addition to surveying the American critical reception of Wyeth s art over the seven decades of his career, David Cateforis brings together a collection of essays featuring new critical and scholarly responses to the artist. Donald Kuspit s compelling...
Andrew Wyeth is one of the best loved and most widely recognized artists in American history, yet for much of his career he was reviled by the art wor...
World War I had a profound impact on American art and culture. Nearly every major artist responded to events, whether as official war artists, impassioned observers, or participants on the battlefields. It was the moment when American artists, designers, and illustrators began to consider the importance of their contributions to the wider world and to visually represent the United States' emergent role in modern global politics. World War I and American Art provides an unprecedented consideration of the impact of the conflict on American artists and the myriad ways they reacted to...
World War I had a profound impact on American art and culture. Nearly every major artist responded to events, whether as official war artists, impa...
In his noteworthy theoretical essay "Experience," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that humans by nature cannot fully grasp life as lived. If this is so, how capable are we of expressing our experiences in works of art? Despite this formidable challenge, for the past thirty years, scholarship in American art has assumed that works of art are coded and has analyzed them accordingly, often with constructive results. The fourth volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Experience considers the possibility of immediacy, or the idea that we can directly relate to the past by way of an...
In his noteworthy theoretical essay "Experience," Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that humans by nature cannot fully grasp life as lived. If this is so, ho...
