Kategoria BISAC: Art >> American - General

A highly regarded impressionist-style artist, George Ames Aldrich drew on his years of experience living and studying in Europe to create beautiful landscape paintings. His life and work are explored in this gorgeous book. Many of the artist's finest creations, some representing French subjects and others depicting the midwestern steel industry and American landscapes, are included in this book. It features color reproductions, along with other archival and contextual images. Essays by Michael Wright and Wendy Greenhouse explore in detail Aldrich's life, influences, sources of inspiration,...

Since the 1960s, the artist Bruce Nauman has developed a highly complex and pluralistic oeuvre ranging from discrete sculpture, performance, film, video, and text-based works to elaborate multipart installations incorporating sound, video recording and monitors, and architectural structures. Nauman's work is often interpreted in terms of movements and mediums, including performance, postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, thereby emphasizing its apparent eclecticism. But what is often overlooked is that underlying these seemingly disparate artistic tendencies are conceptual...

The Civil War redefined America and forever changed American art. Its grim reality, captured through the new medium of photography, was laid bare. American artists could not approach the conflict with the conventions of European history painting, which glamorized the hero on the battlefield. Instead, many artists found ways to weave the war into works of art that considered the human narrative--the daily experiences of soldiers, slaves, and families left behind. Artists and writers wrestled with the ambiguity and anxiety of the Civil War and used landscape imagery to give voice to their...

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) not only put American art on the map with his famous "drip paintings," he also served as an inspiration for the character of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire--the role that made Marlon Brando famous. Like Brando, Pollock became an icon of rebellion in 1950s America, and the brooding, defiant persona captured in photographs of the artist contributed to his celebrity almost as much as his notorious paintings did. In the years since his death in a drunken car crash, Pollock's hold on the public imagination has only increased....

"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its...

Charles Reiffel (1862-1942) is widely regarded today as one of the foremost figures of the California plein air school of landscape painting. This book, accompanying an exhibition of the same name at The San Diego Museum of Art and San Diego History Center, aims to reevaluate Reiffel as a leading practitioner of Post-Impressionism in the United States.

Charles Reiffel trained as a lithographer and traveled, worked, and studied in Europe before establishing himself as an independent artist in Silvermine, Connecticut. He finally settled in San Diego in 1925. There, he...