Great Painters And Illustrators Of The Old West

In this gorgeous graphic memoir, Joe Ciardiello gracefully weaves together his Italian family history and the mythology of the American West while paying homage to the classic movie and TV Westerns. Featuring John Ford, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sophia Loren, and many more, this book is a paean to Hollywood and a love letter to the Western.

This encyclopedia is a biographical dictionary of some 1,000 women artists of the American West. The product of a twenty-year, coast-to-coast research project by authors Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, it offers accurate, concise introductions to women painters, graphic artists, and sculptors, all of whom achieved recognition as depictors of Western subjects between the 1840s and 1980. Their styles range from representationalism to early modernism, while their works depict everything from bold landscapes and scenes of intensive action to studies of Native Americans, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, wildlife, and flora. Each entry in the encyclopedia features the salient facts of the artist's life and career, with attention to her work with Western subject matter. Many of the entries also contain a selected list of the artist's exhibitions, current locations of her work in public collections, pertinent references, and a black-and-white example of her work. An overview of the history of women in western art complements the biographical entries.

The first biography in over sixty years of a great American artist whose paintings are more famous than the man who made them. George Catlin has been called the “first artist of the West,” as none before him lived among and painted the Native American tribes of the Northern Plains. After a false start as a painter of miniatures, Catlin found his calling: to fix the image of a “vanishing race” before their “extermination”—his word—by a government greedy for their lands. In the first six years of the 1830s, he created over six hundred portraits—unforgettable likenesses of individual chiefs, warriors, braves, squaws, and children belonging to more than thirty tribes living along the upper Missouri River. Political forces thwarted Catlin’s ambition to sell what he called his “Indian Gallery” as a national collection, and in 1840 the artist began three decades of self-imposed exile abroad. For a time, his exhibitions and writings made him the most celebrated American expatriate in London and Paris. He was toasted by Queen Victoria and breakfasted with King Louis-Philippe, who created a special gallery in the Louvre to show his pictures. But when he started to tour “live” troupes of Ojibbewa and Iowa, Catlin and his fortunes declined: He changed from artist to showman, and from advocate to exploiter of his native performers. Tragedy and loss engulfed both. This brilliant and humane portrait brings to life George Catlin and his Indian subjects for our own time. An American original, he still personifies the artist as a figure of controversy, torn by conflicting demands of art and success.

The most comprehensive book of its kind, this gorgeous edition presents more than 500 full-color works by famous and lesser-known artists from the heyday of book and magazine illustration. Featured artists include Walter Crane, Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham, N. C. Wyeth, and many others — 101 in all. Several examples of each artist's finest illustrations are accompanied by biographical comments and career notes. Additional artists include Victorian-era illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, noted for his compelling combinations of the erotic and grotesque; American painter Harvey Dunn, one of Howard Pyle's most accomplished students; James Montgomery Flagg, famed for his U.S. Army recruitment posters; Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the iconic Gibson Girl; Charles R. Knight, a pioneer in the depiction of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures; Edward Penfield, the king of poster art; Frederic Remington, whose works document the Old West; J. Allen St. John, the principal illustrator of Edgar Rice Burroughs's adventure tales; and dozens of others.

Profiles more than 150 women artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the American West, offers fifteen interpretive essays, and includes nearly three hundred reproductions of their works.

"Donatello, Titian, Hals, Turner, Renoir and Munch, and a surprisingly large number of other major artists, lived to be over seventy-five. Some of their finest and most distinctive works, including Michelangelo's last Pieta, Goya's Black Paintings and Monet's Water Lilies, were done in old age. Whether experimenting with new approaches, adopting new techniques, responding to changed circumstances and debilities, or reacting to the approach of death, the intensity of the late work of many of the greatest artists is striking. Childhood genius has often been studied but, astonishingly, this is the first book to draw attention to a considerably more important artistic phenomenon. Old Masters establishes beyond doubt the frequency with which elderly painters and sculptors reached new heights in their seventies and eighties and suggest why and how they did so."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved