Reading American Art

This anthology brings together twenty outstanding works of recent scholarship on the history of the visual arts in the United States from the colonial period to 1945. The selected essays--all written within the past two decades--reflect the interdisciplinary character of current art historiography in America and the variety of approaches that contribute to the dynamism in the field. The authors take up diverse subjects--from colonial portraits to nineteenth-century sculptures of women to photographic images of New York--and invite those with a general knowledge of the history of American art to think more deeply about art and culture. Employing many interpretive methodologies, including iconology, social history, structuralism, psychobiography, and feminist theory, the contributors to this volume combine close analysis of specific art objects or groups of objects with discussion of how these works of art operated within their cultural contexts. The authors consider the works of such artists as John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock as they assess how paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs have carried meaning within American society. And they investigate how the conceptualization, production, and presentation of works of art both inform and are informed by prevailing attitudes toward the role of the arts and the artist in American culture.

[This book is] for American art survey courses. [It] provides a thorough ... chronology of American art, including painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, photography, and folk art. [The author] presents art and artists within the context of their times, including insights into the intellectual, spiritual, and political environment. [He] charts the growth of a distinctly American art culture.-Back cover.

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositionsÑcollages of text and gestural painting across a variety of mediaÑquickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artistÕs practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as Òthe black Picasso,Ó probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artistÕs interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identityÑas a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writerÑvia the manipulation of texts in his own library.

Covering three centuries, this vibrant, fresh overview ranges from Puritan portraits to the American Impressionists to the videos and digital works of today's most intriguing conceptual artists. 500 color illustrations.

"A wide-ranging and inclusive history of American art and architecture from its seventeenth-century colonial beginnings to the latest installation and video work, this book: discusses the key artists, architects, art works, and buildings across the centuries; defines the characteristics of different periods and highlights the forms, techniques, and styles that are distinctively American; integrates discussions of works of visual art and buildings, revealing their shared social and aesthetic concerns; charts the ways in which American artists and architects both adopted and diverged from earlier European models to create their own language; and illustrates paintings, sculpture, photography, and new-media art plus dozens of building types, from colonial houses and churches to modernist and postmodernist museums, stations, and skyscrapers."--BOOK JACKET.

Discusses African American folk art, decorative art, photography, and fine arts.

Celebrating the reopening of the newly restored Smithsonian American Art Museum, a premier collection of American art features more than 250 reproductions of great works of American painting, sculpture, folk art, and photography, by such artists as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Nam June Paik, and other luminaries.

From the world's foremost collector, here is the new, fully illustrated standard guide to America's first golden age of tile making. American Art Tile presents more than 2,000 tiles, arranged geographically and chronologically, made by more than 100 American potteries and manufacturers from the Civil War to the 194Os. Full-color photographs illustrate these collectible and rare tiles from all regions of the United States, as well as historic landmark tile installations, from the New York subway to Catalina Island. Tile collectors will appreciate the meticulously researched history of each pottery, biographies of tile makers, and rare examples (seldom seen even in museums) from little-known potteries in Norman Karlson's personal collection.

"Sandler covers the art, artists and movements of the sixties--Painterly and Post Painterly Painting, Pop Art, New Perceptual Realism, Op Art and Kinetic Sculpture, Minimal Sculpture, Construction Sculpture, Eccentric and Process Art, Earthworks, Conceptual and Performance Art and so on. He discusses the aesthetics of art as well as the social and political context of art, the art market, the art world and the culture heroes of the sixties." -- Provided by publisher

Robert Hughes begins where American art itself began, with the Native Americans and the first Spanish invaders in the Southwest; he ends with the art of today. In between, in a scholarly text that crackles with wit, intelligence and insight, he tells the story of how American art developed. Hughes investigates the changing tastes of the American public; he explores the effects on art of America's landscape of unparalleled variety and richness; he examines the impact of the melting-pot of cultures that America has always been. Most of all he concentrates on the paintings and art objects themselves and on the men and women - from Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins to Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe, from Arthur Dove and George Bellows to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko -awho created them. This is an uncompromising and refreshingly opinionated exploration of America, told through the lens of its art.