Search results for ""author john wilmerding""

Frederic Church, the acclaimed Hudson River School artist, first traveled to Maine in 1850. Over the next decades Church ventured repeatedly from his New York State home, Olana, to explore the Maine coast and its rocky islands. He also frequently trekked inland to visit Mount Katahdin. Maine provided sensational sunsets, robust waves crashing on rocky shores, and an abundance of wilderness well suited to Church’s artistic vision. Maine Sublime brings together all of the artwork in the Olana collection resulting from and inspired by Church’s travels, from finished oil sketches that Church selected to mount, frame, and display at his home to pencil sketches and cartoons that he stored in portfolios. The subjects include such specific locations as Sunset Bar Harbor (1854) and works like Sunset (ca. 1852–65) and Twilight a Sketch (1858), which were inspired by dramatic Maine skies and are evocative of the region as a whole. Throughout his life, Church would continue to visit Maine, sketching, fishing, and hiking. In 1878 he bought land on Lake Millinocket with a view of Katahdin and built a simple cabin. After Church’s marriage in 1860, his wife Isabel often joined his excursions to Maine. In a witty cartoon included in this catalog, Frederic and Isabel Church on Mount Desert Island, Church captures his wife’s admiration of the scenery. Maine Sublime accompanies an exhibit of Church’s Maine artwork that will be displayed at the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine) from June to September, 2012; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from February to May 2013; and the Evelyn and Maurice Sharp Gallery at Olana (Hudson, New York) from July to October, 2013.

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Announcing the new Princeton University Art Museum Monograph Series:Princeton University Art Museum Monographs is a new series of in-depth explorations of the museum's rich collections. Beautifully designed and produced, these books by leading and emerging scholars offer new insights and perspectives on a single work or group of works from Princeton's distinguished permanent collection.Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, and Alex Katz have all come to define the Pop art movement that emerged in America in the 1960s. This handsomely illustrated book focuses on 40 understudied and rarely seen late paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by these influential artists in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.Pop Art offers fresh insights into the ways in which artists radically transformed the mediums of painting and sculpture. For example, Lichtenstein is repositioned as a classical “studio artist”; Wesselmann is shown to be playfully preoccupied with academic genres; and Indiana is interpreted less as a Pop artist than as a folk artist in a mass-cultural context. This important book also features an engaging introduction by Hal Foster that places these new interpretations in the context of the history of Pop art and its critical literature.Distributed for the Princeton University Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Princeton University Art Museum (March 24 – August 12, 2007)

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This magnificent volume, featuring more than 750 illustrations, is the first definitive account of the Tonalist movement. Based on original research, it tells the fascinating story of how the progressive Tonalist landscape first dethroned the Hudson River School in the late 1870s and went on to become the dominant school in American art until World War I. More provocatively, it also situates Tonalism at the beginnings of American modernism, revealing how the movement’s later exponents laid the groundwork for the artists of the Stieglitz Circle, and subsequently Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Wolf Kahn. A History of American Tonalism places the key figures of the movement — such as George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, and John Henry Twachtman — in their cultural context, which was influenced by such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and William James. It also examines the lives and careers of more than 60 other Tonalist painters, lesser known but highly talented. This new edition of A History of American Tonalism is augmented with more than 100 new illustrations, as well as a new overview of the stylistic principles of Tonalism. It will continue to be essential in understanding not only the Tonalist movement but American art as a whole.

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Perhaps best known for his iconic paintings and sculptures of LOVE, also featured on a U.S. postage stamp, and HOPE, created in support of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Robert Indiana (b. 1928) has been living and working in Maine since 1978. The Star of Hope, his year-round home and studio on the island of Vinalhaven, is a former late 19th-century Odd Fellows lodge listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Robert Indiana and the Star of Hope is both a retrospective of the artist’s work based on his own holdings, and an unprecedented study of his living and working space. His studio is a home, museum, archive, and gallery, all set within the historic interiors of the former Odd Fellows lodge. This book offers a unique examination of how Indiana’s work has unfolded since his move to Vinalhaven and includes works from his student days to storied sculptures such as EAT, prematurely removed from the 1964 New York World’s Fair and not exhibited since.Distributed for the Farnsworth Art MuseumExhibition Schedule:Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine (6/20/09 – 10/25/09)

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A figurative realist in the heyday of abstract expres- sionism, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) painted himself, his family, and friends in New York City, in Southampton, Long Island, and on an island off the Maine coast, all depicting a relaxed and comfortable world that seemed to mirror his own affluent, well- connected existence. With virtually all of the artist's previous publications now out of print, this much- anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great American master. Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928 and then studied at the Art Students League in New York with Thomas Hart Benton. Along with months in Maine, Porter lived in New York and from 1948 on, in Southampton where he purchased a large, late Federal-style house for his own expanding family. Porter painted several artist friends, including Elaine de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher. He was also close to the modern poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. With a carefully curated selection of the artist's best works, John Wilmerding, a specialist in American art, gives full consideration to Porter's expressive compositions and a color palette influenced by his coastal surroundings. Karen Wilkin discusses Porter's influences and pictorial creativity. Distinguished poet J. D. McClatchy writes a reflection on one of Porter's paintings.

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"The wide variety of selections from Frederic Edwin Church's collection of his own paintings shows the master in all phases of his career, in sketches and finished paintings, depicting the breadth of his subjects and the high technical skills that established him as an eminent and influential artist in his own time. As works he held on to or reacquired and kept in his house during his lifetime, they embody the heart of his artistic vision and convey a deeply personal slant. As pictures he hung and lived with at Olana, they tell the larger story of that extraordinary place and are as illuminating when seen in context as on their own."—from the Introduction Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) traveled the world, captured its beauty in countless paintings, and brought it home to live at Olana, his castle on the Hudson. The name was inspired by a reference Church found to a fortress or a treasury-storehouse in ancient Persia. This extraordinary selection of Church's paintings from his collection at Olana puts the most cherished of his treasures on full display in a volume that includes eighty color plates. Church's paintings, among the most acclaimed examples of art of the Hudson River School, are found in museums and private collections around the globe. However, Church kept some of his art close by during his lifetime. The rich collection that remains at Olana includes about seven hundred pieces, including notebooks, drawings, and oils, both sketches and completed canvases. They cover the full range of Church's career chronologically and thematically. The highlights from his personal collection are found in the touring exhibition that accompanies this book. The introduction by John Wilmerding and a substantial essay by Kevin J. Avery place the work into the context of Church's life and travels and examine Church's influences and the public reception of his art. Throughout Treasures from Olana, they discuss how profoundly Church's hilltop home and the surrounding landscape inspired and informed his work. His paintings, in turn, illuminate Olana more than a century after his death. The Olana Partnership, Hudson, N.Y., and New York State's Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, Albany, N.Y., organized Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by Frederic Edwin Church.

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