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The first comprehensive treatment in seventy years of the American Art-Union’s remarkable rise and fall For over a decade, the New York–based American Art-Union shaped art creation, display, and patronage nationwide. Boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state, its meteoric rise and its sudden and spectacular collapse still raise a crucial question: Why did such a successful and influential institution fail? The American Art-Union reveals a sprawling and fascinating account of the country’s first nationwide artistic phenomenon, creating a shared experience of visual culture, art news and criticism, and a direct experience with original works. For an annual fee of five do...
The first comprehensive treatment in seventy years of the American Art-Union's remarkable rise and fall For over a decade, the New York-based American Art-Union shaped art creation, display, and patronage nationwide. Boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state, its meteoric rise and its sudden and spectacular collapse still raise a crucial question: Why did such a successful and influential institution fail? The American Art-Union reveals a sprawling and fascinating account of the country's first nationwide artistic phenomenon, creating a shared experience of visual culture, art news and criticism, and a direct experience with original works. For an annual fee of five dollars,...
A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in the nineteenth century From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the ...
Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.
They also consider the artists' responses to foreign prototypes, travel and training, changing exhibition venues, and audience expectations. The persistence of certain themes--childhood, marriage, the family, and the community; the attainment and reinforcement of citizenship; attitudes toward race; the frontier as reality and myth; and the process and meaning of making art--underscores evolving styles and standards of storytelling. Divided into four chronological sections, the book begins with the years surrounding the American Revolution and the birth of the new republic, when painters such as Copley, Peale, and Samuel F. B. Morse incorporated stories within the expressive bounds of portraiture. During the Jacksonian and pre-Civil War decades from about 1830 to 1860, Mount, Bingham, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others painted genre scenes featuring lighthearted narratives that growing audiences for art could easily read and understand.
From the simple assertion that "words matter" in the study of visual art, this comprehensive but eminently readable volume gathers an extraordinary selection of words—painters and sculptors writing in their diaries, critics responding to a sensational exhibition, groups of artists issuing stylistic manifestos, and poets reflecting on particular works of art. Along with a broad array of canonical texts, Sarah Burns and John Davis have assembled an astonishing variety of unknown, little known, or undervalued documents to convey the story of American art through the many voices of its contemporary practitioners, consumers, and commentators. American Art to 1900 highlights such critically important themes as women artists, African American representation and expression, regional and itinerant artists, Native Americans and the frontier, popular culture and vernacular imagery, institutional history, and more. With its hundreds of explanatory headnotes providing essential context and guidance to readers, this book reveals the documentary riches of American art and its many intersecting histories in unprecedented breadth, depth, and detail.