Robert Vickrey's unique vision and meticulous, painstaking technique have sustained him throughout a sixty-year career. He is widely considered to be a living master of using egg tempera, the same labor-intensive medium used by Renaissance painters, including Giotto and Cennini. But Vickrey's concerns are distinctly twentieth-century in the subjects and themes he has chosen, from childhood innocence to the dichotomy of urban versus country living. "A quintessential Realist, Vickrey endeavoured to explore the human condition within a distinctively American environment," writes author Philip Eliasoph, whose essay argues that Vickrey's work builds a bridge from Surrealism and New Objectivity to Magic Realism. Described by the New York Times as the "world's most proficient craftsman in tempera painting, [and] an immaculate technician," Vickrey's oeuvre is the "fiercely independent work of one of its most unorthodox and even most daring inventors," according to Eliasoph. AUTHOR: Philip Eliasoph is a professor of art history at Fairfield University. Virginia M.Mecklenburg is Senior Curator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. SELLING POINTS: A comprehensive survey of the 60 year career of a master of tempera painting, an artist who has been included in nine Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibitions 80 color plates show off the brilliant light-infused compositions of Vickrey's paintings Includes scholarly essays placing Vickrey in the context of the twentieth-century American art 128 colour & 43 b/w illustrations

This long-overdue monograph relates the fascinating story of the son of great surrealist, master Max Ernst and a Jewish mother killed in the Holocaust.

Numerous American women artists built successful professional careers in the mid-twentieth century while confronting challenging cultural transitions: shifts in stylistic avant-gardism, harsh political transformations, and changing gender expectations for both women and men. These social and political upheavals provoked complex intellectual and aesthetic tensions. Critical discourses about style and expressive value were also renegotiated, while still privileging masculinist concepts of aesthetic authenticity. In these contexts, women artists developed their careers by adopting innovative approaches to contemporary subjects, techniques, and media. However, while a few women working during these decades have gained significant recognition, many others are still consigned to historical obscurity. The essays in this volume take varied approaches to revising this historical silence. Two focus on evidence of gender biases in several exhibitions and contemporary critical writings; the rest discuss individual artists' complex relationships to mainstream developments, with attention to gender and political biases, cultural innovations, and the influence of racial/ethnic diversity. Several also explore new interpretative directions to open alternative possibilities for evaluating women's aesthetic and formal choices. Through its complex, nuanced approach to issues of gender and female agency, this volume offers valuable and exciting new scholarship in twentieth-century American art history and feminist studies.

In 1948 Andrew Wyeth produced what would become one of the most iconic paintings in American art: a desolate landscape featuring a woman lying in a field, that he called "Christina's World." The woman in the painting, Christina Olson, lived in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth and his wife kept a summer house. She suffered from polio, and was paralyzed from the waist down; Wyeth was moved to portray her when he saw her one day crawling through the field towards her house. "Christina's World" was to become one of the most well-loved and most scorned works of the twentieth century, igniting heated arguments about parochialism, sentimentality, kitsch and elitism that have continued to dog the art world and Wyeth's own reputation, even after the artist's death in 2009. An essay by MoMA curator Laura Hoptman revisits the genesis of the painting, discussing Wyeth's curious focus, over the course of his career, on a deliberately delimited range of subjects and exploring the mystery that continues to surround the enigmatic painting.

This work surveys Edwin Dickinson's life and career, both of which revolved around Cape Cod, Buffalo, and New York's Finger Lakes region. It covers the artist's influential career as a teacher, and analyzes Dickinson's self-portraits and major symbolic paintings.

First Published in 1997. North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary was created to fill a gap of there being a comprehensive reference work like this available, even though the bibliography in English on various aspects of the history of women artists has grown exponentially during the past ten years. As researchers, the editors have been frustrated many times by being unable to locate basic information about many of the artists included in this volume—especially those working outside the United States. This leads directly to another reason for producing this particular kind of reference book—to try and create a better understanding between and among the artists and art audiences in these countries.

Featuring 19 color plates and 65 b&w illustrations, this text critically examines the imagery, process, and pictorial structure of works by American painter Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978). Drawing upon 56 years of the artist's journals and several thousand pages of his letters, Ward makes connections b

The Davidsons assembled an extraordinary collection of American drawings dating from 1960 to the present, showcasing the continuing currency of realism and humanism. Featuring such artists as William Bailey, Jack Beal, William Beckman, Rackstraw Downes, Janet Fish, Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, Michael Mazur, Alice Neel, and Philip Pearlstein, the collection has been given to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is exhibiting 125 of its finest examples. This beautiful volume includes biographies of the artists and an important critical essay by Ruth E. Fine. 126 colour illustrations