This reference work covers American still-life painting from the beginning of the 19th century, when it became a well-known medium of expression, to the mid-20th century. Among the artists Gerdts analyzes are those who worked with still life extensively and those who painted them only occasionally, including the Peales, Severin Roesen, Samuel Marsden Brooks, William Michael Harnett, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The effects on this form of such movements as realism, impressionism, tonalism, orphism, and modernism are discussed in detail. The study concludes with 1939, when American art began to be dominated by abstraction.

Artist secrets revealed, step by step instructions Libby Fellerhoff, North Light Magazine. Mar. 2001.

A Southern Collection presents select masterworks from the permanent collection of the Morris Museum of Art on the occasion of the institution's inaugural exhibition. Drawn from a comprehensive survey collection of painting in the South from the late eighteenth century to the present day, the museum's opening exhibit explores an artistic terrain as rich and diverse as the South itself, arranged in categories that reflect critical chronological developments in the art world. A survey of painting activity in the South begins with the travels of itinerant portrait artists working prior to the Civil War. At the same time, landscape painting encompasses a sensitive response to the swamps, bayous and fertile fields of the South. Late in the nineteenth century strong and vivid genre painting competes with the nostalgic effects realized by Southern impressionists, whose shimmering, liquid images are invested with an elusive spirit of place. In this century, those strains of realism and naturalism that characterize the classic body of Southern writing appear in the representational art of painters who defied the modern abstract dictum. And finally, the exciting, compelling works of a current generation of both self-taught artists and sophisticated contemporary painters complete this fascinating, though sometimes neglected, chapter in American art history.

This work argues that Blakelock was one of the greatest American painters of the 19th-century, whose art ranges from the "romantic visionary" school to a more realistic physically experimental style. It pays special attention to the pre- and post- 1880s an

In Facing Facts, David Shi provides the most comprehensive history to date of the rise of realism in American culture. He vividly captures the character and sweep of this all-encompassing movement - ranging from Winslow Homer to the rise of the Ash Can school, from Whitman to Henry James to Theodore Dreiser. He begins with a look at the antebellum years, when idealistic themes were considered the only fit subject for art (Hawthorne wrote that "the grosser life is a dream, and the spiritual life is a reality"). Whitman's assault on these otherworldly standards coincided with sweeping changes in American society: the bloody Civil War, the aggressive advance of a modern scientific spirit, the emergence of photography and penny newspapers, the expansion of cities, capitalism, and the middle class - all worked to shake the foundations of genteel idealism and sentimental romanticism. The public developed an ever-expanding appetite for concrete facts and for art that accurately depicted them. As Shi proceeds through the nineteenth century, he traces the realist impulse in each major area of arts and letters, combining an astute analysis of the movement's essential themes with incisive portraits of its leading practitioners. Here we see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., shaken to stern realism by the horrors of the Civil War; the influence of Walt Whitman on painter Thomas Eakins and architect Louis Sullivan, a leader of the Chicago school; the local-color verisimilitude of Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett; and the impact of urban squalor on intrepid young writers such as Stephen Crane. In the process of surveying nineteenth-century cultural history, Shi provides fascinating insights into thespecific concerns of the realist movement - in particular, the nation's growing obsession with gender roles. Realism, he observes, was in part an effort to revive masculine virtues in the face of effeminate sentimentality and decorous gentility. By the end of the nineteenth century, realism had displaced idealism as the dominant approach in thought and the arts. During the next two decades, however, a new modernist sensibility challenged the fact-devouring emphasis of realism: "Is it not time", one critic asked, "that we renounce the heresy that it is the function of art to record a fact?" Shi examines why so many Americans answered yes to this question, under influences ranging from psychoanalysis to the First World War. Nuanced, detailed, and comprehensive, Facing Facts provides the definitive account of the realist phenomenon, revealing its essential causes, explaining why it played so great a role in American cultural history, and suggesting why it retains its perennial fascination.

"Presenting, interpreting, and celebrating the world-renowned and the lesser-known California artists who have uniquely defined and redefined the still life, this volume offers an exploration of the sensual pleasures, the aesthetic challenges, and the intellectual and perceptual associations of a century of art through the prism of a single genre."--BOOK JACKET.

In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation. Reacting against this genteel culture of imitation, a number of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century were inspired by the machine to create more authentic works of art that were themselves "real things." The resulting tension between a culture of imitation and a culture of authenticity, argues Orvell, has become a defining category in our culture. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author, looking back on the late twentieth century and assessing tensions between imitation and authenticity in the context of our digital age. Considering material culture, photography, and literature, the book touches on influential figures such as writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.