Title

American visions : the epic history of art in America

Description

The intense relationship between the American people and their surroundings has been the source of a rich artistic tradition. American Visions is a consistently revealing demonstration of the many ways in which artists have expressed this pervasive connection. In nine eloquent chapters, which span the whole range of events, movements, and personalities of more than three centuries, Robert Hughes shows us the myriad associations between the unique society that is America and the art it has produced: O My America, My New Founde Land explores the churches, religious art, and artifacts of the Spanish invaders of the Southwest and the Puritans of New England; the austere esthetic of the Amish, the Quakers, and the Shakers; and the Anglophile culture of Virginia. The Republic of Virtue sets forth the ideals of neo-classicism as interpreted in the paintings of Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and the Peale family, and in the public architecture of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and Charles Bulfinch. The Wilderness and the West discusses the work of landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and the luminists, who viewed the natural world as the fingerprint of God's creation, and of those who recorded America's westward expansion, George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington, and the accompanying shift in the perception of the Indian, from noble savage to outright demon. American Renaissance describes the opulent era that followed the Civil War, a cultural flowering expressed in the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens; the paintings of John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Childe Hassam; the Newport cottages of the super-rich; and the beaux-arts buildings of Stanford White and his partners. The Gritty Cities looks at the post-Civil War years from another perspective: cast-iron cityscapes, the architecture of Louis Henri Sullivan, and the new realism of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, the trompe-l'oeil painters, and the Ashcan School. Early modernism introduces the first American avant-garde: the painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O'Keeffe, and the premier architect of his time, Frank Lloyd Wright. Streamlines and Breadlines surveys the boom years, when skyscrapers and art deco were all the rage, and the bust years that followed, when painters such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Thomas Hart Benton, Diego Rivera, and Jacob Lawrence showed Americans the way we live now. The Empire of Signs examines the American hegemony after World War II, when the abstract expressionists, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, et al., ruled the artistic roost, until they were dethroned by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, the pop artists, and Andy Warhol, while individualists such as David Smith and Joseph Cornell marched to their own music. The Age of Anxiety considers recent events: the return of figurative art and the appearance of minimal and conceptual art; the speculative mania of the 1980s, which led to scandalous auction practices and inflated reputations; and the trends and issues of art in the 1990s. Writing with all the brilliance, authority, and pungent wit that have distinguished his art criticism for Time magazine and his greatly acclaimed study of modern art, The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes now addresses his largest subject: the history of art in America. Lavishly illustrated and packed with biographies, anecdotes, astute and stimulating critical commentary, and sharp social history, American Visions is published in association with a new eight-part PBS television series. Robert Hughes has called it "a love letter to America." This superb volume, which encompasses and enlarges upon the series, is an incomparably entertaining and insightful contemplation of its splendid subject.

Identifier

680659

679426272

Creator

Hughes, Robert

Format

1st ed.

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

1997

Program air date: July 20, 1997

Publisher

Alfred A. Knopf

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Notes on front endpapers: What's the politics of artists--any right wingers. Hopper p 422; Grant Wood p 440; Thomas Hart Benton 442. Underlinings/Notes: Underlinings: Not scholarly text, Australian, American Indians immigrants, Met in NY greatest, Spanish in North America before English, Puritans compared John Winthrop to Moses, Novus ordo seclorum, Salem 1692 19 women hanged, New Englanders suspicious of luxury, New England--painters useful for crests and portraits, Death omnipresent in Puritan culture. Lamb underlines details on artists' lives as well as information on collectors and the relation of art to American life, culture, mores and history. Notes: "24,000 v. 180,000 words," "general intelligent reader," "left wing view of the Met," "work ethic, religion," "arrival of Puritans," "1630 Winthrop, City on a hill," "radical newness," "newness of America," "New England," "1615 Native Indians," "oldest wooden church," "artists," "John Winthrop portraits," "painted child in," "death," "the tombstone," "[Edward Hopper] dead 30 years," "Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Jackson Pollock," "a conservative Willkie supporter," "definition of abstraction," "his wife," "Time Thomas Hart Benton self-portrait," "Wood-a homosexual," "Eldon, Iowa most famous house in America," "Wood's work sly, comp, gay sensibility," "Regionalism," "Benton-father in Congress, grandfather a senator," "Benton and homosexuality," "devious queer," "fairie," "abstract painter, Jackson Pollock, died 1956 v(44) Life mag.," "alcoholic," "Claes Oldenburg born in Stockholm 1929, raised in Chicago," "America very little religious art," "Americans new age of anxiety," "America 1968 to 1997," "artists vs. influence," "Maine woods," "Serra influenced Maya Lin," "the Earth Room," "Ed Kienholz," "Anti-American," "ask not! Identity politics and art," "patriotic correctness/political correctness," "future looks worse."

Subject

"Art, American--Themes, motives."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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