American Paintings and Sculpture to 1945 in the Carnegie Museum of Art - Hardcover

Strazdes, Diana J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555950558 ISBN 13: 9781555950552

Publisher: Hudson Hills Pr, 1992

Synopsis

The Carnegie Institute, founded in 1896, was Andrew Carnegie's first great philanthropic endeavor and his grandest tribute to Pittsburgh, the city of his youth. It was originally planned that its Department of Fine Arts would over the years develop a representative collection of "contemporary American art by buying two works from each of the institute's annual international exhibitions beginning with the year of the founding nearly a century ago (the very first purchase was The Wreck by Winslow Homer). Carnegie apparently also saw no point in having more than a single work by any one artist.
Yet the collection has vastly exceeded this initial ambition in terms of both size and scope. Today it is called The Carnegie Museum of Art and owns some four hundred American paintings and sculptures dating from the late eighteenth century (the earliest works are Benjamin West's Venus Lamenting the Death of Adonis and Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Henry Nicols) to the end of World War II. Ranking among the most significant American art collections in the nation, it is especially strong in the work of Pennsylvania artists (including Cassatt, Eakins, Hicks, Kane, and Pippin), and of earlier twentieth-century modernists (for example, such masters as Bellows, Benton, Bruce, Davies, Dove, Feininger, Glackens, Graham, Hartley, Hassam, Henri, Hopper, Luks, Macdonald-Wright, Marsh, Nadelman, O'Keeffe, Prendergast, and Sloan).
This comprehensive volume is the culmination of the enthusiastic rediscovery in our own time of the invaluable resource that this core collection represents. It catalogues the collection in its entirety, with an essay on each of some 400 works, a biography of each of nearly 200 artists, and complete reference material. It also includes a history of the institution and its collection of American art.

About this title

From Library Journal:

The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is one of this country's premier art institutions. It is a pity that a museum collection so deserving of fresh attention is presented in such an intrinsically unexciting, Brittanica -like fashion. Each of the nearly 200 painters and sculptors who fall within the book's restrictive parameters is discussed for a few paragraphs, which are usually accompanied by tiny black-and-white illustrations of his or her work. Out of 400 works of art, only 37 are reproduced in color. Crowded at the front, these color plates precede an uninteresting account of the institution's history, while the tedious, alphabetically arranged artist bios make up the bulk of the volume. A quick perusal has the reader longing for a curatorial overview of the entire collection and a greater emphasis on illustration. More like an archival-searching aid than an art book meant to inspire, this work can boast as perhaps its sole selling point the single-source availability of the individual biographies, many of which cover artists seldom profiled elsewhere. Still, this need only be purchased by those libraries wishing to achieve comprehensive coverage of American art history.
- Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh boasts one of the finest collections of American paintings and sculptures. Illustrated with 470 black-and- white plates and 38 color ones, this catalogue of the museum's holdings in American art to 1945 includes reproductions of seminal works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows, Albert Ryder and Georgia O'Keeffe along with those of exciting lesser-known works like Dwight Tryon's turn-of-the-century tonalist paintings and Elihu Vedder's mystical fantasies, which were inspired by Buddhism and theosophy. Early modernists such as Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley are represented; the collect i on is strong on Pennsylvania artists, among them Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Edward Hicks and Horace Pippin. Sculpture ranges from Augustus Saint-Gaudens's statue of Abraham Lincoln to Elie Nadelman's cryptic Circus Performer . Organized alphabetically, the text combines profiles of each artist with in-depth commentaries on the plates. Strazdes, a former Carnegie curator, is now a research consultant with San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hudson Hills Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1555950558
• ISBN 13: 9781555950552
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 552