Honoré Sharrer (1920–2009) was a major art world figure in 1940s America, celebrated for exquisitely detailed paintings conveying subtly subversive critiques of the political and artistic climate of her time. This book offers the first critical reassessment of the artist: a leftist, female painter committed to figuration in an era when anti-Communist sentiment and masculine Abstract Expressionism dominated American culture. Her brightly colored, humorous, and distinctly feminine paintings combine elements of social realism and surrealism to seductive and disquieting effect. This publication is a timely reevaluation of an artist who pushed the boundaries of figurative painting with playfulness and biting wit.

Subversion and Surrealism in the Art of Honoré Sharrer

Arts & Photography

Cozzolino, Robert

Burns, Sarah

Wolfe, M. Melissa

Zagorin, Adam Desmond

Lobel, Michæl

History & Criticism

The Columbus Museum of Art

David Lynch is internationally renowned as a filmmaker, but it is less known that he began his creative life as a visual artist and has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing an extensive body of painting, prints, photography, and drawing. Featuring work from all periods of Lynch’s career, this book documents Lynch’s first major museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together works held in American and European collections and from the artist’s studio. Much like his movies, many of Lynch’s artworks revolve around suggestions of violence, dark humor, and mystery, conveying an air of the uncanny. This is often conveyed through the addition of text, wildly distorted forms, and disturbances in the paint fields that surround or envelop his figures. While a few relate to his film projects, most are independent works of art that reveal a parallel trajectory. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, David Lynch: The Unified Field brings together ninety-five paintings, drawings, and prints from 1965 to the present, often unified by the recurring motif of the home as a site of violence, memories, and passion. Other works explore the odd, tender, and mincing aspects of relationships. Highlighting many works that have rarely been seen in public, including early work from his critical years in Philadelphia (1965–70), this catalog offers a substantial response to dealer Leo Castelli's comment when he enthusiastically viewed Lynch’s work in 1987, “I would like to know how he got to this point; he cannot be born out of the head of Zeus.” Published in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

David Lynch: The Unified Field

University of California Press

    This exhibition catalogue focuses on the art and friendships of the American artists Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977), Sylvia Fein (b. 1919), Marshall Glasier (1902–1988), Dudley Huppler (1917–1988), Karl Priebe (1914–1976), and John Wilde (b. 1919). The first intensive study of this close-knit group explores the artistic and personal relationships they shared. Cozzolino provides insight into a figurative branch of postwar American modernism that has been often neglected in favor of abstract expressionism.Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison

With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940-1965 (Chazen Museum of Art Catalogs)

Chazen Museum of Art

Chicago is known as a center of innovation in architecture, literature and music, but Art in Chicago is the first broad overview of its twentieth-century fine art. It focuses on three distinct but overlapping generations of Modernists between 1913 and 1985--not just postwar artists such as Leon Golub and June Leaf, or later stars like Ed Paschke and Jim Nutt and the 1960s Hairy Who--not any one clique, but the links between them. Through the decades, Chicago's art world has had a predilection for variety and the authenticity of personal vision, which it consistently privileges over the emulation of trends or established styles. Art in Chicago places this penchant within the context of the larger culture of Modernism, and examines both a cradle of artistic excellence and the issue of "regionalism" in Modern art and criticism. With illustrations of historically important paintings, some reproduced for the first time.

Art in Chicago: Resisting Regionalism, Transforming Modernism

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

For more than 60 years, George Tooker (1920–2011) created luminous and often enigmatic paintings, addressing issues from alienation and the dehumanizing aspects of contemporary society to personal meditations on the human condition. From the Cold War urban purgatories and bureaucratic paranoia of his early paintings to his later warm, glowing images of lovers embracing in fields or found in windows, Tooker’s spiritual vision ultimately stands as a quest for the endless possibilities of intimacy, compassion and tolerance. Widespread public recognition first came to Tooker through his best-known painting, “Subway” (1950), a definitive image of anxiety and dread. His more utopian themes of peace, brotherhood and reconciliation would find expression in such works as “Embrace of Peace II” (1988). Published in conjunction with DC Moore Gallery’s memorial exhibition, George Tooker: Reality Recurs as a Dream features paintings from every period of Tooker’s long career.

George Tooker: Reality Recurs as a Dream

Sessions, Ralph

Price, Marshall

Cadmus, Paul

Kauper, Kurt

DC Moore Gallery

Elizabeth Osborne (born 1936) is a painter who responds with awe and religiosity to the grandeur, the frightening power, and the rich fluid diversity of nature. Early she painted the same landscapes -- particularly in Maine and New Mexico -- that have attracted many generations of American artists such as Frederic Church and Thomas Moran in the nineteenth century as well as Robert Henri, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Alex Katz and others in the twentieth. Osborne's translations of nature through the methods of soaked-in, saturated pigment, ecstatic and hallucinatory chroma, and evocative brush gestures conjure the touch, taste, and scent of the landscape. This subjective, experiential exploration reveals her place in the lineage of American landscape painting as well as her compelling role in the history of postwar abstraction. Osborne made her mark with monumental, hallucinatory landscapes of the early and mid-1970s and with virtuoso, glowing realist watercolors of the late 1970s but her recent work has included boldly-painted ruminations of nature in its micro- and macrocosm. Osborne's oeuvre is full of surprises, stylistically experimental yet cohesive, hauntingly introspective and complex in its artistic and personal associations. The Color of Light brings together paintings from all periods in her career, from a provocative series of 1960s interiors, to those innovative land- and sea-scapes of the 1970s, ambitious large still-lifes of the late 1970s and early 1980s and increasingly abstract work of the past two decades. Richly illustrated, this monograph features eighty-two full-color plates, comparative material illuminating the artist's processes, and a comprehensive chronology with numerous documentary photographs. Long recognized by critics and her peers as one of the most innovative and daring Philadelphia-based artists of the last forty years, Osborne has tirelessly explored the psychologically-charged space between abstraction and realism. Osborne studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in the mid-1950s and has been a faculty member there since 1963. A prolific artist and frequent exhibitor in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and throughout the United States, Osborne has produced a multivalent and challenging body of work that has shifted tone and content gradually since the 1960s. Although she is well-known, there has never been a full survey of her work. This book, published on the occasion of her first painting retrospective reveals the range, depth, and importance of Osborne's art.

Elizabeth Osborne: The Color of Light

Bunker Hill Publishing Inc

What Nerve! reveals a hidden history of American figurative painting, sculpture and popular imagery. It documents and/or restages four installations, spaces or happenings, in Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and Providence, which were crucial to the development of figurative art in the United States. Several of the better-known artists in What Nerve! have been the subject of significant exhibitions or publications, but this is the first major volume to focus on the broader impact of figurative art to connect artists and collectives from different generations and regions of the country. These are: from Chicago, the Hairy Who (James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum); from California, Funk artists (Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson, Ken Price, Peter Saul, Peter Voulkos, William T. Wiley); from Detroit, Destroy All Monsters (Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw); and from Providence, Forcefield (Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Ara Peterson). Created in collaboration with artists from these groups, the historical moments at the core of What Nerve! are linked by work from six artists who profoundly influenced or were influenced by the groups: William Copley, Jack Kirby, Elizabeth Murray, Gary Panter, Christina Ramberg and H.C. Westermann. Featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and videos, as well as ephemera, wallpaper and other materials used in the reconstructed installations, the book and exhibition will broaden public exposure to the scope of this influential history. The exuberance, humor and politics of these artworks remain powerfully resonant. Much of the work in this book, including installation photos, exhibition ephemera and correspondence, is published for the first time. What Nerve! represents the first historical examination of the circumstances, relationships and works of an increasingly important lineage of American artists.

What Nerve!: Alternative Figures in American Art, 1960 to the Present

Brown, Roger

Dan Nadel

Molon, Dominic

RISD Museum of Art/D.A.P.

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on the Chicago surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77), a key figure in midcentury American surrealism. From the late 1930s until her death, Abercrombie made paintings populated by objects of personal significance―moons, towers, cats, pennants, Victorian furniture, shells, snails and doors―to create allegories for her own often precarious psychological states. Often presiding over these symbols was Abercrombie herself, who appears in numerous pictures as proud observer or witchy caricature.
Abercrombie exhibited in Chicago and New York in the 1940s and ‘50s, and her salon became a center of Midwestern culture, hosting jazz musicians (such as her close friend Dizzy Gillespie), writers and artists. This book includes new scholarship by Robert Cozzolino; a memoir of Abercrombie by Robert Storr; the artist's own writing; a definitive text by art historian Susan Weininger; and a memoir by the artist's daughter, Dinah Livingston.

Gertrude Abercrombie

Weininger, Susan

Livingston, Dinah

STORR, Robert

TERKEL, Studs

Karma, New York

Mike Kelley. Ghost and Spirit

Wood, Catherine

KELLEY, MIKE

HALBERSTAM, JACK

Welchman, John

Ndiritu, Grace

de Brugerolle, Marie

Lacy, Suzanne

Folkerts, Henri

Smith, Cauleen

López Paniagua, Laura

Leckey, Mark

Moran, Fiontán

Philipps, Glenn

Dilecta

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