Honorable Mention, 1988, in the category of Excellence in Design and Production, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Of all the innovations of the industrial revolution, it was the railroad that took strongest hold on the collective American imagination. These essays on paintings, prints, and photographs explore the wealth of railroad imagery in American art - from Thomas Cole's pastoral landscapes to the industrial muscle of works by Bellows, Luks, Marsh, and Sloan, and evocations of the frontier in photographs by Andrew Joseph Russell and William Henry Jackson. The Railroad in American Art had its origins in a 1981 exhibit at the Wellesley College Museum on "The Railroad in the America Landscape: 1850-1950." The show attracted much attention because of the remarkable quality and diversity of the images collected, but it also raised numerous questions that are taken up in this more thorough exploration of the intriguing connections between art, technology, and American culture. Susan Danly lays the ground with a survey of the uses of railroad imagery in American art over the last 150 years. Seven shorter essays then focus on specific images or themes. Kenneth W Maddox looks at the confrontation between economic development and the vanishing wilderness of Native Americans in Asher B. Durand's Progress. Nicolai Cikovksy, Jr., clarifies the place that George Inness's popular but enigmatic Lackawanna Valley had in his career. Susan Danly uses Andrew Joseph Russell's photographic album The Great West Illustrated to show the impact that railroad patronage had on artists' aesthetic concerns. Leo Marx concludes the book with a historical exploration of the theme of the railroad-in-the landscape. In an iconological analysis, he shows how railroad imagery was used to represent a variety of deep social and cultural concerns on the part of American artists. James F. O'Gorman examines the sources for H. H. Richardson's "man-made mountain" designed for the Ames family (Boston backers of the Union Pacific Railroad) in Wyoming. Dominic Riciotti follows the railroad to the city - the urban train, subway, and elevated - as a force for ever-changing technology, while Susan Fillin-Yeh explores the dual nature of Charles Sheeler's fascinating and powerful painting Rolling Power, which functioned both as a work of fine art and as a piece of commercial advertising. Turning to the railroad imagery in Edward Hopper's work, Gail Levin shows how public image and personal psyche can become deeply intermingled in an artist's work. Susan Danly is Associate Curator of American Art at the Huntington Library. Leo Marx is William R. Kenan Professor of American Cultural History at MIT.

The Railroad in American Art: Representations of Technological Change

Arts & Photography

Danly, Susan

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

From her appearance as a provocative young artist in Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs to her depiction as a grande dame of the art world in silkscreens by Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe captivated the media with her image of a woman as bold as her art. This beautifully illustrated book tells the stories behind the portraits of one of the 20th century’s foremost American painters. 
O’Keeffe’s professional and personal relationships with the leading photographers of her time come to light, as does her ability to shape public perceptions of her career. Stieglitz first created photographs of his protégée posing in front of her abstract artworks as a manifestation of a sexually liberated woman. O’Keeffe later redefined her image, sometimes working with photographers at her homes in New Mexico, where she emerged as a rugged individualist among the animal bones and gnarled trees that she often painted.
This publication brings together for the first time photographs by Stieglitz, Newman, Loengard, Webb, and others―many of which probe fascinating tensions between abstractionism and realism in O’Keeffe’s art. In addition, a selection of O’Keeffe’s works chronicles the span of her long career.

Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity (Portland Museum of Art)

Individual Artists

Yale University Press

The early twentieth century brought renewed focus upon the image of the coast and witnessed the formation of art colonies in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Ogunquit and Monhegan, Maine. These creative communities became an inspiration for artists and art students, among them Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent, and George Bellows. Visually stunning, Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England explores the importance of place for artists in these colonies, and the development of impressionist Connecticut and modernist Maine within the visual traditions of the coast of New England.
Featuring approximately 80 works, Call of the Coast illustrates each major painting with extensive interpretative text and includes documentary photography to provide historical context for the artworks.

Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England

Denenberg, Thomas Andrew

Lansing, Amy Kurtz

Portland Art Museum

Between 1900 and 1940, a group of modernist artists gathered regularly on the coast of Maine in a region then known as Seguinland. For photographer Paul Strand, painter Marsden Hartley, sculptor Gaston Lachaise, and others, it was a way to escape market-driven, competitive, and divisive New York City, and celebrate a new kind of American Modernism. 
In this beautifully illustrated book, Libby Bischof and Susan Danly explore the state's important place in the history of modern art and show how summers in Seguinland inspired a new classicism that merged the antique with the modern. They also shed light on how the various artists' experiences in the refreshing atmosphere on the Maine coast cemented their friendships, shaped their individual styles, and fostered their understanding of what it meant to be a modern artist.

Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland, 1900-1940

Bischof, Libby

Portland Museum of Art

Irving B. Ellis (1902-1977) was an archetypal Pictorialist photographer. A physician by training and a photographer by avocation, he was a dedicated and much-awarded maker of pictures. Active as a photographer during the decades just before and after the Second World War, Ellis experienced the burgeoning growth of amateur photography clubs, the expansion of corporate photography businesses and the establishment of photographic collections in major art museums across the country. This volume, based on an extensive photographic and documentary archive, places Ellis' work within the context of the Pictorialist movement in an effort to gain a better understanding of the complex undercurrents that helped to define this era of American photographic history. Susan Danly contributes essays on the development of Ellis' photographic style and the use of his photographs in advertising, and Chris Thompson contributes an interview with photographer Judy Ellis Glickman, Ellis' daughter and the subject of much of his work.

For The Love of It: The Photography of Irving Bennett Ellis

Thompson, Chris

Glickman, Judy

Ellis Press

This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name as the book title. The art is a retrospective of Michael Mazur's work.

Branching: The Art of Michael Mazur

Lafo, Rachel Rosenfield

Mazur, Michael

Mead Art Museum (Amherst College)

DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Amherst College

Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity by Susan Danly. Yale UP,2008

Georgia O'Keeffe and the Camera: The Art of Identity

Telling Tales: Nineteenth-Century Narrative Painting from the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Pennsylvania Academy Of The Fine Arts

Amer Federation of Arts

Maine has always played a rich and varied role in the art of photography. For hundreds of years, photographers, like other artists, have made their way to Maine to capture the natural beauty and human culture of the state. So, too, have many photographers come from Maine, and many contributions by Mainers have been made to the medium. Maine in Photography is the first comprehensive overview of the history of photography in the state. Providing basic knowledge of the most important people and institutions to have promoted photography, this volume also studies the ways in which photography has informed the understanding of the social and cultural history of Maine. Beginning with the earliest daguerreotype portraits of the 1840s, this history traces the growth of the medium—emphasizing key contributions, such as the Stanley brothers’ invention of the dry plate process—through to the present. Key topics addressed throughout the book include the importance of photography in documenting labor and economic life, the close relationship between photography and the growth of tourism, and the role of Maine photographers in advancing the medium as a fine art form. Published in conjunction with the Maine Photo Project, this is a unique and timely addition to the body of work on the importance of Maine to American art.

Maine Photography: A History, 1840-2015

Shettleworth Jr., Earle G.

Down East Books

This is the first major book to celebrate the Huntington's collection of five hundred Edward Weston photographs, all of them selected and printed for the institution by the artist in the 1940s. The Guggenheim photographs lie at the heart of this legacy, but Weston also included in his gift still-life studies from the early 1920s and 1930s, as well as later landscapes from the 1940s. Weston selected these photographs as representative of his best work, and they are reproduced here, complemented by investigations into the influences that shaped them.

Edward Weston: A Legacy

Watts, Jennifer

Spaulding, Jonathan

Smith, Jessica Todd

Weston, Edward

Merrell Publishers

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