Arriving in Rome in 1825, Corot spent three years painting and drawing the landscape nearby. In their freshness and candour, his open-air studies seem to point forward, toward Impressionism. Galassi shows that they also point to the past. Half a century before Corot visited Italy, the community of foreign artists at Rome had spawned a school of outdoor painting. Under the banner of Neoclassicism, an international roster of artists - British, French, German, Scandinavian - elaborated the experiment into a rich tradition, absorbing the lessons of Poussin and Claude and appropriating the motifs of the viewmakers. Corot's work marks the culmination of the tradition, the last, flowering of the classical landscape ideal. Drawing on the efforts of scholars, dealers, and collectors, Galassi establishes the coherence and significance of early outdoor painting in Italy. Building on this foundation, he explores in depth Corot's magnificent landscapes.

Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition

Arts & Photography

GALASSI, Peter

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

In addition to offering the first critical study of Camille Corot`s magnificent Italian landscapes, Corot in Italy is also the first book to establish the coherence and significance of early outdoor painting in Italy. Generously illustrated with scores of beautiful paintings unfamiliar even to experts, Peter Galassi`s thorough examination of a brilliant episode in the work of a great painter is also a provocative contribution to the study of nineteenth-century painting.

Individual Artists

A glimpse inside the darkroom—and into the strategies of renowned photographers This handsome volume offers an innovative perspective on the artistic processes of some of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. For decades before the advent of digital technology, the proof sheet or contact sheet was vital to the practice of photography. Photographers using roll film first saw positive images in the small-scale grid of the contact, which was marked for printing and served as a lasting reference. Because contact sheets typically remained out of view, they offer a privileged window into the working process. Photographers also recognized aesthetic potential in the proof sheet itself and occasionally presented the contact grid as a finished work of art. The lively but largely unexplored territory of the contact sheet is richly represented in the previously unpublished collection assembled by Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz. As he charts this territory, Peter Galassi offers fresh insights into the work of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Harry Benson, Harry Callahan, Larry Fink, Robert Frank, Emmet Gowin, Philippe Halsman, Arnold Newman, Irving Penn, and others.

Proof: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet from the Collection of Mark Schwartz + Bettina Katz

Photography & Video

The Cleveland Museum of Art

"These mountains are breathtaking - utterly different than anything we have seen. The peaks and forest and 'tone' fulfill almost every ideal I have had of what 'my' mountains could be. . . . These are the great mountains we dream about."-Ansel Adams to his wife Virginia, 1928 The Sierra Club's twenty-seventh annual outing or "High Trip" was Ansel Adams's first as official photographer. It was during this expedition to the Canadian Rockies in 1928 that Ansel began to find his voice as a photographer. In Ansel Adams in the Canadian Rockies, we discover images of celebrated natural sites including Mount Robson, Amethyst Lake, Drawbridge Peak, and Bennington Glacier that foreshadow the majestic mountain vistas for which Adams would become renowned. A fine chronicle of one of Ansel Adams's earliest major photographic expeditions, and the only one he ever made outside of the United States, this book also serves as a record of Ansel's emerging style during these crucial years in his artistic development.

Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley: Celebrating the Park at 150

Little. Brown and Company

The Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Early Work

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Nice collection of sinister and not so sinister photos of domestic scenes. Peter Galassi is Chief Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.

The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Museum of Modern Art

American photography from the turn of the century through the mid-1960s offers one of the richest and most coherent traditions in the history of the medium. This book explores that tradition in depth through superb reproductions of 183 photographs from the outstanding collection of The Museum of Modern Art.Toward the end of the nineteenth century photographs became radically easier to make and to reproduce. The result was a vast new range of audiences and applications for photography. From untutored snap-shooter to specialized professional, the swelling ranks of photographers produced a sprawling diversity of new pictures, which recorded and helped to create modern America. At the same time, there arose an elite movement that withdrew from the undisciplined bustle of the modern world and claimed for photography a position among the fine arts.The first part of the introductory essay concisely outlines the evolution and interplay of photography's high-art and vernacular traditions. The second part traces the growth of the pioneering photography program at The Museum of Modern Art in which Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, and other leading American photographers played decisive roles.Luc Sante's essay, "A Nation of Pictures," places photography at the center of a lively reconsideration of modern American culture, which touches on music, the movies, the magazines, and a great deal more.A splendid gallery of photographs follows the essays. American photography from Jacob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz to Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus is set forth through a carefully ordered sequence, in which groups of pictures conceived as works of fine art alternate with groups of pictures that served a myriad of worldly functions. Major figures, such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, and Robert Frank, are each represented by six or more photographs. Dozens of other distinguished photographers are included as well, and many remarkable but unfamiliar pictures join the landmark works.

American Photography 1890-1965

Philip-Lorca diCorcia was born in 1953 and lives in New York. His inventively staged and exquisitely crafted color photographs occupy a special place in contemporary art. Operating in the gap between postmodern fiction and documentary fact, between slick convention and fresh perception, they deliver a powerful emotional charge.

Philip-Lorca Dicorcia (Contemporaries : A Photography Series)

Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective

The nearly two hundred superb plates in this book survey a half-century of work by a great American photographer. First applauded for The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a book on life in Harlem with text by Langston Hughes, Roy DeCarava is also known for his extraordinary photographs of jazz musicians - Billie Holiday, Milt Jackson, John Coltrane, and many others. A master of poetic contemplation and of sensual tonalities in black and white, DeCarava is, above all, a photographer of people. In his pictures of couples and children, of men at work and protesters on the march, he presents a compelling unity of private feeling and social conviction. Born in 1919, DeCarava was trained as a painter and printmaker. He turned to photography in the late 1940s and in 1952 won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first awarded to an African-American photographer. His early photographs of life in Harlem, at once tender and unsentimental, announced a powerful new talent. In 1956 he embarked on an extended series of jazz pictures, which in 1983 was exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem as The Sound I Saw. In the early 1960s, photographs of workers in New York's garment district and of civil-rights protests brought a new boldness to his work, as his style became leaner without losing its lyric grace. A life-long New Yorker, DeCarava has almost always worked close to home, making from his own world the expansive world of his art. Since 1975 he has taught photography at Hunter College, where he is Distinguished Professor of Art of the City University of New York. Published to accompany a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, that later will travel to eight leading American museums, Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective makes the full range of the artist's work available for the first time. Its exceptional reproductions convey the subtleties of DeCarava's famously rich prints, and its two essays offer a wealth of new information and interpretation. Peter Galassi, Chief Curator at the Museum, traces the evolution of DeCarava's work and career, including such neglected episodes as the pioneering photography gallery he established in the 1950s. Sherry Turner DeCarava, an art historian, curator, and the author of several essays on her husband's work - including that in the Friends of Photography monograph Roy DeCarava: Photographs (1981) offers new insight into its development by reaching back to his earliest artistic efforts, before he turned to photography. She currently serves as Executive Director of The DeCarava Archive.

Roy Decarava: A Retrospective

Decarava, Sherry Turner

A Museum of Modern Art Book Walker Evans's radical photography of the 1930s demonstrated that unembellished photographic fact could serve as a highly poetic language. These works expanded the potential of the art of photography and at the same time defined a lasting iconography that recognized advertising, movies, and car culture as central images of modern American identity. Published in conjunction with the second of three cycles of millennial exhibitions (MoMA2000) at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this book focuses on Evans as a central figure in the arts of the 1920s and 1930s. 
This superbly illustrated volume includes works in photography and other mediums that influenced Evans or were influenced by him, or which resonate in a significant way with aspects of his imagery, sensibility, and style. Among the other artists whose work is featured are: Eugne Atget, Mathew Brady, Stuart Davis, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Edward Hopper, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, August Sander, Andy Warhol, and Edward Weston. 
Approximately 440 illustrations, 60 in full color, 380 in duotone, 9 3/4 x 11 1/4" 
PETER GALASSI is chief curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His previous books, also available from Abrams, include American Photography 1890-1965 and, with Magdalena Dabrowski and Leah Dickerman, Aleksandr Rodchenko. 
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mar. 15-Sept. 6, 2000

Walker Evans & Company

Museum of Modern Art / Abrams

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GALASSI, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by GALASSI, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GALASSI, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition

Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition

Proof: Photography in the Era of the Contact Sheet from the Collection of Mark Schwartz + Bettina Katz

Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley: Celebrating the Park at 150

The Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Early Work

The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort

American Photography 1890-1965

Philip-Lorca Dicorcia (Contemporaries : A Photography Series)

Roy Decarava: A Retrospective

Walker Evans & Company