The Phoenix Art Museum is one of the premier cultural institutions of the Southwest. This illustrated volume, which presents much new scholarship by the Museum's curators, is the first to highlight its collections. The finest holdings of the Museum's six major departments are represented. Among treasures from the Department of American and Western American Art are canvases by Gilbert Stuart and Mary Cassatt, along with major works on Western themes by Thomas Moran, Maxfield Parrish, and John Mix Stanley. The collection of Chinese paintings and decorative arts is world famous, and the extensive holdings of the Asian Art Department also include noteworthy examples from Japan, Tibet, and India. The European Art Department has selected paintings by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Edouard Vuillard from among its more than 1,000 works; important decorative-arts objects, including an Italian Renaissance altarpiece and a 1603 German collector's cabinet, are also featured.

Phoenix Art Museum: Collection Highlights

Arts & Photography

Komanecky, Michael K.

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Harry N. Abrams

An extraordinary private collection of watercolors and drawings by Andrew Wyeth depicting the subjects memorialized in his legendary painting Christina's World, one of the best-known works of American art. This book presents rarely seen watercolors and drawings Andrew Wyeth made of his friend Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro, and the weathered Maine farmstead where they lived. It features moving portraits and serene interior and exterior views of the house and the surrounding land, now memorialized in Wyeth's 1948 tempera painting Christina's World, one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art and now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some forty-five works from the collection of the Marunuma Art Park in Japan, rarely shown before in the United States, are accompanied by works from the Farnsworth as well as by historical photographs of Wyeth, the Olsons, and the house. Otoyo Nakamura writes about the history of this collection of Wyeth works, and Michael Komanecky addresses the place of the Olson farm in Wyeth's career over three decades, and how Christina's World and the Olson House have inspired pilgrimages for fans of Wyeth's work. Despite its isolated location and seasonal schedule, Olson House draws thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The Olson House, acquired by the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1991, has been recommended for National Landmark status.

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, and the Olson House

Nakamura, Otoyo

History & Criticism

Skira/Rizzoli

In this expansive volume devoted to one of the premier art collections in the U.S., the rich and full picture of Maine's central role in American art from the early nineteenth century to the present is chronicled. Published on the occasion of Maine's bicentennial, the book considers more than 200 major works of American art from the Farnsworth Art Museum's impressive holdings and details how the state has figured prominently in the development of American art. The volume includes artists as diverse as Andrew Wyeth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francesco Clemente, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alex Katz, among others. Through their work, a fascinating depiction of the state--and indeed of the development of American art--emerges. The volume will feature two historic sites: the Farnsworth Homestead (the National Register of Historic Places home of founder Lucy Copeland Farnsworth) and the National Historic Landmark Olson House, inspiration for some 300 works by Andrew Wyeth, including Christina's World. The book also considers Lucy Copeland Farnsworth's distinctive vision to create a museum, library, and historic house, placing her among the few and still under-recognized women who created museums throughout the United States in the early twentieth century.

Maine and American Art: The Farnsworth Art Museum

Biano, Jane

Waldron, Angela

Rizzoli Electa

At First Light chronicles twenty-six extraordinary artists of the last two hundred years who have lived and worked in Maine. Published to coincide with the state's bicentennial in 2020, the volume considers the significant contributions artists have made to a deeper and more profound understanding of Maine's history, its land and its peoples. Maine's unique and breathtaking landscape--from its rugged coastline, quaint harbors, majestic mountains, and verdant forests--continues to have a powerful effect on the artists who are drawn to its shores. Written and expertly researched by some of the foremost scholars and curators in the field, each chapter focuses on a different artist, featuring the artists' artworks and anchored by breathtaking contemporary photography of their homes, studios, and surroundings. From picturesque bungalows to grander structures with beautiful vistas, the houses and studios featured are as diverse as the artists who have inhabited them. The artists featured include fan favorites to lesser known yet important figures from the eighteenth century to the present day, working in a range of media from painting to photography to sculpture, including: Jonathan Fisher, Winslow Homer, Frank Weston Benson, Charles Herbert Woodbury, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Marguerite and William Zorach, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Eliot Porter, Fairfield Porter, Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Ashley Bryan, Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, Bernard Langlais, Robert Indiana, David C. Driskell, Molly Neptune Parker, Richard Tuttle, and William Wegman.

At First Light: Two Centuries of Maine Artists, Their Homes and Studios

Goodyear III, Frank H.

Goodyear, Anne Collins

In 1988 The Currier Gallery of Art received what is perhaps the most significant gift in its sixty-four year history, the donation of a home designed in 1950 by Frank Lloyd Writer for Isadore and Lucille Zimmerman.  The Zimmermans had a particular passion for the pottery of Mary and Edwin Scheier, who at the time the Zimmermans moved into their home in 1952 were nationally renowned potters with works in many major American Art museums.  Over a period fo the next twenty years, the Zimmermans purchased some seventy-five pieces of Scheier pottery, forming the largest and most comprehensive private or public collection of the Scheirer' work.   The nationwide celebration of American craft in 1993 presented itself as the natural opportunity to pay tribute to these talented artists.  The goal for this exhibition, and more so the book that accompanies it, is easy to articulate: to explore the work of these two American potters in context, the context of American pottery produced at mid-century; the context of American, European, and primitive art as it influenced the appearance of the Scheiers', and particularly Ed's work; and finally, the broader context of the rich life experiences of these two remarkable people.

American Potters: Mary and Edwin Scheier

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Univ of Washington Pr

Alison Van Pelt: The Women : January 10-June6, 2004

Van Pelt, Alison

Dayton Art Inst

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Books by Komanecky, Michael K.