A fascinating and novel exploration of the transformative role played by the American West in the development of modernism in the United States Drawing extensively from various disciplines including ethnology, geography, geology, and environmental studies, this groundbreaking book addresses shifting concepts of time, history, and landscape in relation to the work of pioneering American artists during the first half of the 20th century. Paintings, watercolors, and photographs by renowned artists such as Frederic Remington, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, Dorothea Lange, and Jackson Pollock are considered alongside American Indian ledger drawings, tempuras, and Dineh sandpaintings. Taken together, these works document the quest to create a specifically American art in the decades prior to World War II. The Modern West begins with a captivating meditation on the relationship between human culture and the physical landscape by Barry Lopez, who traveled the West in the artists’ footsteps. Emily Ballew Neff then describes the evolving importance of the West for American artists working out a radically new aesthetic response to space and place, from artist-explorers on the turn-of-the-century frontier, to visionaries of a Californian arcadia, to desert luminaries who found in its stark topography a natural equivalent to abstraction. Beautifully illustrated and handsomely designed, this book is essential to anyone interested in the West and the history of modernism in American art.

The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

Arts & Photography

Neff, Emily Ballew

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

American artists and innovators Benjamin West (1738–1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) changed the way history was recorded in the 18th century and became America’s first transatlantic art superstars. Initially friends but eventually bitter rivals, the artists painted contemporary events as they happened, illustrating the transformation of imperial power through diplomacy between British Americans and the Iroquois, and through transatlantic trade, exploration, and the natural history of the West Indies. Focusing on two iconic works, West’s The Death of General Wolfe (1770) and Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778), American Adversaries charts the rise of contemporary history painting, and offers a compelling examination of American history and New World exploration. Featuring more than two hundred color reproductions of paintings, works on paper, and objects that informed the artists, this handsome volume also includes essays that shed new light on, among other subjects, West and Copley within the context of the Royal Academy and the use of Western and Native American objects in cultural diplomacy.

American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World

Weber, Kaylin H.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, houses one of the most distinguished collections of works by Frederic Remington (1861-1909) in the country. Featuring Fight for the Water Hole, one of the icons of American art, and many other highlights, the Hogg Brothers Collection is remarkably comprehensive, representing an unparalleled survey of Remington's career.
 This handsome and generously illustrated book showcases the most important works from this collection--including paintings, works on paper, and a bronze sculpture--establishing each within its appropriate historical, cultural, and political contexts. Drawing on unpublished archival information, the book discusses Remington's spectacular rise to fame as a popular illustrator who mythologized the experience of westward expansion and whose works created the enduring American cowboy archetype, while chronicling the rapidly disappearing Native American cultures. Later paintings in the collection, such as The Call for Help and Episode of the Buffalo Gun, which display rich colors and a bravura brushstroke, are considered anew in the context of previous technical achievement, including works by the French Impressionists.
 The book begins with an introductory essay about Will Hogg--a contemporary of Remington and one of Houston's most prominent businessmen and philanthropists. In 1943, after the deaths of Will and his brother Mike, their sister Ima donated the works by Remington--in accordance with their wishes--to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. This essay is followed by twenty-two catalogue entries of the most important works in the collection and a conservation essay that details fascinating new information on Remington's technique. The book concludes with an illustrated checklist of all forty-one works by Remington in the Hogg Brothers Collection.
 Frederic Remington will be of great appeal to those who have long loved and admired this unique American artist. And, with its new technical data and information, the book will also be a valuable addition to libraries of both students and scholars.

Frederic Remington

Phelan, Wynne H.

Individual Artists

Princeton University Press

American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection

In 1920, Ima Hogg began an extensive collection of art and antiques that would chronicle America's tastes, styles, and customs from colonial times to the Victorian era. The daughter of a Texas governor, Miss Hogg continued to acquire works for her magnificent Houston home, Bayou Bend, until her death in 1975 at the age of ninety-three. Today Bayou Bend is owned and operated by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and is regarded as one of the country's foremost collections of Americana. This handsome and richly illustrated book documents this extraordinary collection in its entirety for the first time.
The volume records over 1,100 superb examples of furniture, paintings, and decorative arts, including many key pieces that have been acquired since Miss Hogg's death. The extensive furniture collection features important high-style examples from America's principal urban centers. Paintings by such prominent artists as John Smibert, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Gilbert Stuart are included, many of which are reproduced here in color for the first time. Exceptional examples of metalwork, including notable pieces by Paul Revere and the celebrated firm of Tiffany &amp; Co., are joined by an extraordinary selection of prints, drawings, textiles, glass, and ceramics.
Reflecting more than ten years of research, documentation, and technical examination of the collection by prominent curators and conservators, this beautiful volume will be of great interest to the general public and collectors as well as to students and scholars.

Warren, David B.

Brown, Michael K.

Coleman, Elizabeth Ann

Loaded with illustrations and info. 144 pages, 9 By 11" 1994

American Painters in the Age of Impressionism

Shackelford, George T.M.

Museum of Fine Arts. Houston

Painting

Neff, Emily Ballew, John Singleton Copley in England

John Singleton Copley in England

Pressly, William L. (Essay by)

Museum of Fine Arts; Merrell Holberton

Book by Neff, Emily Ballew, Remington, Frederic

Frederic Remington: The Hogg Brothers Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Remington, Frederic

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Princeton Univ Pr

The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950

The Museum of Fine Arts.

John Singleton Copley is well known in America as the creator of the finest portraits of the Colonial era. Less well known is the fact that he left America in 1774, when the impending armed struggle between the Colonies and England threatened to destroy his livelihood, and settled in London to pit himself ambitiously against the Old Masters and the English giants of the day. Copley's English career was long and brilliant - and represents the most important period of his working life. During the forty-one years he spent in England, Copley created his great masterpieces of history painting and portraiture that stand as key monuments of British painting.From the earliest days of his career in London Copley realized that he would have to do everything possible to stand out in a crowded field of painters and create works that would bring him instant notice. This he did with his first great English picture, The Copley Family (1776-77) and, even more dramatically, with the landmark Watson and the Shark (1778). He quickly mastered the elements of the fashionable English style of painting, exchanging the tight and linear handling of the Colonial period for one more fluid and expressive. By the 1780s Copley was reckoned one of the most important painters working in England, a clear rival to his compatriot Benjamin West. With his masterpiece, The Death of Major Pierson (1784), Copley assumed a place of primacy in the field of history painting.While William L. Pressly gives a balanced, up-to-date exposition of Copley's English career, Emily Ballew Neff examines his masterpiece, The Death of Major Pierson, in particular detail, and is the author of the catalogue of his major English works. This is a long overdue study of this important painter.

Pressly, William L.

Merrell Pub Ltd

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