"Oh, do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father, that I have three fine children, that I go to the theatre." These words were spoken by Matisse just before the Armory Show in 1913—a pivotal moment, after which his work was seen in America as an example of what should be admired or deplored in modern art. In this ambitious study, John O'Brian argues that Matisse's sober presentations of himself were calculated to fit with the social constraints and ideological demands of the times. Matisse's strategy included cooperating with museums, cultivating private collectors, playing off dealers one against another, and reassuring the media that, whatever his reputation as an avant-gardist, the conduct of his life was solidly bourgeois. Moving from the late 1920s, when Matisse's output was shedding its outlaw reputation, to the early 1950s, when his work was canonized, O'Brian shows how the way Matisse's work was viewed changed as attention shifted away from the seductiveness of his subject matter to the seductiveness of his paint. The art's resolute rejection of political concerns, its deployment of decorative design for visual satisfaction, and its representations of pleasure encouraged American audiences, who in the 1930s deemed the art disreputable, to celebrate its gratifications by the early years of the Cold War. This intriguing, wide-ranging investigation of Matisse's self-promotion, America's uneasy embrace of modernism, and America's consumer culture and politics provides a rich context to Clement Greenberg's words published in the Nation in 1947: "Matisse's cold hedonism and ruthless exclusion of everything but the concrete, immediate sensation will in the future, once we are away from the present Zeitgeist, be better understood as the most profound mood of the first half of the twentieth century."

Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse

Arts & Photography

O’Brian, John

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Photographer and writer Allan Sekula constructs narratives that define land and its political, social, and economic demarcations. He has described Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes as a conjectural comparison of imaginary and material geographies in the advanced capitalist world. In the book, which is based on a 1986 exhibition, he examines the iconography found in images of a landscape altered by mining, of bank architecture and its messages of cultural stability, and of the land as a source of economic wealth as it appears on Canadian money.The seventy-six photographs form a narrative sequence augmented by captions and by the text, which is written in the subjective voice of a single investigator and storyteller. The photographs link two sites: the Inco mine and smelter in Sudbury and the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. The deep roots of their existence -- the creation and distribution of wealth -- are far more intimately connected than appearances would suggest. Canadian bills bear images of industry that draw resources from the land, contributing to the myth of national independence and self-determination. Issues of national identity and independence acquire a heightened poignancy in light of Sekula's underlying subject, the relationship between Canada's resource-based economy and U.S. capital.In essays following Sekula's text, Gary Dufour discusses Canadian Notes as an examination of social and economic discourses that shape perceptions of the land, and John O'Brian discusses the dynamics of a resource-based economy, relations between Canada and the United States, and photography's ability to regulate appearances and therefore to control reality.Distributed for the Vancouver Art Gallery

Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes

Sekula, Allan

Vancouver Art Gallery

Dufour, Gary

Photography & Video

Mit Pr

LEAVING LAS VEGAS ( film tie-in )

Literature & Fiction

Humor & Satire

Picador

The great purpose of landscape art is to make us at home in our own country was the nationalist maxim motivating the Group of Seven's artistic project. The empty landscape paintings of the Group played a significant role in the nationalization of nature in Canada, particularly in the development of ideas about northernness, wilderness, and identity. left off. They demonstrate that since the 1960s a growing body of both art and critical writing has looked beyond wilderness to re-imagine landscape in a world of vastly altered political, technological, and environmental circumstances. By emphasizing social relationships, changing identity politics, and issues of colonial power and dispossession contemporary artists have produced landscape art that explores what was absent in the work of their predecessors. Beyond Wilderness expands the public understanding of Canadian landscape representation, tracing debates about the place of landscape in Canadian art and the national imagination through the twentieth century to the present. curators, historians, feminists, media theorists, and cultural critics and exactingly reproduced artworks by contemporary and historical artists are brought together in productive dialogue. Beyond Wilderness explains why landscape art in Canada had to be reinvented, and what forms the reinvention took.

Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (Arts Insights Series)

WHITE, PETER

McGill-Queen's University Press

What can photographs reveal about Canada's nuclear footprint? The Bomb in the Wilderness contends that photography is central to how we interpret and remember nuclear activities. The impact and global reach of Canada's nuclear programs have been felt ever since the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. But do photographs alert viewers to nuclear threat, numb them to its dangers, or actually do both? John O'Brian's wide-ranging and personal account of the nuclear era presents and discusses over a hundred photographs, ranging from military images to the atomic ephemera of consumer culture. His fascinating analysis ensures that we do not look away.

The Bomb in the Wilderness: Photography and the Nuclear Era in Canada (Brenda and David McLean Canadian Studies)

History

Americas

University of British Columbia Press

Degas to Matisse: The Maurice Wertheim Collection

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Bequeathed to the Fogg Art Museum in 1950, a galaxy of impressionist and post-impressionist artists - sculptures as well as drawings and paintings.

Degas to Matisse: The Maurice Wertleim Collection

Fogg Art Museum

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Harvard Univ Art Museum

The Flat side of the landscape: The Emma Lake Artists' Workshops : essays

Mendel Art Gallery

James Wilson Morrice (1869-1954) was an important Canadian Impressionist painter working in Canada, France and North Africa. American-born John Lyman (1886-1967) was a Canadian Modernist artist who spent most of his lengthy career in Montreal. Early in their artistic lives, the two met in Paris where they attended the Academie Julian. 
 Both artists crossed paths with master French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) in different ways and at different times over their careers, and he became a formidable influence. Their encounters in France and North Africa, occurring over the early decades of the 20th century, were decisive for their respective art, and the development of Canadian modernist art. A century later, Morrice, Lyman and Matisse's work is still influential. 
 In the fall of 2014, Morrice, Lyman and Matisse are the subjects of a large exhibition, Morrice and Lyman: In the Company of Matisse to be held at the Musee National des Beaux-arts du Quebec, and at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, two of Canada's most important art institutions and visitor destinations. 
 Morrice and Lyman: In the Company of Matisse is a beautiful companion to the exhibition that is expected to be attract thousands of visitors. Illustrated essays by noted art historians, interspersed with wide-ranging portfolios of work by the artists, compare and contrast the artists' individual and common artistic outlooks and output. The book's 150 full-color reproductions by all three painters and archival photographs show Morrice's and Lyman's personal quest for the light, color, balance and serenity permeating the art of revolutionary painters such as Matisse. The light shines through every painting.

Morrice and Lyman In the Company of Matisse

Gagnon, Francois

Grandbois, Michele

Firefly Books

Atomic postcards played an important role in creating and disseminating a public image of nuclear power. Presenting small-scale images of test explosions, power plants, fallout shelters, and long-range missiles, the cards were produced for mass audiences in China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, and they link the multilayered geographies of Atomic Age nationalism and tourism. From the unfailingly cheery slogans—“Greetings from Los Alamos”—to blithe, handwritten notes and no-irony-intended “Pray for Peace” postmarks, these postcards mailed from the edge of danger nonetheless maintain the upbeat language of their medium. With 150 reproductions of cards and handwritten messages dating from the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the end of the Cold War, Atomic Postcards offers a fascinating glimpse of a time when the end of the world seemed close at hand.

Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War

Borsos, Jeremy

Intellect Ltd

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Books by O’Brian, John