Ivan Albright

This is the first paperback edition of the centennial monograph about a unique American artist who depicted the vulnerability of human life and the inevitable decay in all things in such masterworks as Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida and the horrifying portrait created for Hollywood's Picture of Dorian Gray.

Arts & Photography

Robert Cozzolino

Courtney Graham Donnell

Susan S. Weininger

Individual Artists

Art Institute of Chicago / Hudson Hills Press

Among the most popular images in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts' rich collection are self-portraits and depictions of studio life. This publication accompanies a landmark exhibition investigating the complex nature of artistic identity. Narcissus in the Studio features texts by scholars and prominent contemporary artists whose work has tirelessly explored life in the studio. It includes an enormous selection of self-portraits and portraits of fellow artists by more than 60 major American artists from the nineteenth century to the present: Gertrude Abercrombie, Robert Arneson, William Beckman, Joan Brown, Thomas Eakins, Joe Fig, Viola Frey, Gregory Gillespie, Red Grooms, George Grosz, Barkley L. Hendricks, Sarah McEneaney, Archibald Motley, Jr., Vik Muniz, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Violet Oakley, John Frederick Peto, George Tooker and Benjamin West.

Narcissus in the Studio: Artist Portraits and Self-Portraits

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Comprehensive monograph celebrates the Centennial of America's most original artist.

History & Criticism

The Art Institute of Chicago

George Tooker

Merrell

Presents a catalog of an exhibition covering the works of the American painter and includes a collection of critical essays and a brief biography of the artist.

Marshall N. Price

M. Melissa Wolfe

Merrell Publishers

For nearly three decades, Hirschl &amp; Adler Galleries has been quietly gathering works by the enigmatic Magic Realist artist Thomas Fransioli (1906 1997) in anticipation of organizing a retrospective of his work the first in over five decades. Works by Fransioli, dating from the late 1940s through early 1970s, will be accompanied by pictures by other Magic Realists, including John Rogers Cox, Louis Guglielmi, Zama Vanessa Helder, Edmund Lewandowski, and Andrew Wyeth. Thomas Fransioli s cityscapes are crisp and tidy. Buildings stand in bold outline, their forms squarely defined by stark light and long shadows. Saturated color permeates every corner of his canvases, from vibrant oranges and greens to smoky terra cottas and granites. Even the trees that line Fransioli s streets, parks, and squares are sharp and angular, exactly like those in an architect s elevation rendering. But Fransioli s cities often lack one critical feature: people. His streets are largely deserted, save for parked cars and an occasional black cat scurrying across the pavement. People make rare appearances in Fransioli s compositions, and never does the entropy of a crowd overwhelm their prevailing sense of order and precision. People are implied in a Fransioli painting, but their physical presence would detract from the scene s bleak and surreal beauty. Magic Realism neatly characterizes Fransioli s artistic viewpoint. The term was first broadly applied to contemporary American art in the 1943 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists. As exhibition curator Dorothy Miller noted in her foreword to the catalogue, Magic Realism was a widespread but not yet generally recognized trend in contemporary American art.... It is limited, in the main, to pictures of sharp focus and precise representation, whether the subject has been observed in the outer world realism, or contrived by the imagination magic realism. In his introductory essay, Lincoln Kirstein took the concept a step further: Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed. This is Fransioli, in a nutshell. His cityscapes exist in time and space, but certainly not in the manner in which he portrays them. Fransioli and other Magic Realists of his time was also the heir to Precisionism, spawned from Cubism and Futurism after the Great War and popularized in the 1920s and early 1930s. While Fransioli may not have aspired to celebrate the Machine Age, heavy industry, and skyscrapers in the same manner as Charles Sheeler, his compositions tap into the same rigid gridwork of the urban landscape that was first codified by the Precisionists. Fransioli was born in Seattle,and received a degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1930. He worked with John Russell Pope on plans for the exhibition galleries at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., which was the beginning of his interest in painting. World War II interrupted a promising career in architecture. Fransioli served in the Pacific Theatre from 1943 - 1946, and was among the first American soldiers to survey Hiroshima after the atomic bomb s detonation in August 1945. He returned to civilian life and took up painting, basing himself in Boston, but working up and down the eastern seaboard. During the 1950s, Fransioli was represented by the progressive Margaret Brown Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston, and then later by Kennedy Galleries in New York. His work was the subject of a retrospective of about 50 pictures at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, in 1954. Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Currier Gallery, Manchester, New Hampshire; the Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri; Art Museum; and in a number of important private collections.

An Architect's Dream: The Magic Realist World of Thomas Fransioli

Stuart P. Feld

Arlene Katz Nichols

Hirschl & Adler Galleries

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

Books by Robert Cozzolino