With an emphasis on painting and sculpture made in the United States between 1910 and 1950, this gorgeously illustrated volume offers a rich introduction to American modernism through the world-class collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The lively text, which includes previously unpublished archival photos, examines the roles that the museum and the city of Philadelphia played in promoting modernism from its inception. Works by internationally acclaimed artists from the circle of photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, including Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler, are featured here alongside works by artists left outside the mainstream of art history. The book draws visual connections across works by these artists while creating compelling juxtapositions that tell a story of modern American art that is unique to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

American Modernism: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Arts & Photography

Smith, Jessica Todd

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

This volume chronicles the development of printmaking in America through the first half of the twentieth century. During this period of dramatic social and cultural change, printmaking served artists as a cost-effective means of communicating their observations and ideas. Woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs—many illustrated here—by artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, and Grant Wood addressed a variety of themes, including urbanization, small-town life, the Great Depression, the California landscape, and the two World Wars. The skyscraper, for instance, became a prime subject, admired for its roots in American architecture as well as its associations with national power. Prints frequently portrayed the city's inhabitants, often in crowded spaces where the distinctions between public and private life might become uncomfortably blurred. Depictions of the Depression of the 1930s suggest pessimism about the prospects for social justice in a capitalistic economy. Other prints demonstrate a heroic conception of industry and an idealized view of life in the nation's agrarian heartland.

Pressed in Time: American Prints 1905-1950

Murphy, Kevin M.

Huntington Library Press

This is the first major book to celebrate the Huntington's collection of five hundred Edward Weston photographs, all of them selected and printed for the institution by the artist in the 1940s. The Guggenheim photographs lie at the heart of this legacy, but Weston also included in his gift still-life studies from the early 1920s and 1930s, as well as later landscapes from the 1940s. Weston selected these photographs as representative of his best work, and they are reproduced here, complemented by investigations into the influences that shaped them.

Edward Weston: A Legacy

Danly, Susan

Watts, Jennifer

Spaulding, Jonathan

Weston, Edward

Individual Artists

Merrell Publishers

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Books by Smith, Jessica Todd