This catalogue was published in 1996 to accompany an innovative exhibition, Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940, organized by the Frick Art Museum and the Palmer Museum of Art. 
With works of art borrowed from numerous prominent institutions—including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago—the exhibition focused not on the objects themselves but rather on the motivations and methods that led collectors to bring medieval art to America. The catalogue for the 1996 exhibition, now newly available to the public, enables readers to revisit the pioneering display of objects, ranging from ivory statues to stained glass. With an illustrated catalogue of the 75 objects in the show and essays on well-known collectors and collections of medieval art, this volume is an indispensable reference for the study of both American collecting and medieval art.

Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940

Arts & Photography

Smith, Elizabeth Bradford

History & Criticism

the Palmer Museum of Art

A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) was one of the most prolific and important artists of nineteenth-century France. He played a leading role in shaping the new realism brought to the portrayal of everyday life, but he is now best known for the thousands of caricatures he published in magazines and newspapers such as Le Charivari, a daily with satirical articles and a wide circulation. Musical Notes by Honoré Daumier, which accompanied an exhibition of prints from the Collection of Egon and Belle Gartenberg, focuses on Daumier's vivid records of the musical life of Paris. Although not himself a musician, Daumier had a keen interest in the amateur practice of the art as well as in grand opera and the celebrated performers and composers of his day.
Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Gioacchino Rossini, and Niccolò Paganini are among the "greats" lampooned in the lithographs in Musical Notes by Honoré Daumier. Other prints offer satirical glimpses into the music making of everyday Parisians—from squawking clarinets to flirtatious piano teachers and straining tenors. In these lithographs, as in most of the prints Daumier produced during his long career, he discloses the foibles and follies of a society facing rapid changes in its cultural norms.

Musical Notes by Honoré Daumier: Prints from the Collection of Egon and Belle Gartenberg

Robinson, Joyce Henri

Frederick MacMonnies is best known today as one of the leading figurative sculptors of the American Renaissance. Residing in France for much of his professional career, MacMonnies, along with his first wife, the painter Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, often visited Giverny, home to the reclusive Claude Monet and numerous American Impressionists in the final decade of the nineteenth century. By 1894 the town was the MacMonnies's favorite summer retreat, and in 1898 they moved permanently into an old priory in Giverny, dubbed the "MacMonastery" by friends. 
It was at this time, just as the new century dawned, that MacMonnies launched his career as a painter. Although he continued to produce sculpture, the artist happily painted portraits and occasionally submitted paintings to the annual salons for nearly a decade. Mary MacMonnies also continued to pursue her artistic career from their remote enclave outside Paris. This catalogue, which accompanied two exhibitions, "An Interlude in Giverny: The French Chevalier by Frederick MacMonnies" and "An Interlude in Giverny: Dans la nursery by Mary MacMonnies Low," explores the artistic and personal milieus surrounding the creation of two masterworks by the MacMonnieses during this Giverny interlude.

An Interlude In Giverny

Cartwright, Derrick R.

Humor & Entertainment

In honor of the centennial of Beauford Delaney's birth, An Artistic Friendship examines the close artistic and personal friendship between two important American artists of the twentieth century, Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno. An unlikely pair, the two became friends in Paris in the early 1950s and remained close over the next twenty years until Delaney's deteriorating mental health removed him from his orbit of friends and family. Delaney (1901-79), a black American from Knoxville, Tennessee, spent most of his mature life as an expatriate artist in Paris. Lawrence Calcagno (1913-93), a white American from northern California, spent much of his peripatetic career in the United States and in Europe in search of a place to call home. 
But Delaney and Calcagno had many things in common. Both men committed themselves wholeheartedly to lyrical abstraction, though Delaney's work was ultimately influenced more by Claude Monet's fluid water-lily paintings than by the color-field painters so important in Calcagno's formation as an artist. Both men shared an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their abstract work. Calcagno's abstract "landscapes of the mind"—with their recognizable and consistent horizons—derived in part from the artist's sense of the universal, yet mysterious harmony of nature. For Delaney, abstraction gave form to the "higher power" of light in the world, a light that, according to his close friend James Baldwin, "held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal." Both men experienced the power of melancholia (in Delaney's case, the debilitating effects of mental illness), and both understood well the social isolation accompanying their homosexuality.

An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno

Published by the Palmer Museum of Art 
Henry Pearson is often linked to the Op Art movement of the 1960s because his best-known paintings feature a labyrinth of undulating parallel lines. Yet his work, although included in the landmark exhibition of 1965, "The Responsive Eye," has an intuitive rhythm and poetic elegance that fall well outside the calculated, often hard-edged structures favored by most Op artists. World War II interrupted Pearson’s first career in theater design but led to a prolonged contact with Japanese culture and a passion for painting. 
Back in New York City, Pearson studied at the Art Students League and, as early as 1959, began to develop drawings he had made during the war from secret Japanese survey maps. Gradually, he transformed a topography of mountains and valleys into nonobjective forms that reflect a personal vision and herald a new era of linear abstraction in his work. The Poetry of Line accompanied an exhibition of Pearson’s drawings from 1959 to the mid-1970s, the years when the artist moved toward geometric abstraction. This work is crucial from the standpoint of draftsmanship because it achieves a status above that of a sketch or study and makes an artistic statement at once complete and intimate.

The Poetry of Line: Drawings by Henry Pearson

McGrady, Patrick J.

An Endless Panorama of Beauty: Selections from the Jean and Alvin Snowiss Collection of American Art

This catalogue from the Palmer Museum of Art of The Pennsylvania State University accompanied an exhibition, also entitled An Endless Panorama of Beauty, that presented highlights from the Jean and Alvin Snowiss collection of American art. Their remarkable collection ranges from the Revolutionary period of American history through the mid-twentieth century and includes major works by such famed artists as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Charles Demuth, and Georgia O'Keeffe, among many others. An Endless Panorama of Beauty is the first publication devoted to the Snowiss holdings in American art. Fully illustrated, it discusses the scope and significance of their rich yet little-known collection. 
The contributors to the catalogue—Joyce Henri Robinson, Leo G. Mazow, and Julia Dolan—also set the art into the context of American social and cultural history. Mazow's introductory essay concerns the expanded horizons and deeply recessed spaces frequently found in nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape paintings, exploring the ways in which these represent a "panoramic sensibility" at the core of American cultural history.

Continuity, Innovation, and Connoisseurship brings together revised versions of papers first presented at an international symposium of the same name held at The Pennsylvania State University in 1995. Noted Old Master experts were invited to discuss and contextualize key sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings in the collection of the Palmer Museum of Art. The papers shed new light on these works, connecting them to important issues in the thematic and stylistic development of Old Master paintings. 
This richly illustrated volume also provides an informative introduction to the Palmer Museum's Renaissance and Baroque collections.

Continuity, Innovation, and Connoisseurship: Old Master Paintings at the Palmer Museum of Art

Although little known today, John R. Covert (1882–1960) played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism. He was a founder of the Society of Independent Artists, an active participant in the Société Anonyme, and produced innovative paintings and collage-constructions that reflect his experiences of the renowned art collection of his cousin, Walter Arensberg. Yet, in 1923, Covert broke off his association with key modernists like Marcel Duchamp and Charles Demuth, closed his New York studio, and went to work as a salesman for the Vesuvius Crucible Company of Pittsburgh. Generally, the artist’s story is thought to end there, but John Covert Rediscovered, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art, shows that Covert never abandoned his artistic endeavors even if he did spend the last decades of his life at the periphery of the art world. Drawing on Covert’s daybooks (recently conserved at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and art in the collection of the late Charles Covert Arensberg, John Covert Rediscovered not only establishes that Covert continued his artistic explorations long after his supposed retirement in 1923 but also introduces several hitherto lost works. No less surprising and significant is its revelation that Covert became a filmmaker and prolific photographer, working both within and against modernist ideas of the image. In his introduction, Leo G. Mazow presents a new view of Covert’s multifaceted activities, including his exercises in secret writing and cryptography. John Covert Rediscovered also contains an essay by Michael R. Taylor that breaks new ground by tracing Covert’s "conversion" to modernism back to his life in Munich and Paris during the turbulent years leading up to World War I. All the art in the exhibition is reproduced in this publication, the value of which is further augmented by Leo Mazow’s informative commentaries on each art work.The exhibition, "John Covert Rediscovered," organized by the Palmer Museum of Art, has also been shown at The Demuth Foundation and will be at the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery, Lebanon Valley College, August 28–October 12, 2003.

John Covert Rediscovered

Mazow, Leo G.

“My interest has been in developing further the plastic convictions that have been evolving in my abstract paintings; so that a portrait, while remaining a portrait, becomes in this sense an abstraction: the idea of a person in its most intense and essential aspect.” —Will Barnet, 1962 
Will Barnet (1911–), much like Chuck Close and Alex Katz, has approached painting through sustained exploration of the relationship between abstract, geometric forms and the processes of perception. In this book, which accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Palmer Museum of Art and the Alexandre Gallery, Patrick J. McGrady examines the paintings, drawings, and prints Barnet made in the 1960s, the decade when Barnet portrayed his family and renegotiated his commitment to pure abstraction. 
As McGrady traces work during this decisive period in Barnet’s career, he shows how drawing became increasingly important in the evolution of such major paintings as Mother and Child, The Blue Robe, and Eden. In addition, McGrady provides a richly documented discussion of critics’ responses to the profound changes in Barnet’s art and Barnet’s own commentary on his goals as an abstract artist. 
Will Barnet illustrates many of the forty-nine works in the 2003 exhibition and includes a checklist of the exhibition as well as reproductions of comparative works.

Will Barnet: Painting Without Illusion. The Genesis of Four Works from the 1960s

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

Books by the Palmer Museum of Art

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

Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting, 1800–1940

Musical Notes by Honoré Daumier: Prints from the Collection of Egon and Belle Gartenberg

An Interlude In Giverny

An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno

The Poetry of Line: Drawings by Henry Pearson

An Endless Panorama of Beauty: Selections from the Jean and Alvin Snowiss Collection of American Art

Continuity, Innovation, and Connoisseurship: Old Master Paintings at the Palmer Museum of Art

An Endless Panorama of Beauty: Selections from the Jean and Alvin Snowiss Collection of American Art

John Covert Rediscovered

Will Barnet: Painting Without Illusion. The Genesis of Four Works from the 1960s