Myer Myers, a Jewish silversmith in colonial America, created outstanding works for leading members of the New York elite, and the objects made in his workshop have long been regarded as among the most important American statements of the Rococo style. These works are also valuable for the information they provide about craftsmanship, patronage, colonial Judaism, and changing cultural values in pre- and post-Revolutionary America. This stunning catalogue presents works from Myers’s workshop in conjunction with essays by eminent authorities on his life and times, all of which shed light on significant themes and events in American culture and history. Myers’s lifelong membership in the New York Jewish community, for example, reveals much about the role of religious minorities and social toleration in eighteenth-century America, and the artifacts he created for his family and religious community provide a vivid picture of colonial Jewish life. At the same time, Myers’s career as a silversmith offers insights into the complexities of preindustrial craftsmanship in America, showing that silversmiths were less autonomous than has previously been assumed. Catalogue entries provide a chronological survey of Myers’s career, highlighting his finest work, situating it within his routine shop production, and focusing on key objects to evoke the interplay of influences that shaped individual works of American art.

Myer Myers: Jewish Silversmith in Colonial New York

Arts & Photography

David L. Barquist

History & Criticism

Yale University Art Gallery

Mu Xin (b. 1927) is one of the leading expatriate artist-intellectuals of our time. Now living in New York City, he is known for his complex writings and paintings. Clearly a formidable figure in the cultural and intellectual history of Chinese modernism, Mu Xin is admired for his unique synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetic sensibilities. This beautifully illustrated catalogue focuses on a group of thirty-three landscape paintings that Mu Xin painted in 1978–79, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Cultural Revolution. Many of these works have never been exhibited or published in the West. In addition, the book features Mu Xin’s Prison Notes, some sixty-six calligraphic sheets that were written when the artist was in solitary confinement in China in 1972.

The Art of Mu Xin: The Landscape Paintings and Prison Notes

Munroe, Alexandra

Monroe, Alexandra

Toming Jun Liu

Emmet Gowin has been taking aerial photographs of the landscape in the United States, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, Asia, and the Middle East for over twenty years. In his most compelling photographs, one witnesses how man’s footprint has visually scarred and continually altered the earth’s surface. This extraordinary book, published in conjunction with the first major touring exhibition of Gowin’s photographs in over ten years, focuses on images created after 1986. That was the year Gowin began to extend his aerial photography explorations in America by recording images of military test sites, missile silos, ammunition storage and disposal facilities, coal mining, pivot irrigation, offroad motor traffic, and more. The book also surveys his more recent works, which focus on other regions of the world, including the battlefields of Kuwait, new golf courses in Japan, and the chemo-petrol industries of the Czech Republic. Gowin’s richly toned black-and-white images have been characterized as “immorally gorgeous,” since at a distance even his most disturbing images can appear to be beautiful. In this exquisitely produced volume, Jock Reynolds provides an overview of Gowin’s aerial photography and places it in the context of his earlier work and that of such photographers as Carleton Watkins, Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Frederick Sommer. Philip Brookman illuminates Gowin’s recent work in the Czech Republic, while Terry Tempest Williams discusses Gowin’s images from the American West, especially his Nevada Test Site series.

Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth

Philip Brookman

Terry Tempest Williams

Jock Reynolds

Russell, Lord

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The Tiger’s Eye, a widely read magazine of art and literature, was published in nine quarterly issues from 1947 to 1949 by writer Ruth Stephan and painter John Stephan. It took its name from the poem by William Blake. The Tiger’s Eye featuredEuropean and American Surrealists, members of the Latin American avant garde, and young American painters soon to become known as Abstract Expressionists. The artists, among them Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Adolph Gottlieb, Stanley William Hayter, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Anne Ryan, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Rufino Tamayo, and Mark Tobey, as well as art editor and co-publisher John Stephan himself, range across the cultural forefront of the post-war period. This handsome book presents numerous examples of the art, writings, and pages of the magazine, using it as a lens through which to view the art world during these richly creative years when its center was shifting from Paris to New York. Also included is an essay tracing the history of the magazine, along with an annotated index of its contributors. Lavishly produced as an homage to the format, striking design, and structural devices of The Tiger’s Eye, theresultant volume will not only contribute to our understanding of postwar art history but will itself illuminate every aspect of this complex publication.

The Tiger’s Eye: The Art of a Magazine

Franks, Pamela

Through his representation of modern subjects such as ballet dancers and race horses, his constant questioning of traditional artistic practices, and his vital engagement with Parisian society, Edgar Degas (1834–1917) helped to define the beginnings of modernism in visual culture at the end of the nineteenth century. This engaging book yields new scholarship on works by Degas in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery and provides in-depth discussion of works of art in every medium explored by this innovative artist. Extended entries by distinguished scholars including Richard Kendall and Edgar Munhall provide a complete review of the artist’s working methods. The book also introduces several important pieces by Degas that have rarely been available for view by the public, including a notable wax figure and several unique prints and works on paper.

Edgar Degas: Defining the Modernist Edge

RICHARD KENDALL

Jennifer Gross

In response to the tragic events of September 11, photographer Nathan Lyons―known for his honest and often questioning depictions of American culture―has created a poignant portfolio of images. Photographing in small towns and large cities, Lyons has captured the extreme and often confusing variety of responses―from deep reverence to blatant commercialization―manifested by ordinary Americans. One will marvel, for instance, at the myriad uses of the American flag. 
This provocative sequence of images with multiple messages is powerfully coherent and strangely disturbing. In the tradition of Robert Frank’s The Americans, these photographs will engage audiences to question the responses to this horrific event in the context of our complicated society, along with memorializing the tragic loss of so many innocent lives.

After 9/11: Photographs by Nathan Lyons

Photography & Video

A fascinating look at how designers in the 1930s mixed avant-garde principles with middle-class taste and marketing savvy to generate a distinctly American streamlined aesthetic During the years of the Great Depression in America, modernist designers developed products and lifestyle concepts intended for middle-class—not elite—consumers. In this remarkable book, Kristina Wilson coins the term “livable modernism” to describe this school of design. Livable modernism combined International Style functional efficiency and sophistication with a respect for consumers’ desires for physical and psychological comfort. Wilson offers a new view of many popular designs for living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms of the 1930s and investigates the remarkable marketing savvy of the furniture and decorative arts companies of the day. As the first study of the advertising and retailing of modern design during the Depression years, Livable Modernism alsofeatures an extensive array of vintage advertisements from such popular magazines as House Beautiful and Ladies’ Home Journal. Engagingly written and handsomely designed, Livable Modernism is an essential book for anyone interested in modern furniture and decorative arts. The author demonstrates that the work of these designers—including Russel Wright, Donald Deskey, and Gilbert Rohde—paved the way for Charles and Ray Eames and other post-World War II designers, and that the importance of their philosophies, innovations, and influence has until now been underappreciated.

Livable Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (Yale University Art Gallery S)

Wilson, Kristina

Architecture

The highly anticipated, definitive reference on Stuart Davis’s paintings, watercolors, drawings, and published illustrations Stuart Davis (1892–1964) made a mark on the art world early in his career, first with his Ashcan works and then with his highly personal version of Cubism, which firmly established American modernism as a force that could rival its European counterpart. Over the course of six decades, Davis produced artworks that drew inspiration from the European modernists but were deeply rooted in the popular culture of the United States. Jazz music and hipster talk, vaudeville stages, city streetscapes, New England fishing villages, gasoline stations, store fronts, and commercial packaging and advertising images were among the sources that infused his art with energy, bringing crisp edges, radiant color, and syncopated rhythms to a vast body of paintings, watercolors, and drawings.
Documenting the life’s work of this prolific and highly influential artist—who affected almost every development in American art from second-generation Ashcan realism around 1912 to color field and geometric painting in the 1960s—is a monumental achievement. In these three volumes, the editors have catalogued 1,749 artworks by the artist—including more than 600 works never previously illustrated—providing extensive documentation and information about each one. A detailed chronology of Davis’s life, as well as an enlightening discussion of the compositional relationship between certain works spanning his oeuvre, rounds out this study. Exquisitely designed and produced, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonné will be the definitive reference on the artist’s work for many years to come.

Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonne (Yale Art Gallery) (3 Vol. Set)

Individual Artists

Acclaimed for the emotional acuity of her portraits, Judith Joy Ross is an accomplished photographer whose work is found in the collections of America’s major museums. This exquisitely produced book focuses on one of Ross’s most personal series to date―sixty-seven portraits of students at public schools in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. In the early 1990s, Ross returned to the schools of her youth as a way of revisiting the experience of growing up. Shot with an old-fashioned 8 x 10-inch view camera, the photographs in Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools are unpretentious and astonishing in their psychological insight. Shown together for the first time in this volume, they reveal the universally wonderful and terrifying rite of passage of going to school.

Portraits of the Hazleton Public Schools (Yale University Art Gallery S)

Reynolds, Jock

Ross, Judith Joy

Many photographers have been intrigued with the baffling distortions―both subtle and disquieting―that can occur when the camera “captures” the real world. Not always intentional, some images dazzle with impossible juxtapositions or disorienting spatial orders, while others confound the viewer’s belief in the documentary promise of photography. 
Drawn from the highly respected collection of Allan Chasanoff, the photographs in this intriguing volume confront viewers with the challenge of doubt and confusion in so-called “straight” pictures. Featured are perceptually provocative images by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Clarence John Laughlin, Imogen Cunningham, and Lee Friedlander, among others. The book’s essays raise awareness of the interpretive nature of the lens and the interpolative nature of the medium.

First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography: Selections from the Allan Chasanoff Collection

Chuang, Joshua

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Books by Yale University Art Gallery