‘The ingenious Captain Peale” sired a dynasty of painters and started America’s first great museum.
GRANT WOOD’S STERN-VISAGED IOWA FARMER LOOKS OLD ENOUGH TO BE HER FATHER. IS HE?
Andy Warhol and friends oversaw the death of a centuries-old tradition and the birth of the postmodern.
At the height of the American avant-garde movement, Fairfield Porter’s realistic paintings defied the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and risked rejection by the art world. But today, his true stature is becoming apparent: He may just be the best we have.
His contemporaries saw the painter Charles Burchfield as another regionalist. Today, it seems clear that the region was the human spirit.
AN OHIO UNDERTAKER’S LIFELONG obsession has left a mysterious outdoor gallery of American folk art.
He may have been the greatest caricaturist of all time; he has imitators to this day. But his true passion was for a very different discipline.
World War I made the city the financial capital of the world. Then, after World War II, a very few audacious painters and passionate critics made it the cultural capital, as well. Here is how they seized the torch from Europe.
A historian of American portraits tells how he determines whether a picture is authentic and why that authenticity matters.
A PAIR OF GERMAN-BORN CRAFTSMEN BEGAN BY MAKING EXUBERANT FURNITURE AND WENT ON TO SHOW A NEWLY RICH GENERATION HOW TO LIVE.
For 150 years, a crenelated Gothic Revival castle in Connecticut has housed an art collection that was astonishing for its time, and remains so.
An airman’s sketchbook
The man who may be America’s greatest artist liked to fend off the curious with the statement “My life is all in my works. ” He was right, but the works and the life take on new poignance with the release and exhibition of a once-private collection of his letters, photographs, and sketchbooks.
H. T. Webster’s cartoons offer a warm, canny, and utterly accurate view of an era of everyday middle-class life
At the dawn of this century, a new form of residential architecture rose from the American heartland, ruled by the total integration of space, site, and structure.
In an age when the best black artists were lucky to exhibit their work at state fairs, Henry Ossawa Tanner was accepted by the most selective jury in France.
A civilian adventurer gave us the best artist’s record of America in Vietnam.
When Pierre S. du Pont bought the deteriorated Longwood Gardens in 1906, he thought that owning property was a sign of mental derangement. Still, he worked hard to create a stupendous fantasy garden, a place, he said, “where I can entertain my friends.”
American art was hardly more than a cultural curiosity in the early years of this century. Now, it is among the world’s most influential, and much of the credit belongs to a self-made woman named Juliana Force.
He ignored the conventions of his day and became one of the greatest American sculptors of this century.
He said that his critics didn’t like his work because it was “too noisy,” but he didn’t care what any of them said. George Luks’ determination to paint only what interested him was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
You Asked for It
Charles Sheeler found his subject in the architecture of industry. To him, America’s factories were the cathedrals of the modern age.
In a career that made her one of the greatest American artist of the century, Georgia O’Keeffe claimed to have done it all by herself—without influence from family, friends, or fellow artists. The real story is less romantic though just as extraordinary.
Born in response to the shoddy, machine-made goods available in the marketplace, the Arts and Crafts movement in America began in isolated workshops and spread to the public at large, preaching the virtues of the simple, the useful, and the handmade
A picture taken the day before President Roosevelt’s death has been hidden away in an artist’s file until now
The distinguished artist talks intimately about the art, the emotions, and the unique talent of his illustrator father, Newell Convers Wyeth
A journey through a wide and spellbinding land, and a look at the civilization along its edges.