BOOKS
Paul Cadmus, Yesterday & Today
Produced in conjunction with the retrospective organized by Miami University Art Museum which opened September 12, 1981. The book includes a biography of the artist along with a discussion of his work, images of 119 paintings included in the exhibition (14 in full color), the artist's "Credo", and a chronology of Cadmus' career.
Robert C. Jackson Paintings
The paintings of Robert C. Jackson are introduced by Philip Eliasoph in the artist’s first monograph. Using paintings from artists as diverse as Andrew Wyeth and Jasper Johns, Eliasoph’s extensive knowledge of American art places Jackson’s artwork into a historical context. This beautifully illustrated book includes more than 130 images of the artist’s paintings with details, photographs of the artist at work, sketchbook reproductions, and an interview with the artist himself. Eliasoph colorfully proclaims, “The paintings we are about to examine are inescapably a bundle of contradictions, satirical complexities, and witty subterfuge. Essentially, Jackson is a uniquely self-realized painter. His feisty independence is fortified with healthy dosages of non-conforming eccentricity, with a small touch of screwball nuttiness.” The foreword by Professor Henry Adams reveals a similar sentiment, “Notably, this is also the sort of strange mix of sensibilities one finds in the best American novelists, such as Mark Twain.”
Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan
A major monograph on this prolific artist and his love for Manhattan, featuring a never-before-seen presentation of paintings, prints, and drawings. This book is for lovers of New York city and beyond, celebrating its golden age with a fresh, new appreciation for its urban design, parks, and the eternal romance of art Adolf Dehn (1895-1968), an American lithographer and watercolorist, left his hometown in Minnesota after formal training at the Minneapolis Art Institute to study at the Art Students League in New York. In the early 1920s, he traveled to the cosmopolitan cities of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, where he focused on lithography and printmaking, and soon found success as a magazine illustrator. As he toured Europe, Dehn quickly acclimated to the continental lifestyle and was adept at depicting its nuances and idiosyncrasies through his prolific lithographs and sketches. His critical and satirical renderings of the political movements, social conventions, and governmental policies in pre-World War II Europe gave the Midwestern artist ample material for his growing body of work. Returning to the United States in 1930, Dehn exhibited his prints in several solo shows at the Weyhe Gallery in New York, starting in 1935. As an artist during the era of the Great Depression, Dehn did commercial artwork and contributed to popular magazines such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. In fact, his clever drawings that reflected the culture and fashionable society during the Jazz Age, made Dehn a favourite of Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair's renowned editor. During this time, while Dehn captured the heyday of burlesque theaters, lively Harlem nightclubs, the impressive skyline, and busy harbour, he was continuously drawn to Manhattan's Central Park his predilection for the city's magnificent green space was a sustaining source of inspiration and subject matter. Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan candidly examines the life and work of this exceptional, adventurous, and intrepid artist as he moved skillfully and capably between lithography, ink-wash drawings, gouache, casein painting, and in the late 1930s, watercolours. Combining numerous vintage photographs from the archives of the New York Historical Society, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Public Library with newly discovered, Manhattan-inspired prints and drawings from the collections of, among others, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan traces how Dehn's art reflected the spirit, pulse, and uniquely American tonalities captured in composer George Gershwin's popular Rhapsody in Blue. This is a book for lovers of New York City and beyond, celebrating its golden age with a fresh, new appreciation for its urban design, parks, and the eternal romance of art.
Robert Vickrey:
The Magic of Realism
A comprehensive survey of the 60 year career of a master of tempera painting, an artist who has been included in nine Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibitions ―80 color plates show off the brilliant light-infused compositions of Vickrey's paintings ―Includes scholarly essays placing Vickrey in the context of the twentieth-century American art Robert Vickrey's unique vision and meticulous, painstaking technique have sustained him throughout a sixty-year career. He is widely considered to be a living master of using egg tempera, the same labor-intensive medium used by Renaissance painters, including Giotto and Cennini. But Vickrey's concerns are distinctly twentieth-century in the subjects and themes he has chosen, from childhood innocence to the dichotomy of urban versus country living. A quintessential Realist, Vickrey endeavoured to explore the human condition within a distinctively American environment, writes author Philip Eliasoph, whose essay argues that Vickrey's work builds a bridge from Surrealism and New Objectivity to Magic Realism. Described by the New York Times as the world's most proficient craftsman in tempera painting, [and] an immaculate technician, Vickrey's oeuvre is the fiercely independent work of one of its most unorthodox and even most daring inventors, according to Eliasoph.
Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism
Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism accompanies the exhibition of the same name, on view at the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia from February 27 through June 13, 2021. The exhibition and the publication seek to reexamine how we define magic realism and expand the canon of artists who worked within this category. It includes works by Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, Z. Vanessa Helder, Patsy Santo, Gertrude Abercrombie, Honoré Sharrer, Eldzier Cortor, Hughie Lee-Smith, Everett Spruce, Patrick Sullivan and many others. The catalogue includes essays by curator Jeffrey Richmond-Moll and scholar Philip Eliasoph and catalogue entries on every work in the show by scholars including Richmond-Moll, William U. Eiland (the museum s director), David A. Lewis (professor of art history at Stephen F. Austin State University), Maurita N. Poole (director and curator at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum) and Akela Reason (associate professor of history and director of museum studies at the University of Georgia). It illustrates every work in the exhibition full page and in full color and includes many supplementary images.
