Thursday 13 October 2011Making American Taste
Making American Taste
Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy is a landmark volume focusing on American art from 1825 to 1870. To be published by D Giles Limited in association with the New-York Historical Society in November 2011, this beautifully illustrated volume reassesses narrative art and what defined artistic “taste” during this period.
The book features 55 works by 38 artists drawn from the New-York Historical Society’s newly restored and superb collection of narrative art, much of which will be new to viewers. Narrative themes in 19th-century American art went beyond the rural and the domestic to include a broad range of historical, literary, and religious subject matter, all of them richly represented here.
American art at this time was dominated by powerful arguments about what constituted true art: should it be for the many or the educated few, and should specifically American art forms and styles should be favoured over more traditional, academic, European traditions. Making American Taste looks at these issues through the work of both well-known artists, like Benjamin West, Asher B. Durand, and Eastman Johnson, and less familiar names such as Daniel Huntington, Henry Peters Gray, and Louis Lang.
Accompanied by three thoughtful essays, these works can now be considered in the context of the complex cultural and social history of the 19th century. Extensive catalogue entries for each work with bibliographical notes ensure that this new volume is a significant contribution to our understanding of taste and collecting in America.
The Authors
Barbara Dayer Gallati is curator emerita of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. She is the author of William Merritt Chase (1995) and Great Expectations: John Singer Sargent Painting Children (2004) and a co-author of Winslow Homer: Illustrating America (2000) and, with Linda S. Ferber, Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (2007). Linda S. Ferber is vice president and senior art historian of the Museum at the New-York Historical Society. She is the author of Pastoral Interlude: William T. Richards in Chester County (2001) and Masters of Color and Light: Homer, Sargent, and the American Watercolor Movement (1998), with Barbara Dayer Gallati. Ella M. Foshay is an independent art historian. She is the author of Reflections of Nature: Flowers in American Art (1984), John James Audubon (1997), and, with Barbara Novak, Intimate Friends: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and William Cullen Bryant (2000). Kimberly Orcutt is curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society, and former chair of the Association of Historians of American Art. She is an author and volume editor of John Rogers: American Stories (2010) and author of Painterly Controversy: William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri (2007).
MAKING AMERICAN TASTE
Narrative Art for a New Democracy
324 pages, 254 x 292mm (11½ x 10 in.), landscape
85 colour and 80 b&w illustrations, hardback
ISBN: 978 1 904832 76 8
Price: US$65.00/UK£45.00
Publication date: November 2011
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London
Distributed in the US and Canada by ACC Distribution
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