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American Workman
The Life and Art of John Kane
Maxwell King
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

American Workman presents a comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America’s most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. With a full account of Kane’s life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and around Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, the authors explore how these occupations shaped his development as an artist and his breakthrough success in the modern art world. A rough-and-tumble blue-collar man prone to brawling and drinking, Kane also sought out beauty in the industrial world he inhabited. This Kane paradox—brawny and tough, sensitive and creative—was at the heart of much of the public’s interest in Kane as a person. The allure of the Kane saga was heightened all the more by the fact that he did not achieve renown until he was at the age at which most people are retiring from their professions. Kane’s dedication to painting resulted in a fascinating body of work that has ended up in some of America’s most important museums and private collections. His dramatic life story demonstrates the courage, strength, and creativity of his generation of workmen. They may be long gone, but thanks to Kane they cannot be forgotten.

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Art and the Crisis of Marriage
Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe
Vivien Green Fryd
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Between the two world wars, middle-class America experienced a "marriage crisis" that filled the pages of the popular press. Divorce rates were rising, birthrates falling, and women were entering the increasingly industrialized and urbanized workforce in larger numbers than ever before, while Victorian morals and manners began to break down in the wake of the first sexual revolution.

Vivien Green Fryd argues that this crisis played a crucial role in the lives and works of two of America's most familiar and beloved artists, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Combining biographical study of their marriages with formal and iconographical analysis of their works, Fryd shows how both artists expressed the pleasures and perils of their relationships in their paintings. Hopper's many representations of Victorian homes in sunny, tranquil landscapes, for instance, take on new meanings when viewed in the context of the artist's own tumultuous marriage with Jo and the widespread middle-class fears that the new urban, multidwelling homes would contribute to the breakdown of the family. Fryd also persuasively interprets the many paintings of skulls and crosses that O'Keeffe produced in New Mexico as embodying themes of death and rebirth in response to her husband Alfred Stieglitz's long-term affair with Dorothy Norman.

Art and the Crisis of Marriage provides both a penetrating reappraisal of the interconnections between Georgia O'Keeffe's and Edward Hopper's lives and works, as well as a vivid portrait of how new understandings of family, gender, and sexuality transformed American society between the wars in ways that continue to shape it today.
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An Artist in America 4th Revised Edition
Thomas Hart Benton
University of Missouri Press, 1983

Controversial, flamboyant, contentious, brilliant--Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was certainly all of those. Few American artists have stirred so much love and hatred as he did in a career that lasted almost seventy years. Although his painting aroused much controversy, perhaps equally as much was created by his words, for his piercing wit, profane sarcasms, and insightful condemnations were fired off without restraint. In this fiery and provocative autobiography, Benton presents an intriguing records of American art and society during his lifetime.

The first installment of this work was published in 1937, but Benton continued his life story in chapters added to editions published in 1951 and 1968. This new edition includes seventy-six drawings that add much to his narrative, plus a foreword discussing Benton's place in American art and an afterword covering his career after 1968, both written by art historian Matthew Baigell.

Although Benton is most famous as a regionalist painter and muralist, his complex and fascinating career brought him into contact with many of the most important artists and thinkers of the century, including Jackson Pollock, Grant Wood, Julian Huxley, Felix Frankfurter, Eugene Debbs, John Reed, and Harry Truman. While living in New York and on Martha's Vineyard in the 1920s and 1930s, Benton often associated with leading intellectuals and radicals. However, when his evolving principles of art led him away from an interest in Marxism, he was bitterly attacked by many of his former friends, and his account of that time reveals strikingly the fierce critical battles he faced in trying to establish his own artistic vision.

Critics on the Left were not his only opponents, however, and equally revealing are his responses to the moral condemnations heaped on his murals done for the states of Indiana and Missouri and on his realistic nudes of the late 1930s.

Throughout his account, from descriptions of his boyhood in southwest Missouri, his travels, and his career to discussions of specific works of art and other artists, Benton portrays people and events as vividly in words as he does in his paintings.

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Bruegel, or the Workshop of Dreams
A Novel
Claude-Henri Rocquet
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Claude-Henri Rocquet—poet, playwright, and critic—has marshalled the full range of his talents to create a dazzling historical novel about the artist Peter Bruegel the Elder. To the few facts we have—Bruegel died in 1569 around the age of fifty; he lived in Antwerp and in Brussels; his work was much admired—Rocquet adds his own speculations on the sights, smells, and textures of Bruegel's world, on the artist's innermost feelings and intimate conversations, on his spiritual life and its possible translation on the artist's canvas.
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Canvases and Careers
Institutional Change in the French Painting World
Harrison C. White and Cynthia A. White
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In the nineteenth century, the Académie des Beaux Arts, and institution of central importance to the artistic life of France for over two hundred years, yielded much of its power to the present system of art distribution, which is dependent upon critics, dealers, and small exhibitions. In Canvases and Careers, Harrison and Cynthia White examine in scrupulous and fascinating detail how and why this shift occurred. Assimilating a wide range of historical and sociological data, the authors argue convincingly that the Academy, by neglecting to address the social and economic conditions of its time, undermined its own ability to maintain authority and control.

Originally published in 1965, this ground-breaking work is a classic piece of empirical research in the sociology of art. In this edition, Harrison C. White's new Foreword compares the marketing approaches of two contemporary painters, while Cynthia A. White's new Afterword reviews recent scholarship in the field.
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Cezanne and the End of Impressionism
A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art
Richard Shiff
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cézanne's painting. He shows how Cézanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cézanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.
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Charles Deering and Ramón Casas / Charles Deering y Ramón Casas
A Friendship in Art / Una amistad en el arte
Isabel Coll Mirabent
Northwestern University Press, 2012

This lavishly illustrated, bilingual art book presents drawings by Ramón Casas in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at the Northwestern University Library and oil paintings by Casas from private collections and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Charles Deering and Ramón Casas follows the development and dramatic dissolution of a three-way friendship that connected the Spanish painter Ramón Casas (1866–1932); the Chicago industrialist Charles Deering (1852–1927), who was a collector and admirer of Casas’s work as well as a patron of Northwestern University; and the Spanish artist Miguel Utrillo (1862–1934), Casas’s lifelong friend and the father of the French painter Maurice Utrillo.

Casas introduced Deering to Sitges, a beach town near Barcelona, Spain, where the latter created a palatial estate with a museum to house his art collection. Miguel Utrillo served as director of the museum. The text explores the treasures housed at Maricel and what happened among the three men that led Casas to abandon Utrillo and Deering to depart Spain, taking his art collection with him.

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Children of Mercury
The Lives of the Painters
Spike Bucklow
Reaktion Books, 2022
Following “the seven ages of man” from infancy to death, an innovative retelling of the lives of premodern painters both famous and forgotten.
 
Children of Mercury is a bold new account of the lives of premodern painters, viewed through the lens of “the seven ages of man,” a widespread belief made famous in the “All the world’s a stage” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Spike Bucklow follows artists’ lives from infancy through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, to maturity, old age, and death. He tracks how lives unfolded for both male and female painters, from the famous, like Michelangelo, through Artemisia Gentileschi and Mary Beale, to those who are now forgotten, like Jehan Gillemer. The book draws on historic biographies, the artists’ writings, and, uniquely, the physical evidence offered by their paintings.
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The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca
James R. Banker
University of Michigan Press, 2003
The paintings of Piero della Francesca have remained intriguing because of their distinctive three-dimensional space and unemotional figures, but the artist himself remains a mystery. Curiously, his activities were not confined to painting. He wrote treatises on perspective, commercial arithmetic, and geometry, all without ever settling in any of the centers of great intellectual achievement. James R.Banker has unearthed previously undiscovered documents that make it possible for him to write a social biography of the artist that accounts for his early formation. The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca examines the culture of the southeastern Tuscan town of Piero's youth. Analyses of San Sepolcro's political and social organization and its specific religious culture serve to enhance our understanding of Piero's early career prior to his experiences in Florence.
Piero della Francesca has remained an enigma because of the contradictions observed in his life and art. Banker's archival research has enabled him to clear away some of the obscurities. This book situates Piero in the earliest social and intellectual worlds within which he moved. Heretofore, writers on Piero have begun his putative formation in Florence in 1439. Banker demonstrates that the young painter's formation began prior to 1439, when he was surrounded by his family and the local artisans' community.
The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca integrates social and art history in order to better understand the formation of a Renaissance artist. It will be vital to scholars and historians of the Italian Renaissance city states, as well as to art historians and those interested in the relationship of art and society.
James R. Banker is Professor of History, North Carolina State University.
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Dancing Ledge
Derek Jarman
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
From his sexual awakening in postwar England to life in the sixties and beyond, Derek Jarman tells his life story with the in-your-face immediacy that became his trademark style in both his films and writing. Accompanied by nearly one hundred photographs of Jarman, his friends, lovers, and inspirations, the candid accounts in Dancing Ledge provide intimate and incredibly vivid glimpses into this iconoclastic filmmaker's life and times.
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The Deaths of Henri Regnault
Marc Gotlieb
University of Chicago Press, 2016
This is the first book in English on Henri Regnault (1843–71), a forgotten star of the European fin-de-siècle. A brilliant maverick who once seemed to hold the future of French painting in his hands, Regnault enjoyed a meteoric rise that was cut short when he died at the age of twenty-seven in the Franco-Prussian War. The story of his glamorous career and patriotic death colored French commemorative culture for nearly forty years—until his memory was swept away by the vast losses of World War I. In The Deaths of Henri Regnault, Marc Gotlieb reintroduces this important artist while offering a new perspective on the ultimate decline of nineteenth-century salon painting.

Gotlieb traces Regnault’s trajectory after he won the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome, a fellowship that provided four years of study in Italy. Arriving in Rome, however, Regnault suffered a profound crisis of originality that led him to flee the city in favor of Spain and Morocco. But the crisis also proved productive: from Rome, Madrid, Tangier, and Paris, Regnault enthralled audiences with a bold suite of strange, seductive, and violent Orientalist paintings inspired by his exotic journey—images that, Gotlieb argues, arose precisely from the crisis that had overtaken Regnault and that in key respects was shared by his more avant-garde counterparts.

Both an in-depth look at Regnault’s violent art and a vibrant essay on historical memory, The Deaths of Henri Regnault lays bare a creative legend who helped shape the collective experience of a generation.
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Edouard Manet
Rebel in a Frock Coat
Beth Archer Brombert
University of Chicago Press, 1997
"Manet comes alive in [Brombert's] pages. . . . At times her biography reads like a substantial and detailed 19th-century novel. . . . Brombert's Edouard Manet gives us not only a portrait of a complex artist but, in its authority and its range, a portrait of an age as well."—James R. Mellow, New York Times Book Review

"One of the pleasures of reading her is to follow the way she weaves life, art and history into a smooth tapestry. The art emerges from the life, and in the broadest possible context: in terms of its creator's life and concerns and in terns of its historical and cultural setting."—Eric Gibson, The Washington Times Books

"Richly detailed and informative . . . [this biography] exposes the character of an artist who maintained a sharply defined duality between his public and private personas."—Edward J. Sozanski, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Brombert's reading of important canvasses . . . shine, as do her accounts of the changing social and political environment in which Manet worked. . . . Well researched, complexly conceived, and clearly written."—Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliant . . . [this book] grants us a far deeper understanding of why [Manet's] paintings outraged so many of his peers, and why these same masterpieces resonate so richly in our psyches a century later."—Booklist, starred review
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Frida Kahlo
An Illustrated Life
By María Hesse, translated by Achy Obejas
University of Texas Press, 2018

One of the most important artists of the twentieth century and an icon of courageous womanhood, Frida Kahlo lives on in the public imagination, where her popularity shows no signs of waning. She is renowned for both her paintings and her personal story, which were equally filled with pain and anguish, celebration and life. Thousands of words, including her own, have been written about Kahlo, but only one previous biography has recorded her fascinating, difficult life. Frida Kahlo by María Hesse offers a highly unique way of getting to know the artist by presenting her life in graphic novel form, with striking illustrations that reimagine many of Kahlo’s famous paintings.

Originally published in Spanish in 2016, Frida Kahlo has already found an enthusiastic audience in the Spanish-speaking world, with some 20,000 copies sold in just a few months. This translation introduces English-language readers to Kahlo’s life, from her childhood and the traumatic accident that would change her life and her artwork, to her complicated love for Diego Rivera and the fierce determination that drove her to become a major artist in her own right. María Hesse tells the story in a first-person narrative, which captures both the depths of Frida’s suffering and her passion for art and life.

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George Caleb Bingham
Missouri's Famed Painter and Forgotten Politician
Paul C. Nagel
University of Missouri Press, 2005
In this fascinating work, Paul Nagel tells the full story of George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879), one of America’s greatest nineteenth-century painters. While Nagel assesses Bingham’s artistic achievements, he also portrays another very important part of the artist’s career—his service as a statesman and political leader in Missouri. Until now, Bingham’s public service has been largely forgotten, overshadowed by his triumph as a great artist. Yet Nagel finds there were times when Bingham yearned more to be a successful politician than to be a distinguished painter.
            Born in Virginia, Bingham moved with his family to Missouri when he was eight years old. He spent his youth in Arrow Rock, Missouri, and returned there as an adult. He also kept art studios in Columbia and St. Louis. In his last years, he served as the first professor of art at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Because of his ties to the state, he was known nationally as “the Missouri artist.” Bingham began his distinguished public service to Missouri as a member of the legislature. During the Civil War, he grew even more politically involved, holding the office of state treasurer, and he remained active throughout the period of Reconstruction. From 1875 to 1877, Bingham served as Missouri’s adjutant general, with most of that time spent in Washington, D. C., where he attempted to settle Missourians’ war claims against the federal government.
            Contrary to the idyllic scenes portrayed in most of his paintings, Bingham’s life ranged from moments of high achievement to times of intense distress and humiliation. His career was often touched by controversy, sorrow, and frustration. Personal letters and other manuscripts reveal Bingham’s life to be quite complicated, and Paul Nagel attempts to uncover the truth in this biography.
            Beautifully illustrated, this book includes a magnificent landscape entitled Horse Thief, which had been missing since Bingham painted it sometime around 1852. Recently discovered by art historian Fred R. Kline, this splendid work will appear in print for the first time. Anyone who has an interest in art, Missouri history, or politics will find this new book extremely valuable.
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Godefridus Schalcken
A Dutch Painter in Late Seventeenth-Century London
Wayne Franits
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
In his own day, Godefridus Schalcken (1643—1706) was an internationally renowned Dutch painter, but little is known about the four years that he spent in London. Using newly discovered documents, this book provides the first comprehensive examination of Schalcken’s activities there. The author analyses Schalcken’s strategic appropriations of English styles, his attempts to exploit gapsin the art market, and his impact on tastes in London’s milieu. Five chapters survey his art during these years, concluding with acritical catalogue of all his London-period work.
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Grant Wood’s Secrets
Sue Taylor
University of Delaware Press, 2011
Incorporating copious archival research and original close readings of American artist Grant Wood’s iconic as well as lesser-known works, Grant Wood’s Secrets reveals how his sometimes anguished psychology was shaped by his close relationship with his mother and how he channeled his lifelong oedipal guilt into his art. Presenting Wood’s abortive autobiography “Return from Bohemia” for the first time ever, Sue Taylor integrates the artist’s own recollections into interpretations of his art. As Wood dressed in overalls and boasted about his beloved Midwest, he consciously engaged in regionalist strategies, performing a farmer masquerade of sorts. In doing so, he also posed as conventionally masculine, hiding his homosexuality from his rural community. Thus, he came to experience himself as a double man. This book conveys the very real threats under which Wood lived and pays tribute to his resourceful responses, which were often duplicitous and have baffled art historians who typically take them at face value.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Hilma af Klint
A Biography
Julia Voss
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A highly anticipated biography of the enigmatic and popular Swedish painter.
 
The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe. 
 
But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the institution.
 
Despite her enormous popularity, there has not yet been a biography of af Klint—until now. Inspired by her first encounter with the artist’s work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research af Klint’s life—not only who the artist was but what drove and inspired her. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic.
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The House of the Singing Winds
The Life and Work of T. C. Steele
Rachel Berenson Perry
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2016
First published in 1966, this account of the life and work of T.C. Steele, one of Indiana's most renowned artists, has become a much-sought-after classic. For this reissue, sixty-two of the book's seventy-six illustrations, including all ten color plates, have been newly photographed and reproduced according to the highest modern standards. The text, unchanged from the first edition, includes a brief biography by the painter's grandson, Theodore L. Steele; a poetic memoir of Steele's last Brown County years by Selma N. Steele; and an appreciation of Steele's work by art historian Wilbur D. Peat.
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Interpreting Cézanne
Sidney Geist
Harvard University Press, 1988
In this remarkable book the sculptor and writer Sidney Geist presents a revolutionary interpretation of the art of Cézanne. Geist argues that Cézanne's paintings are fertile with reflections of the artist's private world and passionate concerns. Looking at more than two hundred works, all reproduced in the book, he identifies the symbolism that gives form to a hidden significance in the paintings—concealed allusions to Cézanne himself and to his relations with his wife and mother, his father, his son, and his friend Zola, as well as a circle of colleagues including Pissarro, Frederic Bazille, and Ambroise Vollard. It is a complex pattern of symbols expressed in both secondary visual images and in verbal connections, including rebuses and puns. In reading these paintings for symbolic meaning Geist opens the way to a fuller understanding of Cézanne as well as to new ways of looking at pictures. Interpretation of this kind in its turn explains formal aspects of the paintings with a richness not possible in abstract analysis.
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Invisible Friends
The Correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842-1845
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon; edited by Williard Bissell Pope
Harvard University Press, 1972

Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Benjamin Robert Haydon never met, their lively and topical conversation, initiated in 1842, continued unabated until 1845, about a year before the painter’s suicide. It was a somewhat lopsided correspondence in which ninety-four letters written by Haydon, most of which have not been published before, received fewer replies from Miss Barrett, twenty-eight of which are included in this book. Judging from the contents of the letters, the epistolary friendship was truly meaningful to both. To Miss Barrett, Haydon was “my dear kind friend”; he was far more effusive, addressing her as “you Ingenious little darling invisible” and “my dearest dream & invisible intellectuality.”

In spite of Haydon’s frequent pleas for a meeting, Miss Barrett never agreed to receive him. However, as the correspondence progressed, they exchanged more and more confidences and each recognized the other as a responsive and sympathetic listener. With complete candor Haydon admitted at one point that egotism was the basis of his pleasure in the correspondence; “I never ask what you are doing,” he wrote, “but take it for granted what I am doing must be delightful to you.”

Evincing warmth and poignancy, the letters range over a variety of colorful subjects covering art, literature, current events, and gossip. The Elgin Marbles and Queen Victoria are discussed, and the correspondents air opposing views on mesmerism and Napoleon versus Wellington. After a thoughtful introduction which provides background information on Miss Barrett and Haydon, Willard Pope presents the letters—carefully annotated with identifying information on people, places, and current events—in chronological order.

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Isaac Rosenberg
The Making of a Great War Poet: A New Life
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Isaac Rosenberg was among the greatest poets of the First World War. The British-born son of impoversihed Russian Jews, Rosenberg fought as a private in the trenches of the Great Was and died on the Western Front in 1918 as the age of 27. In Isaac Rosenberg, Wilson examines the influence of Rosenberg's class and heritage on his writings, as well as the development of his poetic technique. She traces his maturation from his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London to art school, his travels to South Africa, and finally his harrowing service as a private in the British Army.
 
Rosenberg was also a gifted painter and this beautifully illustrated volume oncludes some hitherto inseen self-portraits, along with photogrpahs of Rosenberg and his family. Wilson's biogrpahy brings together all known Rosenberg material with a mass of important new discoveries. Isaac Rosenberg is a long-overdue consideration of a remarkable war poet.
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Jerry Bywaters
A Life in Art
By Francine Carraro
University of Texas Press, 1994

As an artist, art critic, museum director, and art educator, Jerry Bywaters reshaped the Texas art world and attracted national recognition for Texas artists. This first full-scale biography explores his life and work in the context of twentieth-century American art, revealing Bywaters' important role in the development of regionalist painting.

Francine Carraro delves into all aspects of Bywaters' career. As an artist, Bywaters became a central figure and spokesman for a group of young, energetic painters known as the Dallas Nine (Alexandre Hogue, Everett Spruce, Otis Dozier, William Lester, and others) who broke out of the limitations of provincialism and attained national recognition beginning in the 1930s.

As director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, art critic for the Dallas Morning News, and professor of art and art history at Southern Methodist University, Bywaters became a champion of the arts in Texas. Carraro traces his strong supporting role in professionalizing art institutions in Texas and defendlng the right to display art considered "subversive" in the McCarthy era.

From these discussions emerges a finely drawn portrait of an artist who used a vocabulary of regional images to explore universal themes. It will be of interest to all students of American studies, national and regional art history, and twentieth-century biography.

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The Letters and Journals
Paula Modersohn-Becker
Northwestern University Press, 1998
One of the great modern painters, Paula Modersohn-Becker was also a gifted writer who left behind journals and a sizable correspondence. This edition includes every extant letter, all carefully annotated, and is illustrated with forty-six black-and-white plates.
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Letters of Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The French Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-77), a
pivotal figure in the emergence of modern painting, remains
an artist whose interests, attitudes, and friendships are
little understood. A voluminous correspondent, Courbet
himself, through his letters, offers a tantalizing avenue
toward a keener assessment of his character and
accomplishments. In her critical edition of over six hundred
of the artist's letters, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu presents
just such a look at the inner life of the artist; her
unparalleled feat of gathering together all of Courbet's
known letters, many heretofore unpublished and untranslated,
is sure to change our evaluation of Courbet's creativity and
of his place in nineteenth-century French life.
Beginning when Courbet left his provincial home at
eighteen and ending eight days before his death in exile in
Switzerland, this correspondence enables readers to follow
the artist's development from youth to mature artist of
international repute. Addressed to correspondents such as
the poet Charles Baudelaire, the painter Claude Monet, the
writers Champfleury, Victor Hugo, and Théeophile Gautier,
the political theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and the
politician Jules Simon, the letters offer numerous insights
into Courbet's life and art as well as the cultural and
political activity of his day. In fascinating detail, they
present the artist's relation to the contemporary media, his
deliberate choice of subject matter for Salon paintings, his
preoccupation with photography, and his participation in the
Commune.

Besides collecting, translating, and annotating the
letters, Chu provides an introduction, a chronology,
biographies of persons appearing frequently in the letters,
and a list of paintings and sculptures mentioned in the
letters. Her work is an essential resource of immediate use
to historians of art and culture, political and social
historians, and readers of biography.

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu is professor and head of the
Department of Art and Music at Seton Hall University.
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The Letters of Paul Cézanne
Alex Danchev
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2013

Book of the Year, Apollo Magazine, 2013

Revered and misunderstood by his peers and lauded by later generations as the father of modern art, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) has long been a subject of fascination for artists and art lovers, writers, poets, and philosophers. His life was a ceaseless artistic quest, and he channeled much of his wide-ranging intellect and ferocious wit into his letters. Punctuated by exasperated theorizing and philosophical reflection, outbursts of creative ecstasy and melancholic confession, the artist’s correspondence reveals both the heroic and all-toohuman qualities of a man who is indisputably among the pantheon of all-time greats.

This new translation of Cézanne’s letters includes more than twenty that were previously unpublished and reproduces the sketches and caricatures with which Cézanne occasionally illustrated his words. The letters shed light on some of the key artistic relationships of the modern period—about one third of Cézanne’s more than 250 letters are to his boyhood companion Émile Zola, and he communicated extensively with Camille Pissarro and the dealer Ambroise Vollard. The translation is richly annotated with explanatory notes, and, for the first time, the letters are cross-referenced to the current catalogue raisonné. Numerous inaccuracies and archaisms in the previous English edition of the letters are corrected, and many intriguing passages that were unaccountably omitted have been restored. The result is a publishing landmark that ably conveys Cézanne’s intricacy of expression.

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The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565); and Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572)
Dominicus Lampsonius
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2022
Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation.

Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher.

This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, complemented by a new translation of the inscriptions Lampsonius composed to accompany the Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572), a cycle of twenty-three engraved portraits of Netherlandish artists developed in collaboration with the print publisher Hieronymus Cock.

Together, The Life of Lambert Lombard and the Effigies established frameworks for a distinctly Netherlandish history of art. Responding to a growing sense of Netherlandish cultural and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, these texts proposed a critical alternative to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and its Italian model of art historical development, celebrating local ingenuity and skill. They remain the starting point for any history of the northern Renaissance.
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Love, H
The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones
Duke University Press, 2016
"It works, we're in business, yeah Babe!" So begins this remarkable selection from a forty-year correspondence between two artists who survived their time as wives in the Beat bohemia of the 1960s and went on to successful artistic careers of their own.
 
From their first meeting in 1960, writer Hettie Jones—then married to LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)—and painter and sculptor Helene Dorn (1927–2004), wife of poet Ed Dorn, found in each other more than friendship. They were each other's confidant, emotional support, and unflagging partner through difficulties, defeats, and victories, from surviving divorce and struggling as single mothers, to finding artistic success in their own right. 
 
Revealing the intimacy of lifelong friends, these letters tell two stories from the shared point of view of women who refused to go along with society’s expectations. Jones frames her and Helene's story, adding details and explanations while filling in gaps in the narrative. As she writes, "we'd fled the norm for women then, because to live it would have been a kind of death."
 
Apart from these two personal stories, there are, as well, reports from the battlegrounds of women's rights and tenant's rights, reflections on marriage and motherhood, and contemplation of the past to which these two had remained irrevocably connected. Prominent figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary appear as well, making Love, H an important addition to literature on the Beats. 
 
Above all, this book is a record of the changing lives of women artists as the twentieth century became the twenty-first, and what it has meant for women considering such a life today. It's worth a try, Jones and Dorn show us, offering their lives as proof that it can be done.
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Mark Rothko
A Biography
James E. B. Breslin
University of Chicago Press, 1993

A book of heroic dimensions, this is the first full-length biography of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century—a man as fascinating, difficult, and compelling as the paintings he produced. Drawing on exclusive access to Mark Rothko's personal papers and over one hundred interviews with artists, patrons, and dealers, James Breslin tells the story of a life in art—the personal costs and professional triumphs, the convergence of genius and ego, the clash of culture and commerce. Breslin offers us not only an enticing look at Rothko as a person, but delivers a lush, in-depth portrait of the New York art scene of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s—the world of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Klein, which would influence artists for generations to come.


"In Breslin, Rothko has the ideal biographer—thorough but never tedious, a good storyteller with an ear for the spoken word, fond but not fawning, and possessed of a most rare ability to comment on non-representational art without sounding preposterous."—Robert Kiely, Boston Book Review

"Breslin impressively recreates Mark Rothko's troubled nature, his tormented life, and his disturbing canvases. . . . The artist's paintings become almost tangible within Breslin's pages, and Rothko himself emerges as an alarming physical force."—Robert Warde, Hungry Mind Review

"This remains beyond question the finest biography so far devoted to an artist of the New York School."-Arthur C. Danto, Boston Sunday Globe

"Clearly written, full of intelligent insights, and thorough."—Hayden Herrera, Art in America

"Breslin spent seven years working on this book, and he has definitely done his homework."-Nancy M. Barnes, Boston Phoenix

"He's made the tragedy of his subject's life the more poignant."—Eric Gibson, The New Criterion

"Mr. Breslin's book is, in my opinion, the best life of an American painter that has yet been written . . . a biographical classic. It is painstakingly researched, fluently written and unfailingly intelligent in tracing the tragic course of its subject's tormented character."—Hilton Kramer, New York Times Book Review, front page review

James E. B. Breslin (1936-1996) was professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965 and William Carlos Williams: An American Artist.
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Monet and His Muse
Camille Monet in the Artist's Life
Mary Mathews Gedo
University of Chicago Press, 2010

“The mourning never stops, it just changes.” (Edward Albee)

For Claude Monet (1840–1926), the founder of French Impressionist painting, these words are a fitting testament to his lifelong relationship with the female muse, most notably—and most hauntingly—with his first wife, the model Camille Doncieux.

For the esteemed clinical psychologist and art historian Mary Mathews Gedo, Monet and His Muse represents a project twenty years in the making. Artfully interweaving biographical insight with psychoanalytic criticism, Gedo takes us on an exploration of Claude Monet’s conflicted relationships with women, complete with exquisitely researched material never before understood about one of our most popular—and inimitable—artists. Beginning with Monet’s childhood, Gedo delves into his relationships with a distant, unreliable father and his beloved, doting mother—whose death when Monet was just sixteen, the author establishes, inspired a lifetime preoccupation with the sea, its lushly imagined flora, and the figurative landscapes Monet painted to such acclaim.

And then—Camille. Entering Monet’s life when he was still a young man, becoming first his model and then mistress and then—finally—his wife, Camille Doncieux always fulfilled the function of muse, even after her life had ended, as Monet not only painted her one last time on her deathbed, but preserved her memory through the gardens he planted at his home in Giverny. Demonstrating how Monet’s connections with women were exceedingly complex, fraught with abusive impulses and infantile longing, Gedo sensitively uses Monet and Camille as exemplars in order to explore links between artists and muses in our modern age.

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My Kitchen Table
Sketches from My Life
Pilar Pobil
University of Utah Press, 2007
Pilar Pobil was born on the island of Mallorca, off the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and it was there that she first learned to love the colors that suffuse her art. The tales contained here are those she later related to her own children around the kitchen table; many of them describe her childhood and young adulthood in Mallorca, filled with mystery and excitement, privilege and deprivation, and always a fierce will to face life on her own terms.

Other stories describe her meeting in Mallorca with the Utah man who would become her husband, her journey to a faraway country, the birth of her children, and her discovery of her artistic impulses and abilities. All are woven with the threads of color and culture of her two homes. Filled with wit and insight, My Kitchen Table reveals foremost the voice of a woman determined to be true to herself and to her art.

Accompanying the narrative are some fifty color reproductions of the paintings and sculptures for which Pilar Pobil has become known. This is a volume that art lovers everywhere will treasure.

"Like her paintings, Pilar’s stories overflow their pages. They fold us into their embrace, so we feel and see her dancing in and out of our minds, a curious and mischievous child, a young woman in love coming to a foreign land with a foreign culture and tongue, the heartbreak of her losses, and the continual renewals that have ripened her art. Pilar’s book, like her house, is a magic kingdom and she is the fairy princess who presides. She paints her shoes for social engagements. The seats of her chairs beam faces. Her electrical wiring metamorphoses into fantastic snakes. The garden that leads to her studio is Salt Lake City’s Giverny. Paintings are everywhere and talk to each other with glittering non sequiturs. At the center of it all is her kitchen table, the place from which she serves the voices and visions of her life. The subtleties of her telling, like the bold clarity of her judgments, are those of an artist whose inspirations are a feast she graciously invites us to share."
— from the Foreword by Robert D. Newman, Dean of the College of Humanities, University of Utah

A finalist for the Utah Book Award in Nonfiction.
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Out Of The Black Patch
The Autobiography of Effie Marquess Carmack
Noel Carmack
Utah State University Press, 1999

Effie Marquess Carmack (1885-1974) grew up in the tobacco-growing region of southern Kentucky known as the Black Patch. As an adult she moved to Utah, back to Kentucky, to Arizona, and finally to California. Economic necessity primarily motivated Effie and her husband's moves, but her conversion to the Mormon Church in youth also was a factor. Throughout her life, she was committed to preserving the rural, southern folkways she had experienced as a child. She and other members of her family were folk musicians, at times professionally, and she also became a folk poet and artist, teaching herself to paint. In the 1940s she began writing her autobiography and eventually also completed a verse adaptation of it and an unpublished novel about life in the Black Patch.

Much of Effie's story is a charming memoir of her vibrant childhood on a poor tobacco farm. She describes a wide variety of folk practices, from healing and crafts to children's games. Her family's life included the backbreaking labor and economic trials of raising tobacco, but it was enriched by a deep familial heritage, communal music, creative play, and traditional activities of many kinds. After the family converted to the Mormon Church, religious study and devotion became another important dimension. Effie's account of Mormon missions contributes to the little-known record of Latter-day Saint attempts to establish a presence in the South.

After marrying, the Carmacks moved west, eventually landing in the Arizona desert, where Effie took up painting in earnest. Her art began to attract modest attention, which brought exhibits, awards, and a new career teaching others what she had taught herself. After the Carmacks later retired to Atascadero, California, Effie became a more active and public folk singer as well.

                 
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Paint and Canvas
A Life of T. C. Steele
Rachel Berenson Perry
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2011
At the age of fourteen, a young man in Waveland, Indiana, had taken over the family farm after the death of his father. Now responsible for taking care of his widowed mother and supporting his four brothers, he took up the reins on the plow to begin preparing the field for planting. Family legend has it that the young farmer, Theodore Clement Steele, tied “colored ribbons to the handles of the plow so that he could watch the ribbons in the wind and the effect that they had on the [surrounding] colors.” Recognizing Steele’s passion for art, his mother supported his choice to make his living as an artist. T. C. Steele, the eighth volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press’s youth biography series, traces the path of Steele’s career as an artist from his early studies in Germany to his determination to paint what he knew best, the Indiana landscape. Steele, along with fellow artists William Forsyth, Otto Stark, Richard Gruelle, and J. Ottis Adams, became a member of the renowned Hoosier Group and became a leader in the development of Midwestern art.
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Paintbrush for Hire
The Travels of James and Emma Cameron, 1840–1900
Frederick C. Moffatt
University of Tennessee Press, 2018

Throughout the nineteenth-century, itinerant painters traveled the length and breadth of Europe and American in search of patronage. In the company of the his crupulous wife, Emma S. Cameron (1825–1907), the Scots-born James Cameron (1816–1882) sought to fulfill his ambitious dream of becoming an artist.

Working primarily as a landscapist and portraitist—he was also an inventor, a missionary, an ordained minister, a land agent, farmer, clothing merchant, and Sunday school teacher—Cameron produced a small collection of paintings during the ten-year period the couple resided in East Tennessee and the American South. Driven by the wife’s lively journals, correspondence, and Civil War diary, Moffatt’s narrative details the couple’s marriage, their extended honeymoon in revolutionary Italy and, following a brief excursion in the Adirondacks, their subsequent residencies in Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Nashville, Augusta, central Mississippi, and New Orleans, between 1856 and 1868. While in Chattanooga, they settled near Col. James A. Whiteside’s fashionable summer resort, Lookout Mountain Hotel, where James reigned as resident artist and Emma, reluctantly, served as the house nurse and social entertainer. In the late 1860s they lived in Maine and, after 1874, in California, where they founded separate Presbyterian churches.

The book emphasizes Cameron’s painting career, the patrons who supported it, and discusses his best-known works, all of which are reproduced here. The study demonstrated how persisted while working under a cultural cloud that often devalued artistic achievement Emma’s journals reveal her to be a perceptive observer of Protestant middle class “life-on-the-run” and yields insight into historic events in the making, including the Italian Risorgimento, the American Civil War, and the settlement of America’s Western frontier. Moffatt’s detailed joint biography provides a valuable contribution to women’s studies, art history, nineteenth-century frontier expansionism, and social history.

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Painting outside the Lines
Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art
David W. Galenson
Harvard University Press, 2002

Why have some great modern artists—including Picasso—produced their most important work early in their careers while others—like Cézanne—have done theirs late in life? In a work that brings new insights, and new dimensions, to the history of modern art, David Galenson examines the careers of more than 100 modern painters to disclose a fascinating relationship between age and artistic creativity.

Galenson’s analysis of the careers of figures such as Monet, Seurat, Matisse, Pollock, and Jasper Johns reveals two very different methods by which artists have made innovations, each associated with a very different pattern of discovery over the life cycle. Experimental innovators, like Cézanne, work by trial and error, and arrive at their most important contributions gradually. In contrast, Picasso and other conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas. Consequently, experimental innovators usually make their discoveries late in their lives, whereas conceptual innovators typically peak at an early age.

A novel contribution to the history of modern art, both in method and in substance, Painting outside the Lines offers an enlightening glimpse into the relationship between the working methods and the life cycles of modern artists. The book’s explicit use of simple but powerful quantitative techniques allows for systematic generalization about large numbers of artists—and illuminates significant but little understood features of the history of modern art. Pointing to a new and richer understanding of that history, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism and beyond, Galenson’s work also has broad implications for future attempts to understand the nature of human creativity in general.

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Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde
Martha Ward
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Martha Ward tracks the development and reception of neo-impressionism, revealing how the artists and critics of the French art world of the 1880s and 1890s created painting's first modern vanguard movement.

Paying particular attention to the participation of Camille Pissarro, the only older artist to join the otherwise youthful movement, Ward sets the neo-impressionists' individual achievements in the context of a generational struggle to redefine the purposes of painting. She describes the conditions of display, distribution, and interpretation that the neo-impressionists challenged, and explains how these artists sought to circulate their own work outside of the prevailing system. Paintings, Ward argues, often anticipate and respond to their own conditions of display and use, and in the case of the neo-impressionists, the artists' relations to market forces and exhibition spaces had a decisive impact on their art.

Ward details the changes in art dealing, and chronicles how these and new freedoms for the press made artistic vanguardism possible while at the same time affecting the content of painting. She also provides a nuanced account of the neo-impressionists' engagements with anarchism, and traces the gradual undermining of any strong correlation between artistic allegiance and political direction in the art world of the 1890s.

Throughout, there are sensitive discussions of such artists as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, as well as Pissarro. Yet the touchstone of the book is Pissarro's intricate relationship to the various factions of the Paris art world.
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Portrait of a Young Painter
Pepe Zuniga and Mexico City's Rebel Generation
Mary Kay Vaughan
Duke University Press, 2015
In Portrait of a Young Painter, the distinguished historian Mary Kay Vaughan adopts a biographical approach to understanding the culture surrounding the Mexico City youth rebellion of the 1960s. Her chronicle of the life of painter Pepe Zúñiga counters a literature that portrays post-1940 Mexican history as a series of uprisings against state repression, injustice, and social neglect that culminated in the student protests of 1968. Rendering Zúñiga's coming of age on the margins of formal politics, Vaughan depicts midcentury Mexico City as a culture of growing prosperity, state largesse, and a vibrant, transnationally-informed public life that produced a multifaceted youth movement brimming with creativity and criticism of convention. In an analysis encompassing the mass media, schools, politics, family, sexuality, neighborhoods, and friendships, she subtly invokes theories of discourse, phenomenology, and affect to examine the formation of Zúñiga's persona in the decades leading up to 1968. By discussing the influences that shaped his worldview, she historicizes the process of subject formation and shows how doing so offers new perspectives on the events of 1968.
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The Portraitist
Frans Hals and His World
Steven Nadler
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. 
 
 
Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like.
 
Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter’s animated presence captured with energy and immediacy.
 
Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals’s life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.
 
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Pow! Right in the Eye!
Thirty Years behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting
Berthe Weill
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Memoir of a provocative Parisian art dealer at the heart of the 20th-century art world, available in English for the first time.
  
Berthe Weill, a formidable Parisian dealer, was born into a Jewish family of very modest means. One of the first female gallerists in the business, she first opened the Galerie B. Weill in the heart of Paris’s art gallery district in 1901, holding innumerable exhibitions over nearly forty years. Written out of art history for decades, Weill has only recently regained the recognition she deserves.
 
Under five feet tall and bespectacled, Weill was beloved by the artists she supported, and she rejected the exploitative business practices common among art dealers. Despite being a self-proclaimed “terrible businesswoman,” Weill kept her gallery open for four decades, defying the rising tide of antisemitism before Germany’s occupation of France. By the time of her death in 1951, Weill had promoted more than three hundred artists—including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, and Suzanne Valadon—many of whom were women and nearly all young and unknown when she first exhibited them.
 
Pow! Right in the Eye! makes Weill’s provocative 1933 memoir finally available to English readers, offering rare insights into the Parisian avant-garde and a lively inside account of the development of the modern art market.
 
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Rounded Up in Glory
Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man
Michael Grauer
University of North Texas Press, 2016

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Shaping the Netherlandish Canon
Karel Van Mander's Schilder-Boeck
Walter S. Melion
University of Chicago Press, 1992
A treatise on Dutch art on par with Vasari's critical history
of Italian art, Karel van Mander's Schilder-Boeck (or
Book on Picturing) has long been recognized for its critical
and historical influence—and yet, until now, no
comprehensive account of the book's conception, aims, and
impact has been available. In this in-depth analysis of the
content and context of Van Mander's work, Walter S. Melion
reveals the Schilder-Boeck's central importance to an
understanding of northern Renaissance and Baroque art.

By interpreting the terminology employed in the
Schilder-Boeck, Melion establishes the text's
relationship to past and contemporary art theory. Van Mander
is seen here developing his critical categories and then
applying them to Ancient, Italian, and Netherlandish artists
in order to mark changes within a culture and to characterize
excellence for each region. Thus Melion demonstrates how Van
Mander revised both the structure and critical language of
Vasari's Lives to refute the Italian's claims for the
superiority of the Tuscan style, and to clarify northern
artistic traditions and the concerns of Netherlandish
artists. A much needed corrective to the view that Dutch art
of the period was lacking in theory, Melion's work offers a
compelling account of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
theoretical and critical perspective and shows how this
perspective suggests a rereading of northern art.

Walter S. Melion is assistant professor of art history
at The Johns Hopkins University.



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Suffering and Sunset
World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin
Celeste-Marie Bernier
Temple University Press, 2017

For self-made artist and soldier Horace Pippin—who served in the 369th all-black infantry in World War I until he was wounded—war provided a formative experience that defined much of his life and work. His ability to transform combat service into canvases of emotive power, psychological depth, and realism showed not only how he viewed the world but also his mastery as a painter. In Suffering and Sunset, Celeste-Marie Bernier painstakingly traces Pippin’s life story of art as a life story of war. 

Illustrated with more than sixty photographs, including works in various mediums—many in full color—this is the first intellectual history and cultural biography of Pippin. Working from newly discovered archives and unpublished materials, Bernier provides an in-depth investigation into the artist’s development of an alternative visual and textual lexicon and sheds light on his work in its aesthetic, social, and political contexts.

Suffering and Sunset illustrates Pippin’s status as a groundbreaking artist as it shows how this African American painter suffered from but also staged many artful resistances to racism in a white-dominated art world.

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Ted Lambert
The Man Behind the Paintings
Ted Lambert
University of Alaska Press, 2012
Ted Lambert is regarded as one of the premier Alaska artists, a true pioneer. Born in 1905, and raised in the Chicago area, Lambert moved to Alaska in 1925 and went to work as a miner near McCarthy. He held several jobs, predominantly working at a copper mine and mushing dogs—first for adventure, and then as a mail carrier.
Lambert left Alaska in 1931 to study art for a year at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, then moved to Seattle, where he began a mentorship under Eustace Ziegler, with whom he traveled throughout Alaska and painted. Eventually Lambert settled down in Fairbanks, where he stayed for twenty years and solidified his reputation as a painter and an artist.
But in 1960 he disappeared from the remote cabin he was living in at Bristol Bay. No trace of his body was ever found, but among the effects rescued from his last home was a memoir of his early days in Alaska. Presented here and never before published, these memoirs reveal Lambert to be a keen and intelligent observer and relay the adventure story of a young man who would become one of Alaska’s most important artists.
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A Union Like Ours
The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney
Scott Bane
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney’s death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

During a hospital stay, years into their relationship, Matthiessen confessed to Cheney that “never once has the freshness of your life lost any trace of its magic for me. Every day is a new discovery of your wealth.” Situating the couple’s private correspondence alongside other sources, Scott Bane tells the remarkable story of their relationship in the context of shifting social dynamics in the United States. From the vantage point of the present day, with marriage equality enacted into law, Bane provides a window into the realities faced by same-sex couples in the early twentieth century, as they maintained relationships in the face of overt discrimination and the absence of legal protections.

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Walls of Prophecy and Protest
William Walker and the Roots of a Revolutionary Public Art Movement
Jeff W. Huebner
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Chicago is home to more intact African American street murals from the 1970s and ’80s than any other U.S. city. Among Chicago’s greatest muralists is the legendary William “Bill” Walker (1927–2011), compared by art historians to Diego Rivera and called the most accomplished contemporary practitioner of the classical mural tradition.

Though his art could not have been more public, Walker maintained a low profile during his working life and virtually withdrew from the public eye after his retirement in 1989. Author Jeff W. Huebner met Walker in 1990 and embarked on a series of insightful interviews that stretched over the next two decades. Those meetings and years of research form the basis of Walls of Prophecy and Protest, the story of Walker’s remarkable life and the movement that he inspired.

Featuring forty-three color images of Walker’s work, most long since destroyed or painted over, this handsome edition reveals the artist who was the primary figure behind Chicago’s famed Wall of Respect and who created numerous murals that depicted African American historical figures, protested social injustice, and promoted love, respect, racial unity, and community change.
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Wyeth People
Gene Logsdon
Ohio University Press, 2003
Wyeth People is the story of one writer’s search for the meaning of artistic creativity, approached from personal contact with the work of one of the world’s great artists, Andrew Wyeth. In the 1960s, just beginning his career as a writer, Gene Logsdon read a magazine article about Andrew Wyeth in which the artist commented at length on his own creative impulse. What he said seemed so true and right and so directly applicable to writing as well as to painting that the young writer was transfixed. He was resolved to talk to Andrew Wyeth, even though warned that the artist could be as elusive as a wild rabbit. Not quite by accident, the writer and the painter met in a roadside diner, and what happened from then on is what Wyeth People is about-an effort to explain a famous artist, his work, and the people who love it, by an intrigued outsider. Wyeth People is the result of Gene Logsdon’s search to find the colorful people Wyeth painted and to interview them. Originally published in 1969, Wyeth People describes how the author solved the mystery of the creative impulse, at least to his own satisfaction. It is reprinted here in paperback for the first time. As Logsdon writes: “The story of my search for why I (and millions of other people) find Wyeth’s art among the greatest that human culture has produced, is ongoing. I may never fully end my quest. But this I know. I was lucky enough to have participated in some small way in the cultural process by which an artist and his work became a classic part of American tradition. That I was able to talk to people like Karl Kuerner and Forrest Wall produced in me the same kind of knowledge and exhilaration that I would gain if I were viewing Michelangelo’s David and David came alive and spoke to me.” Swallow Press welcomes the opportunity to bring this remarkable book back into print.
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