Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Art & Culture
SAVING FACE
The person in the cherry picker is giving an odd sort of truth to Walter Pater’s definition of art: “All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.
“I had come to visit the people in that quiet Shaker village upon the mountain terrace,” Benson John Lossing wrote in August of 1856.
said a New York newspaper when the Metropolitan opened its American Wing in 1924. This spring, a new, grander American Wing once again displays the collection that Lewis Mumford found “not merely an exhibition of art,” but “a pageant of American history.”
The reopening of the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing this spring deserves the great attention it is likely to get.
It is hard to imagine a task more difficult than to convey in a single article a sense of the American Wing’s near-infinite holdings.
A major new exhibition celebrates the bright, idiosyncratic paintings of America’s folk artists
In 1938 the pioneer American folk-art enthusiast Jean Lipman set down a thoughtful answer to a question that still is being debated: what marks the difference between a primitive masterpiece and an ignorant daub?
A splendid gathering of American folk art—half a century before its time
In recent years Pine Street has become the center of Philadelphia’s antiques market, and the shopkeepers there would give a great deal to be able to visit a store that must have been the object of considerable ridicule to their turn-ofthe-century forerunners.
GOOD READING
The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay
by Alexander Walker William Morrow and Co., Inc. 65 photographs, 218 pages, $10.95
A photographic record of the boom years in the granite quarries of Barre, Vermont
Barre, cried one Vermont newspaper in 1893, was “The Busy Hustling Chicago of New England,” and the town itself cheerfully claimed to be the “Granite Center of the World.” Not of the world, perhaps, but certainly of the United States: in the years following t
On the morning of March 6,1836, a band of 187 Texas revolutionaries died at the hands of some three thousand Mexican troops within the crumbling pile of stones called the Alamo.
“The most helpful thing I can think of,” Louis Tiffany once wrote, “is to show people that beauty is everywhere…up-lifting…healthgiving.” He showed that beauty most memorably in the opulent, iridescent, glass that made a Tiffany vase or lamp the hallmark of a
A few years back a Massachusetts hardware salesman named Stuart Goldman bought a trunk which, he believed, had been sealed since 1799. When he opened it, he found the crisp silhouette of the Continental officer at left.
The 407-ton packet Ellerslie left New Orleans on December 30, 1848, on a royage that now would be forgotten save for the discovery of a series of watercolor sketches done by one of the passengers, James
A ponderous memorial to a people who refused to vanish
By the late 1850’s Frederick Church was the most popular artist in America.
A remarkable collection of daguerreotypes by the St. Louis photographer Thomas Easterly illuminates the zest and chaos of city life in the Age of Expansion
Throughout his working life, Thomas Easterly’s St. Louis acquaintances knew him as “the daguerrean,” a title that reflected the man’s stubborn espousal of the first photographic method known in America.
A. B. Frost faithfully recorded the woodland pursuits of himself and his affluent friends
Arthur Burdett Frost, who at the turn of the century was perhaps the best-known and most popular illustrator in America, sketched and painted his way from relatively humble beginnings to hobnobbing with the leisure class.
Carlos Cortez Coyle did not know much about art, at least not in the formal sense. But he knew whom he liked, and he painted his heroines and heroes with naive enthusiasm.
A British Officer Portrays Colonial America
We owe a considerable debt to the British army for our visual perception of the eighteenth-century American scene.
A good party is better than the best man that ever lived.” So said “Czar’ Thomas B. Reed, the formidable late-nineteenth-century Speaker of the House of Representatives.
When she looked back on the dark episode later, Mrs. Leland Stanford, of the California railroad empire Stanfords, San Francisco and Palo Alto, must have regretted many times the day she let That Man into her house.
The question of how many angels can dance on the point of a pin stimulated debate among medieval scholars. Absurd, we say.
It is normally the winners, not the losers, who erect triumphal irches at a war’s end.
The man was Diego Rivera, seen from the rear on his scaffold in an uncharacteristically modest self-portrait at left, and what he was doing in America was expressing his gargantuan contempt for capitalism and its precepts.
When the Norwegian artist Lauritz Larsen Mossige emigrated to America in the early 1880’s, he settled in Deckertown—now Sussex—New Jersey, and changed his name to Louis Larsen.
A decade ago a serious recognition of American Indian painters was rare indeed, for the simple reason that few art critics considered that there was anything about Indian painting worth knowing.
Eleventh in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE
When in June of 1778 Sir Henry Clinton evacuated Philadelphia and moved his army of ten thousand British and German troops toward New York, Washington called his officers together to discuss strategy.
Painter to the Federalist aristocracy, Stuart created likenesses of leading citizens with great brilliance and exactitude.
The face is familiar. Every American has scanned it a thousand times; it passes from hand to hand in millions of ordinary business transactions every day of the year.
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