Kirjahaku

Andrew Wyeth is an essential introduction to the enduring masterworks of this profoundly popular American artist. Published on the occasion of the centennial of the artist s birth, this handsome book highlights works spanning the entirety of the artist s seven-decade career painting the landscapes and people he knew in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he lived, and in Maine, where he summered. Many of his most important landscapes and portraits were created in and around his Chadds Ford studio, now part of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, with which Andrew Wyeth was intimately connected since its founding in 1971. A short introduction provides an overview of his life, and descriptive captions contextualize some fifty of the artist s finest and most beloved paintings, including Pennsylvania Landscape (1942), Wind from the Sea (1947), Christina s World (1948), Trodden Weed (1951), Roasted Chestnuts (1956), Braids (1977), and Pentecost (1989). Readers will also be treated to works previously unseen, such as Betsy s Beach (2006) and Crow Tree (2007).

The Brandywine River Museum of Art is home to one of the country s renowned collections of American art. This stunning book reveals the beauty of the museum s remarkable holdings, housed in a renovated nineteenth-century mill building with a steel- and-glass addition overlooking the Brandywine River, and of its three historic properties the N. C. Wyeth home and studio, the Andrew Wyeth studio, and the Kuerner Farm, which inspired over 1,000 works by Andrew Wyeth all National Historic Landmarks. This volume features fifty of the museum s most beloved paintings, by artists such as John Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, William Trost Richards, Horace Pippin, and Andrew Wyeth, along with immersive photographs of the 300-acre landscape surrounding the museum and historic structures. The introduction by curator Christine Podmaniczky includes a brief history of this unique institution, its art collection, and the intimate places where the Wyeth family lived and painted. This handsome volume will appeal not only to museum visitors but also to art lovers everywhere.

The first major monograph on the visionary nature paintings of the pioneering American modernist Though Joseph Stella is primarily recognized for his dynamic Futurist-inspired paintings of New York, particularly of the Brooklyn Bridge, he was also compelled to express the powerful connection he felt to the natural world, a subject he pursued persistently throughout his career. Visionary Nature presents an overdue examination of this prolific and wide-ranging body of nature-based work. If Stella’s cityscapes became symbols of a modern era, his pictures of flowers, plants, birds and trees were rooted in another, more ancient, primal and paradisaical world. Inspired by archaic and classical precedents as well as his own brand of spirituality, these lyrical and exuberant works are also his least understood. By focusing on his unique visual vocabulary and the context in which it developed, Visionary Nature reconsiders how his nature paintings relate to his career, revealing a surprising continuity between seemingly disparate subjects and exploring how these works are reflective of Stella’s passionate spirituality. His close affiliation with the natural world shaped a body of work that ranged from vividly realistic to poetically transcendent and visionary in its unique expression. Joseph Stella (1877–1946) was born in Italy and moved to New York City in 1896. He belonged to avant-garde circles on both sides of the Atlantic and achieved international notoriety in the 1910s for his large-scale paintings of modern America. For the remainder of his career, he traveled widely and produced a large body of nature-themed work. He died in 1946 from heart failure.

Perhaps nowhere else is Andrew Wyeth s highly distinctive style more palpable, or moving, than in Snow Hill. His masterful tempera painting of 1989 provides a visual and poetic summary of the Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, residents who had provided artistic inspiration at key points in Wyeth s career. With the figures depicted in a snowy landscape high above Kuerner Farm, a property of great personal significance to the painter, this enigmatic composition resonates with an elegiac air. Among Wyeth s most popular works, Snow Hill in some ways encapsulates the spirit of his entire career.