Carolyn Kinder Carr

The first full-length study of the life of Sara Tyson Hallowell, an American agent, advisor to collectors and artists, curator, and advocate for modern art. In the nineteenth century, women became leaders in a myriad fields but only Sara Tyson Hallowell was able to create a lasting career as a curator of exhibitions. Throughout her life Sara Tyson Hallowell continually challenged nineteenth-century expectations about the proper place of well-born women as she worked to make a name for herself in the Chicago art world of the 1880s and 1890s. Although her name may not be well known a century later Hallowell continues to command the attention of contemporary curators because the model she established and the skills she employed in her own work are those that are fundamental to success in the field today. Presenting the first comprehensive story of Sara Tyson Hallowell's life, Sara Tyson Hallowell: Pioneer Curator and Art Advisor in the Gilded Age, highlights the lasting influence and compelling story of Sara Tyson Hallowell.

Capital Portraits: Treasures from Washington Private Collections presents little-known artistic treasures from important Washington area private collections. These portraits by major artists date from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, and they speak to the many reasons that paintings and sculpture continue to represent and capture human likenesses and personalities. Privately collected, commissioned, or inherited, they have seldom, if ever, been seen in a public setting. The catalogue, which accompanies an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from April 1 through September 5, 2011, illustrates the portraits and recounts their histories, including comments by living sitters about having their portraits made.

During the summer and early fall of 1950, as Jackson Pollock moved about the huge canvases on the floor of his Long Island studio, defining their surfaces with dripped and thrown paint, a young photographer named Hans Namuth documented the artist at work. The best of his nearly five hundred photographs, first published in Portfolio and Art News magazines, enhanced public understanding of Pollock's paintings and began for Namuth a forty-year career of photographing America's leading painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, and architects. Accompanied by a biographical essay by Carolyn Kinder Carr, this collection of seventy-five of Hans Namuth's photographic portraits, taken between 1950 and 1989, shows how his friendships with his often reclusive subjects and his determination to capture the essence of each artist's style resulted in revealing portraits of such notable painters as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andrew Wyeth, Helen Frankenthaler, and Andy Warhol. Although Namuth identified most closely with the Abstract Expressionists who became famous in the 1950s and early 1960s, his repertoire included a new generation of 1980s artists, among them Julian Schnabel and David Salle. In both his black-and-white and color photographs, Namuth used subtle but telling poses, settings, and details: John Steinbeck appears with his famous dog Charley; Philip Johnson stands jauntily on a staircase in the Museum of Modern Art beside a painting that he donated; Louise Nevelson wears jewelry that echoes the sweeping lines of her wood sculpture. Carr sets the stage for Namuth's photographic career in America by describing his youth in pre-war Germany, his early work as a documentary photographer in Paris and Spain, his immigration to New York in 1941, and his wartime intellegence work for the United States Army. Returning to professional photography in 1949, he soon concentrated his efforts on photographic portraiture. While Namuth saw himself as an artist photographing ot