Thomas Denenberg

This first comprehensive survey of the life and work of Luigi Lucioni (1900 1988) places him in the context of fellow Regionalist painters Grant Wood, Charles Sheeler, and Maxfield Parrish. Lucioni is known for meticulously rendered still lifes, landscapes, and arresting portraits drawn from his close-knit circle of queer New York artists and cultural figures, including Paul Cadmus, Jared French, George Platt Lynes, and Lincoln Kirstein. In the early 1930s, Lucioni discovered Vermont, whose landscapes reminded him of northern Italy. It was there that he met Electra Havemeyer Webb, who was to become his single most important patron. For more than 50 years, the New York City based artist spent every summer painting landscapes of trees, barns, and buildings in Vermont with sharply observed realism and a cool, precise style. Key scholars examine Lucioni s oeuvre, materials, techniques, and his role in American modernism.

In these works, Rockwell offered a nation battered by the Great Depression and World War II a reassuring image of American life: orderly, self-reliant, and picturesque. Through paintings and illustrations, Rockwell captured not simply scenes of New England life, but a deeply rooted ethos—one in which democratic community, moral clarity, and quiet individualism flourished. This book, and the accompanying exhibition, situates Rockwell’s Vermont years within a broader creative milieu, highlighting the Arlington artist circle that included John Atherton (1900–1952), and Gene Pelham (1909–2004)— all informally enticed to Arlington, Vermont. Together, they helped define a cultural moment in which Vermont was mythologized as democracy’s granite-strong refuge. Even Rockwell’s orchestrated friendship with Anna Mary “Grandma” Moses (1860–1961) was part of a wider crafting of New England as both authentic and marketable—where artists and audiences alike found a form of moral anchorage. Featuring two newly acquired Rockwell paintings to Shelburne Museum celebrating Vermont’s granite industry—long regarded as the state’s “backbone”—Norman Rockwell: At Home in Vermont examines not only the imagery but the careful mythmaking that made Vermont central to Rockwell’s enduring vision of America. Today, Rockwell’s work is housed in major museums across the country, a testament to his profound influence as an artist.

All Aboard is a ground-breaking book. Presented thematically the authors cover the environmental impact of the railroad both on the flora and fauna, and on the social landscape; the role of the railroad on the western expansion of the USA, and the lasting and hugely detrimental impact of this on Native American populations. A wide array of comparative images includes archival and historic views, other related artworks and ephemera, as well as a railroad map. In the early years of the nineteenth century artists including Thomas Cole and George Inness, of the Hudson River School, feared the impact of the railroad on the natural landscape; later artists were inspired by the newly opened-up landscapes of the West, including Albert Bierstadt and Theodore Kaufmann; others like Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, and John Sloan, were fascinated by movement of freight and people across the railroad network. Ben Shahn, Tomas Hart Benton, and Joe Jones's portrayals of railroad workers become emblems of the very backbone of America on which the country's social and industrial expansion was built. Such industrial expansion is captured in the dramatic views of Pittsburgh and mid-west industry in paintings by Otto Kuhler, George Luks, and Charles Sheeler. And finally, there are a raft of artists for whom the railroad was both at the heart of a great new machine age, celebrated in paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Joseph Stella, and Charles Goeller, but also the creator of a more lonely and alienated urban industrial world, most strongly captured in Edward Hopper's railroad landscapes.

Bird decoys were used for hunting in North America until the advent of hunting regulations in the early twentieth century, when decoys started to be prized and collected as masterpieces of American folk art. This handsome book is the first examination of the historic and unparalleled decoy collection at Shelburne Museum. Featuring new photography of 250 of the museum s most important and artistically carved decoys, it includes examples made by the most respected American carvers: Charles Osgood, Lem and Steve Ward, John Blair, Bill Bowman, Nathan Cobb, Jr., Lee Dudley, James Holly, Jr., Nathan Horner, Albert Laing, Joseph Lincoln, A. Elmer Crowell, and Charles Shang Wheeler. The story of the collection begins with Joel Barber, the pioneer decoy enthusiast and New York architect, artist, and carver, whose gift of 400 superior examples established the collection in 1952. Several essays provide groundbreaking scholarship on the origins, construction, and attribution of bird decoys, imparting critical advancements to our modern understanding of this revered tradition.

Electra Havemeyer Webb assembled Shelburne Museum s trove of American paintings in the late 1950s, creating a renowned and rich survey of American portraits, landscapes, marine paintings, sporting art, still lifes, and genre scenes from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. During an era that preferred European modernism and abstraction, Webb s visionary endeavour presented a new story of the United States: an attractive and industrious nation with its own valuable artistic traditions. This handsome book features the best of Shelburne s American paintings, including works by colonial painters John Wollaston and John Singleton Copley, portraits by William Matthew Prior and Ammi Phillips, Hudson River School landcapes by Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, and John Frederick Kensett, and scenes of American life by Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, and many more. The collection is also notable for its great depth in the works by Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Carl Rungius, Grandma Moses, and Ogden Pleissner.