Free PDF American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, by Robert Hughes
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American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, by Robert Hughes
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Writing with all the brilliance, authority, and pungent wit that have distinguished his art criticism for Time magazine and his greatly acclaimed study of modern art, The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes now addresses his largest subject: the history of art in America.
The intense relationship between the American people and their surroundings has been the source of a rich artistic tradition. American Visions is a consistently revealing demonstration of the many ways in which artists have expressed this pervasive connection. In nine eloquent chapters, which span the whole range of events, movements, and personalities of more than three centuries, Robert Hughes shows us the myriad associations between the unique society that is America and the art it has produced:
"O My America, My New Founde Land" explores the churches, religious art, and artifacts of the Spanish invaders of the Southwest and the Puritans of New England; the austere esthetic of the Amish, the Quakers, and the Shakers; and the Anglophile culture of Virginia.
"The Republic of Virtue" sets forth the ideals of neo-classicism as interpreted in the paintings of Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and the Peale family, and in the public architecture of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and Charles Bulfinch.
"The Wilderness and the West" discusses the work of landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and the Luminists, who viewed the natural world as "the fingerprint of God's creation," and of those who recorded America's westward expansion--George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington--and the accompanying shift in the perception of the Indian, from noble savage to outright demon.
"American Renaissance" describes the opulent era that followed the Civil War, a cultural flowering expressed in the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens; the paintings of John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Childe Hassam; the Newport cottages of the super-rich; and the beaux-arts buildings of Stanford White and his partners.
"The Gritty Cities" looks at the post-Civil War years from another perspective: cast-iron cityscapes, the architecture of Louis Henri Sullivan, and the new realism of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, the trompe-l'oeil painters, and the Ashcan School.
"Early Modernism" introduces the first American avant garde: the painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O'Keeffe, and the premier architect of his time, Frank Lloyd Wright.
"Streamlines and Breadlines" surveys the boom years, when skyscrapers and Art Deco were all the rage . . . and the bust years that followed, when painters such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Thomas Hart Benton, Diego Rivera, and Jacob Lawrence showed Americans "the way we live now."
"The Empire of Signs" examines the American hegemony after World War II, when the Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, et al.) ruled the artistic roost, until they were dethroned by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, the Pop artists, and Andy Warhol, while individualists such as David Smith and Joseph Cornell marched to their own music.
"The Age of Anxiety" considers recent events: the return of figurative art and the appearance of minimal and conceptual art; the speculative mania of the 1980s, which led to scandalous auction practices and inflated reputations; and the trends and issues of art in the 90s.
Lavishly illustrated and packed with biographies, anecdotes, astute and stimulating critical commentary, and sharp social history, American Visions was originally published in association with a new eight-part PBS television series. Robert Hughes has called it "a love letter to America." This superb volume, which encompasses and enlarges upon the series, is an incomparably entertaining and insightful contemplation of its splendid subject.
- Sales Rank: #206040 in Books
- Published on: 1999-11-09
- Released on: 1999-11-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.00" h x 1.70" w x 7.70" l, 4.72 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 648 pages
- : Paperback: 648 pages, Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (November 9, 1999)
- Language: English, ISBN-10: 0375703659, ISBN-13: 978-0375703652
- Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.7 x 1.7 inches, Shipping Weight: 4.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
Amazon.com Review
Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes, author of the highly acclaimed study of modern art, The Shock of the New has made his home in the United States for the last 20 years. His latest undertaking, which he calls "a love letter to America," is his most massive: a 350-year history of art in America. Published in association with an eight-part PBS series of the same name, this is no scholarly text. With the same voracious wit and opinionated brilliance that have characterized his criticism for Time magazine, this tour-de-force spans three centuries of events, movements, and personalities that have shaped American society and its art. The reproductions are outstanding; 323 out of 365 are in rich, vivid color. Infinitely entertaining and perceptive, this superb book makes readers feel as if they have discovered a truer, hidden America. It seems certain to become one of the most important works in the art-historical canon.
From Library Journal
Art critic for Time magazine and an influential author (e.g., The Culture of Complaint, LJ 3/15/93), Hughes has written an indispensable guide, covering the sweep of art and architecture in America from the earliest Spanish works in New Mexico to contemporary art done in the late 1990s. All media are covered, as are the American incarnations of important movements such as Cubism, Impressionism, Minimalism, and more. Though Hughes has strong opinions on the relative importance of most artists or works in their oeuvre, his critiques are well founded, and he never simply omits an artist. A major flaw is the lack of footnotes and a bibliography, though, writes Hughes, this was purposely done in emulation of Kenneth Clark's Civilization and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. Ultimately, this is an excellent introduction to art in America for the novice and will provide a handy reference for more advanced researchers. Written as the companion to a PBS series, this title is sure to be in demand. Highly recommended for all libraries.
-?Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
It has been 16 years since Hughes' book and PBS series The Shock of the New (1981); now he has returned to that winning combination with this equally sensational history of American art. Determined to answer the question, "What can we say about Americans from the things and images they have made?" Hughes has orchestrated a spectacular integration of facts, observations, and insights in this ambitious, lively, and gloriously illustrated volume. Equally conversant in aesthetics, biography, and history, and utterly fascinated by personality, Hughes charts the evolution not only of American art but also of the American character. Careful to embrace the West as well as the East, Hughes defies convention by beginning his colorful chronicle not in New England but in Florida and the Southwest, and not with the British but with the Spanish. New York, of course, is the focus of much of the book, but the Southwest connection remains vital as Hughes discusses white artists' depictions of Plains Indians and, in the modern era, the work of Georgia O'Keeffe. The contrast between the influence of nature and of the city on American art is the fulcrum of Hughes' entire narrative as he offers vivid portraits of Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, and Arthur Dove as well as Thomas Eakins, George Bellows, and Edward Hopper, who captured both worlds. Hughes' descriptions of paintings are luscious and his analyses of sculptural works are exceptional, but it is his vision of American art as a great chain of inspiration and discovery--forged artist by artist, image by image--that infuses his history with drama and excitement. The PBS series airs this spring. Donna Seaman
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
One Big Bluff Job
By krebsman
Back in the 1980s I read a large survey book of American art from the New York Public Library that was very enlightening. Alas, I don’t remember the title or the author, but about 15 years later, I wanted to revisit the field and bought this book, which has languished on my bookshelf until now. I’m glad I waited until now to read it because Time has added the element of objectivity to my perception. The book came with what at that time was quite a pedigree. It was written by an allegedly knowledgeable art critic (TIME Magazine), who was an Australian and would therefore presumably look at American work with an outsider’s eye. It was underwritten by the BBC and Time-Warner and was published in conjunction with a television series on PBS. Everyone connected with this book should be ashamed of themselves, starting with the author. He, however, is dead now so it’s too late for that. The book purports to be a history of American art, connecting art with history. Alas, Hughes knew next to nothing of American history. He seems to have gleaned his “knowledge” of American history solely through the pop culture of 1970s America. There is factual misinformation on virtually every page, usually nothing major, but enough to make the whole thing blurry and sloppy, although fairly easy to shoehorn into his political interpretations. Most of it is just lazy, as if he just didn’t want to take the time to look it up. For example, he says that Pennsylvania Station was torn down “in the 1950s” when in fact it was demolished in 1963 to a great brouhaha and its destruction led to New York’s Landmark Preservation laws. A few pages later he states that Evelyn Nesbit (whom he describes as merely “Sanford White’s mistress,” ignoring the fact that she was an accomplished musical comedy performer—one of the original “Floradoras”) posed for a Saint-Gaudens’s nude statue that now adorns the American Wing courtyard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now, in E.L. Doctorow’s novel RAGTIME, Evelyn Nesbit did indeed pose for the statue, but need I remind anyone that Doctorow’s book is FICTION? It is well documented that two models were used for that statue, and neither of them was Ms. Nesbit. (Julia Baird posed for the body and Davida Clark for the face.) There are things like this all the way through the book. It was very distressing to me and cast a lack of credibility over everything else in the book. Although the author intimates up front that he is opinionated and selects which work to discuss on the basis of those opinions (although he doesn’t put it as clearly as I do), I find it difficult to respect opinions that are ill-informed and based on foggy half-truths and still other opinions.
Hughes has a lot of political axes to grind, with which he chops away, especially in the last third of the book when he changes the subject from art to art marketing. (It seems to me that with the advent of “abstract” art, American “Academic” art became afflicted with the Emperor’s New Clothes Syndrome. Hughes, for example, waxes poetic over the profundity of blobs and squiggles and lines slapped onto a canvas and given a pretentious title.) At this point, the whole book seems to fall through the looking glass into Hughes’s own pretentious and phony criticism of other people’s pretentious and phony criticism! It was at this time that critics, agents, gallery owners, auction houses, and museum directors became more important than the artists. “Art” became a commodity. And maybe to Hughes and other insiders it did. But Americans were, and still are, making art, even if the critics have chosen to ignore them.
A lot of Hughes’s interpretations are so subjective that they tell much more about Hughes than about the painting. For example, let us look at what he has to say about Winslow Homer’s Civil War painting, “Prisoners from the Front,” which shows a young Northern officer being presented with three new Confederate prisoners. According to Hughes it presents “a Union officer, General Francis Barlow, receiving three Confederate soldiers captured at the battle of Spotsylvania: a young, tough, defiant Virginia cavalryman, a grizzled old vet, and a lumpish ‘poor white’ boy who gazes stupidly, hands in his pockets, from the left of the group. This image has been praised for its evenhandedness, but it’s hard to see how, short of caricature, Homer could have come up with a clearer ideological image of the difference between the two sides of the Civil War. On the one hand, the frank articulate intelligence of Barlow, whose face is as sensitively drawn as that of Robert Shaw in Saint-Gaudens’s memorial on Boston Common, on the other, the mean-as-hell firebrand look of the Southern cavalier, with behind him the old man who is too old to change, and the cracker kid who is too dumb to develop.” What I see in the picture are people who were formerly countrymen who are now uncomfortable in the inimical roles that the War has assigned them. I don’t see the boy as being any less intelligent than the officer. And I don’t see what a statue by Saint-Gaudens of Robert Shaw has to do with a painting of General Barlow by Winslow Homer. Perhaps if Hughes had included a photo of the statue that we could compare, it might make sense, but he doesn’t. I think he just wanted to seem authoritative.
There are a lot of other criticisms I could level at the book too, like the colors on the color prints being slightly off, which is not noticeable most of the time, but shows badly on the illustration of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Mural with Blue Brushstroke” which renders it “Mural with Gray Brushstroke.” But this is the least of it. The major problem with the book is that it’s one big bluff and that Robert Hughes was a gifted con artist, who managed to con the BBC, Time Warner, PBS, Random House and the Book of the Month Club. Such incidents seem to happen periodically in America when book publishers and television magnates get together. Remember the scandal a few years ago when Oprah got conned into touting an allegedly true story that ultimately was exposed as fiction? I would put this in the same category.
This is now an old book. Surely there is a more reputable, more up-to-date history of American art available now. Buy that one instead of this one. Two stars.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Great introduction
By Kristina Sauerer
For a student of American Studies or anyone interested in American art this book gives a great introduction. It's very readable and the pictures are of great quality. Most interesting are the connections beetween history, religion, culture and art that Robert Hughes draws. They help integrating the American art history into the knowledge the reader might already have about American culture.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Thorough study of American art for professional and novice
By A Customer
The depth and breadth of Hughes' investigation of American art is remarkable. The book is detailed enough to provide students or art critics at a professional level adequate food for thought; at the same time, the book is incredibly easy to read and understandable for the first-time student. Interspersing historical fact with humor, Hughes clearly establishes a link between art and American history/culture. He misses nothing. Beginning with the Puritans, the author takes the reader on an artistic journey that begins in the churches of New England and ends in the scandals of the 1990s. Along the way, the reader, through viewing major artworks, examines the Revolutionary Era, the expansion of the West, ages of Division and Discovery as the U.S. is torn apart by a Civil War, Realism and Naturalism influences, symbolist movements, and the anxieties of the post-modern and current ages.
American Visions is truly a remarkable work: during the past academic year, I have rewritten my high school eleventh grade Humanities curriculum to include it as both a main text and research resource. My students, as well, have tremendous praise for this book since it makes the study of American history, literature, and art interdisicplinary and understandable.
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