Art: Books

A beautifully illustrated history of bird art. Painting birds in the wild presents one of the most difficult challenges for an artist. The subject is usually in constant motion, is intricately detailed, and can fly away at a moment's notice. Birds tells the remarkable story of the development of bird art through the ages. From the skillfully executed, decorative but often fanciful, early images of birds through the Age of Exploration to the present day, this book examines this fantastically vibrant art and science. The book presents an outstanding selection of images, some never before published, from the unrivaled collection of The Natural History Museum in London, the world's most significant repository of natural science specimens and original artworks.

Culture and revolution : the politics of context -- Early beginnings -- Murals of the 1920s : festival, revolt, and tradition -- Rivera and Orozco in the 1930s : re-envisioning nationhood -- Technology of utopia : visions of modernity -- Orozco and Rivera : 1940-1957 -- Siqueiros, 1940-1971 : the ideology of invention.

Conjunction with the exhibition held at the Galerie nationales du Grand Palais, April 19-August 8, 1994, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 27, 1994-January 8, 1995.
Loyrette's contributions translated from French.

Collected papers from the twenty-third North American Print Conference, Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y., Aug., 1995.

Avant-garde art between 1910 and 1950 is well known for its use of "primitive" imagery, often borrowed from traditional cultures in Africa and Oceania. Less recognized, however, is the use United States artists made of Native American art, myth, and ritual to craft a specifically American Modernist art. In this groundbreaking study, W. Jackson Rushing comprehensively explores the process by which Native American iconography was appropriated, transformed, and embodied in American avant-garde art of the Modernist period. Writing from the dual perspectives of cultural and art history, Rushing shows how national exhibitions of Native American art influenced such artists, critics, and patrons as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Henri, John Marin, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and especially Jackson Pollock, whose legendary drip paintings he convincingly links with the curative sand paintings of the Navajo.

The volume and accompanying exhibition feature 56 paintings from the Smithsonian's unique collection created for the Public Works of Art program during the Great Depression.