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Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) marched to a different drum than his fellow American painters in the second half of the nineteenth century. When confreres explored mountain ranges, he discovered marshlands; when they settled in New York City to establish reputations, he continued a peripatetic existence; when others were repeating tired variations on a single theme, he struck out in new directions. His marsh scenes, storm paintings, orchid and hummingbird pictures, and late reclining floral still lifes: These are American originals. Heade can lay claim to a more diverse and creative body of work than almost any of his colleagues, as… Full Review

Laurie Norton Moffatt, Director of the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, forthrightly states her agenda in her essay "The People's Painter": "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People invites reflection on Rockwell as a force in twentieth-century American art and culture" (24). Moffatt reorients the critical debate by emphasizing Rockwell's cultural influence, rather than dithering about his status as either an artist or an illustrator. The admixture of popular culture studies and art history introduces Rockwell into an expanded art historical canon that embraces both avant-garde and kitsch. The exhibition catalogue reflects Moffatt's methodology: Fourteen art historians, historians, and… Full Review

Cities as art centers have not always had the attention they deserve, especially in art exhibitions, because of the daunting problems of scale as well as the problems of representation of both the architectural environment and the unmovable monuments. There have been some truly notable exceptions, with particular relevance to this ambitious effort on Rome: Philadelphia's own Second Empire Paris exhibition as well as Detroit's 18th-Century Naples (1981). Once more Philadelphia has taken on a formidable "millennium show" challenge, and has done it justice. This exhibition is a revelation as well as a revision. The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome… Full Review

"Our studio now enjoys the same advantages as the studio of the men, that is to say, we draw from the nude every day from the same model in the same pose as they do; consequently we can now paint compositions of more importance than before." So wrote the Ukrainian painter Marie Bashkirtseff in November 1880. The studio to which she referred was one of the ateliers of the Académie Julian, located in the center of Paris, where she had been studying since 1877. That the women of the Académie Julian were now able to work directly from the nude—and… Full Review

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition of the same title, organized as "the first to focus in-depth on O'Keeffe's aesthetics through an examination of her paintings of objects" (vii). This formalist approach might seem a curiously retardataire method to employ nowadays, but those familiar with O'Keeffe scholarship will relish the focus on the artist's work rather than her self. The first museum to purchase work from Georgia O'Keeffe was the Phillips Collection, in 1926. At the same institution, curator and project director Elizabeth Hutton Turner conceived and carried out this new exhibition. Though the works in the installation are formally grouped… Full Review

The most substantial exhibition devoted to Gustave Courbet's paintings since the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Courbet Reconsidered a decade ago was presented at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne last winter from November through March. It then traveled to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, where it closed on May 30. Titled Courbet: Artiste et Promoteur de Son Oeuvre, it was organized by Lausanne's director, Jürg Zutter, in collaboration with the noted Courbet scholar Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The well-illustrated catalogue contains valuable essays by Patricia Mainardi and Michael Clarke as well as by the two organizers. Although somewhat difficult to use… Full Review

Shortly before the Federal Security Administration photographer Jack Delano set out for New England in the early 1940s, the program director, Roy Stryker, provided him with a shooting script. Stryker encouraged Delano to "pour maple syrup" on his subjects and "mix [them] well with white clouds." If this script corrupted Delano's "photographic soul," Stryker did not give "a damn . . . with Hitler at our doorstep" (quoted, 137). One of Delano's photographs, Picknickers along Highway 12A Hanover, New Hampshire (1941), is included in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Picturing Old New England at the National Museum of American… Full Review

Identifying the sources of Tibetan Buddhist painting has been the object of much scholarship in recent years, a pursuit that has often been frustrated by the scarcity of materials. While almost nothing except a few Dunhuang paintings in Tibetan style remains from the period of the First Conversion in the eighth century, about 500 works have survived from the years between the eleventh-twelfth century chidar, or Second Conversion under the guidance of the Indian sage Atisha, and Tsongkhapa's founding of the Gelugpa order in the early fifteenth century. This number represents only a sample of an artistic inventory largely lost… Full Review

The Dahesh Museum once again offered a valuable exhibition that expanded the offerings of art on view in New York. Dedicated to the display of "academic" art, its exhibitions have focused on the discarded artists of the modern period—Bouguereau, Rosa Bonheur, Alexandre Cabanel among others. This exhibition was no exception. While English art is on permanent display in New York at the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it tends toward the well-trod areas of eighteenth-century English portraiture and early nineteenth-century landscape paintings, whereas Victorian paintings are in short supply. Briefly for a few precious months, this exhibition… Full Review

Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, currently mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's new West Wing (the onetime May Company Building on Wilshire) is a chronological overview of the artist's career as a painter, comprising seventy works from 1882 to 1890. Imposing chestnuts (The Potato Eaters, Vincent's Bedroom) and masterful achievements (The Harvest (Blue Cart), Blossoming Almond Branch) co-mingle with pictures of modest scale and accomplishment. The unevenness of the offering—in addition to indicating the organizing institution's reluctance to lend its full arsenal of "masterpieces" documents the artist's sometimes warring preoccupations and… Full Review