BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

The specialized sciences of our times are concentrating on the study of the three constants in life: the sexual instinct, the sentiment of death,  and the anguish of space-time. Dali. According to Ballard , the uneasy marriage of reason and nightmare which had dominated the 20th century has given birth to an increasingly surreal world. More and more, we see that the events of our own times make sense in terms of surrealism rather than in any other view - whether the grim facts of the death-camps. Hiroshima and Vietnam, or our far more ambiguous unease at organ transplant surgery and the extra-uterine foetus, the confusions of the media landscape with its emphasis on the glossy, lurid, and bizarre, its hunger for the irrational and sensational. The art of Salvador Dali, an extreme metaphor at a time when only the extreme will do, constitutes a body of prophesy about ourselves unequalled in accuracy since Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents." Voyeurism, self-dis...

While much has been written of the contribution to American art-making of European exiles such as the surrealists, rather less has been written of the ways in which American art history and art making itself was reconceptualised during the 1930s and 1940s following the exodus of academics from Europe. John Rewald was one of several emigre scholars escaping conflict who was welcomed into the USA. Rewald's 1946 The History of Impressionism may seem a strange choice on writing about American art but it is relevant for several reasons. First published in 1946 with the support of MoMa New York and subsequently revised across five editions, it was a publishing phenomenon, although it was not published in Great Britain until 1973. There were sequels: in 1956 Post Impressionism From Van Gogh to Gauguin, again not published in Britain until 1978, and then Gauguin to Matisse, and numerous collections of letters by post-impressionists such as Cezanne and Gauguin. In a post-war period when pub...

Charles Sheeler ,  River Rouge Plant , 1932. Oil on canvas, 20 × 24 1/8 in. (50.8 × 61.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York American painter and photographer of industrial subjects By Alexandra A. Jopp Charles Sheeler, one of America’s leading Modernists, found formal beauty in machinery, the principal emblem of modernity Charles Sheeler, a central figure in American Realism and one of the most interesting and ambitious American artists, was known for producing compelling images of the Machine Age. During his prolific career, Sheeler employed machines, factory complexes near Detroit, New York skyscrapers, locomotive engines, power plants and barns as subjects for his pictures and used painting, drawing, and photography in his works, often in combination. Trained in Impressionist approaches to landscape themes, he experimented with painterly compositions before finding and mastering his outwardly depopulated landscape style, now often called precisionism....

Portrait  John Singleton Copley was America's foremost painter of the 18th century. He was born in Boston, the son of Richard and Mary Copley, who had recently immigrated from Ireland. The death of young Copley's father and his mother's subsequent marriage to the English-trained engraver Peter Pelham in 1748 introduced the youth to an atmosphere where prints, paintings, and artist's supplies were familiar household accessories. Copley certainly receive dome training from his stepfather. The copies of old masters remaining in the studio at one time occupied by John Smibert gave him some idea of the traditions of European painting.  Copley's earliest works, some of them copies after allegorical prints, date from 1753 and 1754; by 1755 he had established himself as a professional painter in Boston, turning out stiff but competent likeness in the manner of John Greenwood and Joseph Badger. The appearance of Joseph Blackburn in New England  in 1754 had an immedi...

Reuben Tam.View from Blackhead, 1959. Reuben Tam was born in Hawaii, educated at the University of Hawaii and at Columbia, lived in Manhattan, and had summered for many years on Monhegan island off the cost of Maine. He was the senior painting instructor at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and has shared his insights with students at such widely separated institutions as Oregon State University in Corvallis and Skowhegan in Maine. On Monhegan, his perennial rock garden (which winter storms oblige his perennially to restore each May) is the joy of the island. He was first shown in New York by Edith Gregor Halpert at her Downtown Gallery in 1945 and today his work is included in the permanent collections of almost every major museum in the United States. A painter of the eventful in nature, Tam joins in his art a profound understanding of how nature works with a poet's gift for the lyric impulse. Since he is a poet as well as a painter, two of his poems are published here for t...