BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

Henri de Toulouse –Lautrec’s production is closely related to Parisian worldly life and, coinciding with the height of the café dansant era, it deals with the world of the stars at the end of the century. The glories of Yvette Guilbert, Aristide Bruant, and Jane Avril were mostly recorded by the little artist’s incisive pencil, which portrayed them in action on stage or in poster presentations of the shows. The master’s work documented their triumphs step by step. Aristide Bruant, bound to Toulouse –Lautrec by a long friendship, was a modest railroad employee who became a famous popular singer and then opened his own cabaret, Le Mirliton , at 84 Boulevrad Rochechouart. Aristide Bruant France, 1851–1925. Composer and song-writer, he created his own genre of very realistic, often anarchical songs with lewd quips addressed to the audience. Jane Avril (1868-1943) dancer, singer and actress, Jane Avril did frenetic dances in the fashionable Parisian...

Renoir is the only great painter who never painted a sad painting. Moulin De la Galette is the greatest example of his radiant outlook. It is an anthem to youth and happiness, expressed in the pure colours and light palette of the Impressionists.  Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette 1876. Paris, Musée d'Orsay Renoir captures a party at a popular Montmartre locale, in the greatest ever painting en plein-air . Auguste Renoir was born in 1841 in Limoges, to a tailor father and factory worker mother. He was still a young child when his family moved to Paris. He trained as a craftsman, decorating first porcelain, then fans and curtains. In 1862 he had enough money to pay for painting lessons from Charles Gleyre at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he met Monet, Sisley, and Bazille. Along with them, he admired the masters of the previous generations, particularly Corbet, Corot, ad the landscape artists of the Barbizon school. He went with his companions to p...

Asher Brown Durand was a man who practices what he preached - "Go first to nature to learn to paint landscapes." The revolutionary aspect of that statement can only be understood in historical context. Coming at a time when American nature painting was dominated by European esthetics, he may well have been the first to advocate a direct response to nature, placing highest value on seeing and feeling for oneself. he urged painters to be influenced by weather, by atmosphere and light. And he took to the hills  and return with fresh, moisture-filled pictures. In 1855 he painted In the Woods, large and refined, and no doubt based on sketches completed in the field. From North Conway, New Hampshire, that year he wrote a letter describing in great detail the scene he found. In the Woods , 1855 Asher B. Durand (American, 1796–1886) The region of the White Mountains is justly famed for its impressive scenery: passages of the sublime and beautiful are not infrequent, and for th...

Fairfield Porter is an American Vuillard, a master of intricately composed, beautifully colored, light-filled canvases. He was born in Winnetka, Illinois, graduated from Harvard and has had a long, distinguished career as art critic as well as painter. He is author of a book on Thomas Eakins, wrote award winning articles on art for The Nation, and has also  lectured widely on esthetics at universities. It is as an artist, however, that Porter has achieved his preeminent reputation. During the long post World-War II period when abstract-expressionism dominated American art, Porter was one of the few painters of landscape to enjoy critical approval. He lived in Southhampton, Long Island, but summered regularly in Maine. Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) Interior With Dress Pattern Oil on canvas 1969 I like Maine very much but I do not always paint my best landscape there, because of something is beautiful in itself, that takes you away from making a painting. It makes you thin...

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....