A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920 will change standard theory on American art history with a new paradigm that places the origins of American modernism in the late 1870s. Crucially, it also demonstrates how the Tonalist movement became the driving force in the development of a distinctly American art form: mystic, visionary, and nostalgic, yet essentially modern in its progressive dynamic of non-narrative abstraction--a fundamentally expressive and symbolic art that set its seal on American art then and now. --Book Jacket.

When first-time author and artist Deborah Paris stepped into Lennox Woods, an old-growth southern hardwood forest in northeast Texas, she felt a disruption that was both spatial and temporal. Walking the remnants of an old wagon trail past ancient stands of pine, white oak, elm, hickory, sweetgum, maple, hornbeam, and red oak, she felt drawn into a reverie that took her back to “the beginning, both physically and metaphorically.” Painting the Woods: Nature, Memory and Metaphor explores the experience of landscape through the lens of art and art-making. It is a place-based meditation on nature, art, memory, and time, grounded in Paris’s experiences over the course of a year in Lennox Woods. Her account unfolds through the twin arcs of the changing seasons and her creative process as a landscape painter. In the tradition of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, narrative passages interweave with observations about the natural history of Lennox Woods, its flora and fauna, art history, the science of memory, Transcendentalist philosophy, the role of metaphor in creative work, and even loop quantum gravity theory. Each chapter explores a different aspect of the forest and a different step in the art-making process, illuminating our connection to the natural world through language, comprehension of time, and visual depictions of the landscape. The complex layers of the forest and Paris’s journey through it emerge as metaphors for the larger themes of the book, just as the natural world underpins the art-making drawn from it. Like the trail that winds through Lennox Woods, memory and time intertwine to provide a path for understanding nature, art, and our relationship to both.

The landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the foremost American artists of his generation. Born in Newburgh, New York, Inness studied the works of the old masters and, as a young man, painted in the reigning style of the Hudson River School. Within a few years, however, he found himself more attuned to the gestural, expressive approach of the Barbizon School. He greatly admired the free handling of paint and the expression of soulfulness in the works of Theodore Rousseau. Equally important were Inness's philosophical and spiritual concerns. Along with contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Walt Whitman, Inness studied the writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). During a trip to Italy in the early 1870s, Inness began to structure his landscapes around geometric forms, a development that may have reflected the Swedenborgian idea that the natural world corresponds to the spiritual world and that geometric forms possess spiritual identities. Through these and other compositional devices, Inness created paintings to inspire an almost "religious experience" in his viewers. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape includes forty color reproductions of Inness's most important paintings and presents both a chronological overview of Inness's life and a more focused treatment of the artist's main philosophical and religious preoccupations. It suggests resonances between Inness's visionary landscapes and the concurrent efforts, on the part of the psychologist/philosopher William James (1842-1910), to validate the existence of mystical states of mind. It shows Inness to have anticipated many of the most importanttenets of modernism, an achievement that continues to inspire contemporary audiences.

A groundbreaking survey of the school of expressive, symbolic landscape painting that gave rise to American modernism—newly revised and updated This magnificent volume, featuring more than 750 illustrations, is the first definitive account of the Tonalist movement. Based on original research, it tells how the progressive Tonalist landscape dethroned the Hudson River School in the late 1870s and remained the dominant school in American art until World War I. More provocatively, it also argues that Tonalism gave rise to American modernism, laying the groundwork for the artists of the Stieglitz Circle, and subsequently Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Wolf Kahn, and Richard Mayhew. A History of American Tonalism places the key figures of the movement—such as George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, and John Henry Twachtman—in their cultural context, which was influenced by such thinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and William James. It also examines the careers of more than sixty other Tonalist painters, lesser known but highly talented. This new edition of A History of American Tonalism includes more than one hundred new illustrations, as well as a new overview of the stylistic principles of Tonalism. It will continue to be essential for art lovers, artists, scholars, and anyone seeking a better understanding not only of the Tonalist movement but American art as a whole.

From literary Concord to the backwater canals of Venice, "Love’s Attraction" takes readers on a tantalizing and thought-provoking journey as Michael Collins, a Washington political fixer facing an impending bribery scandal, is suddenly confronted with a past he never knew and a legacy of heartbreak and deception from which he failed to escape. This is a mysterious, romantic novel that explores universal themes of identity: how memory (or its lack), talent and intemperate desires -- embodied in art as well as in our genes -- are passed down through families to influence our hidden selves. The novel speaks to the role of metamorphosis in our lives and how the transforming elixir of love’s attraction makes us most fully human.

Through an innovative manner of handling paint, a group of American artists around 1900 created deceptively simple canvases that convey images of shimmering transcience, visions suggested rather than delineated. Focusing on this singular aesthetic characteristic - softness - this book explores this painterly phenomenon.