Examines the portrayal of race in interwar American art. Focuses on the works of urban realist Reginald Marsh and his contemporaries to show how black figures acted as cultural and visual markers and embodied complex concerns about the presence of African Americans in urban centers.

Collects the best artwork created before, during and following the Civil War, in the years between 1859 and 1876, along with extensive quotations from men and women alive during the war years and text by literary figures, including Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. 15,000 first printing.

A study of Ben Shahn’s New Deal murals (1933–43) in the context of American Jewish history, labor history, and public discourse. Lithuanian-born artist Ben Shahn learned fresco painting as an assistant to Diego Rivera in the 1930s and created his own visually powerful, technically sophisticated, and stylistically innovative artworks as part of the New Deal Arts Project’s national mural program. InBen Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene author Diana L. Linden demonstrates that Shahn mined his Jewish heritage and left-leaning politics for his style and subject matter, offering insight into his murals’ creation and their sometimes complicated reception by officials, the public, and the press. In four chapters, Linden presents case studies of select Shahn murals that were created from 1933 to 1943 and are located in public buildings in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri. She studies Shahn’s famous untitled fresco for the Jersey Homesteads—a utopian socialist cooperative community populated with former Jewish garment workers and funded under the New Deal—Shahn’s mural for the Bronx Central Post Office, a fresco Shahn proposed to the post office in St. Louis, and a related one-panel easel painting titled The First Amendment located in a Queens, New York, post office. By investigating the role of Jewish identity in Shahn’s works, Linden considers the artist’s responses to important issues of the era, such as President Roosevelt’s opposition to open immigration to the United States, New York’s bustling garment industry and its labor unions, ideological concerns about freedom and liberty that had signifcant meaning to Jews, and the encroachment of censorship into American art. Linden shows that throughout his public murals, Shahn literally painted Jews into the American scene with his subjects, themes, and compositions. Readers interested in Jewish American history, art history, and Depression-era American culture will enjoy this insightful volume.

This volume features artists who brought a new sophistication and elegancento American art in the three decades before World War I. Wealthyndustrialists eager to acquire culture began to patronize native artists whoad achieved international recognition. John Singer Sargent, Irving Wiles andecilia Beaux created portraits of these new patrons, while John La Farge andugustus Saint-Gaudens made luxurious adornments for their homes. One groupf painters - including Louis Comfort Tiffany, Frederick Arthur Bridgman,enry Ossawa Tanner and Charles Sprague Pearce - responded especially to theascnation with exotic Middle Eastern, Egyptian or "Oriental" cultures thatharacterized this age of international imperialism. The educated and refinedspects of Gilded Age culture are expressed here in Renaissance-inspiredaintings by Abbott Thayer and Mary Cassatt. Romantic literary works byisionary Albert Pinkham Ryder symbolize the idealized strivings of thiseneration, while the rugged masculine landscapes of Winslow Homer emblemizehe struggle and conflict that marked this period of contending social and

-World War I and American Art provides an unprecedented look at the ways in which American artists reacted to the war. Artists took a leading role in chronicling the war, crafting images that influenced public opinion, supported mobilization efforts, and helped to shape how the war's appalling human toll was memorialized. The book brings together paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, posters, and ephemera, spanning the diverse visual culture of the period to tell the story of a crucial turning point in the history of American art---