ARTA: Fine Art & Art History: Home

The Brandywine Tradition in painting, founded by Howard Pyle and carried on by N. C. Wyeth and others, is rooted in superb draftsmanship, sumptuous handling of oil paint, and detailed visual observation (if not exhaustive historical research). The tradition was carried into our own time by Andrew Wyeth, among the most beloved of American artists. This book offers admirers of this school a chance to literally follow in these artists' footsteps. Journalist W. Barksdale Maynard provides six in-depth walking and driving tours that allow readers to visit the places where the Wyeths and Pyle painted in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. As Maynard explains, Andrew Wyeth's artistic process was influenced by Henry David Thoreau's nature-worship, and by simply walking daily. Maps and aerial photographs, as well as glorious full-color images and artworks of the landscape (many never reproduced before) illustrate the text. Maynard also presents an unauthorized and unbiased biographical portrait of Andrew Wyeth. Using interviews he conducted with family, friends, and neighbors, he shines a different light on the reclusive artist, emphasizing Wyeth's artistic debts to both Pyle and surrealism.

This book is a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students of the history of Australian art forms, from colonization to postmodernism, and for general readers with an interest in the nation's colonial art history.

What do we have in mind when we talk about African art? This book examines the shifting answers to that question. Fluidly written, it is the first book to explore the full historical arc of the invention and development of the category of "African art" and the academic field of African art history. It is meant to be an accessible guide through the history of the field, showing us how it started and has changed, from its contested beginnings until today. Author Peter Probst helps the reader understand how Africanists have continuously filled the notion of African art with new meanings, and why these shifts manifest wider societal transformations. The book covers three key stages in the field's history, starting with the late 19th through mid-20th century. Here Probst focuses on museums, processes of collecting, photography's role in disseminating visual culture, and how early anthropologists and art historians -- and artists -- imbued collected objects with values that spoke to scientific debates about the evolution and diffusion of culture prominent at the time. Probst then explores the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s, when African art history fell under the gaze of African American critique, and saw an explosion of interest in contemporary African art. Finally, he examines the postcolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of heritage, reparation, and the "crisis of representation." Probst believes that if the study of African art is to move in productive new directions, we must look to how the field is evolving in Africa for new models of inquiry.