A History of American Tonalism: 1880-1920 is the first definitive account of the Tonalist movement that galvanized America's artistic life in the decades around 1900. With more than 600 color and black-and-white illustrations, A History offers both a chronological narrative and contextual re-evaluation of this long neglected--and crucial--missing link in American art. Through the splendor of the intimate and spirit-filled Tonalist landscape, the reader will be treated to a voyage of discovery as America's turn-of-the-century culture is revealed. In the works of George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, John Henry Twachtman, and more than sixty of America's finest artists, in concert with the voices of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, William James, and the finest critics of the period, the spiritual roots of Theodore Roosevelt's reformist era are vividly brought alive.
This indispensable resource for art of this period includes path-breaking scholarship on a considerable number of major artists. In addition to the more renowned Tonalists, a host of lesser known but highly talented artists are identified for the first time, including biographical information and color reproductions to elucidate their chronological and stylistic development. Based on new research and many never-before-published images, this treatise tells the fascinating story of how the progressive Tonalist landscape first dethroned the Hudson River School in the late 1870s and then went on to become the dominant school in American art until World War I. This lavishly illustrated volume explores the modernist dynamic within the Tonalist movement that saw the decorative landscapes of Aesthetic Tonalism of the 1880s and 1890s give way to Expressive Tonalism after 1900, which in turn laid the groundwork for the modernist artists in the Stieglitz Circle, and subsequently Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, and post-modern Tonalists like Wolf Kahn.
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.
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