Charles Wysocki delights in his native land and portrays the joys of its early days so lyrically that he has become the country's leading painter of Americana. In AN AMERICAN CELEBRATION, his premier collection, the artist offers over 200 full-color paintings. Text by Betty Ballantine perfectly embellishes his sense of time and place, providing a further look into American lore, history, innovations, and accomplishments. Selection of the Literary Guild. Excerpted in Family Circle and Americana magazine. 118,000 copies in print.

For more than a generation, critics and scholars have been revising and expanding the customary definition of American art. A tradition once assumed to be mainly European and oriented toward painting and sculpture has been enriched by the inclusion of other media such as ceramics, needlework, and illustration, and the work of previously marginalized groups such as Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Now, in a brilliant combination of original scholarship and synthesis, Frances Pohl's Framing America provides the first comprehensive survey of this new, enlarged vision of American art.

Here are the many strands of North America's history and visual culture: the first contacts of the Spanish with the Aztecs and other Native Americans; the post-Revolutionary definition of nationhood; the visionary feeling for landscape and nature; the images of social and military conflict of the nineteenth century; and the tempering of the twentieth century's heady plunge into modernism by the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the culture wars.

Pohl's account is an adroitly inclusive fusion of many themes. Her discussion of the early definition of nationhood includes the traditional painters of the grand manner: West, Copley, Trumbull, and Stuart. But Stuart's portraits of George Washington, for instance, are also discussed in relation to portrayals of Washington in wood, marble, and embroidery, and the vogue for "mourning pictures" after Washington's death, which create a domestic counterpoint to the more institutional portrayals. Pohl's description of the great landscape tradition of Cole, Durand, and Church shows how the optimistic assertion of a sublimesense of the American nation was accompanied by a sense of loss as the nation expanded westward.

As our appreciation of the rich cultural diversity of American life has grown, our sense of American art -- its sources, its motives, its possibilities -- has also become more varied. Fresh and contemporary, Framing America embraces what our history can tell us about our art and what our art can tell us about our past and present.

Told in a unique first-person creative nonfiction narrative, Women Artists of the West profiles five important women artists who lived, worked, and created in the early years of the twentieth century--Georgia O'Keeffe, Maria Martinez, Dorothea Lange, Laura Gilpin, Mary-Russell Colton.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is hailed as the most important proponent of the Pop art movement. A critical and creative observer of American society, he explored key themes of consumerism, materialism, media, and celebrity.

Drawing on contemporary advertisements, comic strips, consumer products, and Hollywood's most famous faces, Warhol proposed a radical reevaluation of what constituted artistic subject matter. Through Warhol, a Campbell's soup can and Coca Cola bottle became as worthy of artistic status as any traditional still life. At the same time, Warhol reconfigured the role of the artist. Famously stating "I want to be a machine," he systematically reduced the presence of his own authorship, working with mass-production methods and images, as well as dozens of assistants in a studio he dubbed the Factory.

This book introduces Warhol's multifaceted, prolific oeuvre, which revolutionized distinctions between "high" and "low" art and integrated ideas of living, producing, and consuming that remain central questions of modern experience.

About the series

Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:

a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance

a concise biography

approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

The penny bank craze of the twentieth century began quietly enough. Here, a slotted pottery pig from Scotland. There, a grimacing human face made in Bennington, Vermont. In 1793, penny banks first appeared in America, along with the first large copper pennies. Those who mistrusted paper currency saved their "hard" money in vessels of pottery, glass, and tin. In the 1890s, "China Pig" with a slit in his back sold for a dime. Plump pigs and pennies went together like thrift and future success. To this day, these iconic examples of American folk art and vernacular design are prized additions to museum and personal collections throughout the country. Money in the Bank details a wide range of extraordinary still and mechanical banks acquired by Katherine Kierland Herberger, who initially discovered the pleasure and variety of toy banks as gifts for her son. Over 1,200 purchases later, she donated the collection to The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. All are pictured here in full color for the first time. Acclaimed art historian Karal Ann Marling contributes an essay to the book tracing the importance of banks in popular culture, and an introduction narrates Herberger's extensive collecting activities. Money in the Bank is a lavishly illustrated and remarkably comprehensive catalog that demonstrates the charm and whimsy, as well as the significance, of toy banks in America. Corine Wegener is assistant curator at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Karal Ann Marling is professor of American studies and art history at the University of Minnesota. Distributed for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts

This book explores the world of American folk art collectors--people who saw the beauty and value of the folk-art portraits, weathervanes, and carvings that mainstream America had hitherto relegated to attics, barns, and dust bins. Although pioneer collectors sought out and preserved objects that are today regarded as icons, little has been known of their motivations, aesthetics, or display techniques. Unlike the mainly white, professional, male collectors of furniture, silver, and other traditional decorative arts who were the subject of Elizabeth Stillinger's classic study The Antiquers, the earliest folk art collectors were a bohemian crowd made up of women, artists, immigrants, oddballs, and outsiders. They were drawn to folk art not by its prestige value but by its artistic, instructive, and ethnological significance. A Kind of Archeology begins by examining the evolution of the concept of folk art, relating it to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movements such as romanticism, nationalism, arts and crafts, and colonial revivalism. Four sections follow, each presenting a category of collector--antiquarian and ethnologist, modernist, decorator and aesthete, and patriot and nationalist--and offering portraits of individual collectors and dealers. The book closes with the exhibition The Flowering of American Folk Art, 1776-1876, which opened in 1974. The show was so successful that prices shot skyward, and folk objects, after a century of being disregarded, misunderstood, then championed by a few enthusiasts and gradually accepted in a small segment of the art world, finally entered the realm of highly desirable and collectible art.

This title showcases the work of 15 artists showcased by DirtyPilot.com during its inaugural year.

-Accompanies the touring exhibition A Handsome Cupboard of Plate: Early American Silver in the Cahn Collection organized by, and starting at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from December 1, 2012 - March 2013, moving onto the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, April 20, 2013 - November 3, 2013, the Missouri History Museum from November 23, 2013 - March 2, 2014 and finally to the The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, from May 3, 2014 - May 25, 2015 Strength in design and fineness of craftsmanship unify the early American domestic and presentation silver assembled by Paul and Elissa Cahn and published together for the first time. Beginning in Boston with a caudle cup marked by Jeremiah Dummer, America's first native-born silversmith, and objects from the shop of patriot silversmith Paul Revere, the book then focuses on New York, where a distinctive style reflecting the Dutch heritage of that region emerged, and afterward on Philadelphia, where generations of the Quaker Richardson family supplied goods of the "best sort, but plain." Pride of place is given to the work of New York Jewish silversmith Myer Myers and his shop, including a presentation waiter made for Theodorus Van Wyck. Accompanying a touring exhibition of the Cahn collection, the book encapsulates some of the ethnic, religious, and political diversity of early America and sets the silver in its social and historical context

Hundreds of photographs highlight a tour of the historic Brandywine Valley region of Pennsylvania and Delaware, featuring journeys to the famed Brandywine River Museum, the Longwood Gardens, and other notable museums, estates, and garden landmarks.