PAINTINGS BY NINETEEN LIVING AMERICANS
Alfred H. Barr, Jr. [foreword]
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: PAINTINGS BY NINETEEN LIVING AMERICANS. New York: Museum of Modern Art, January 1930. First edition [2,250 copies]. Quarto. Thick printed wrappers with black cloth spine. 88 pp. 38 black and white illustrations. Catalog of 104 works. Spine crown and heel lightly worn. Wrappers lightly edgeworn. Pencil checkmarks to acknowledgements page. A very good or better copy.
8.5 x 11 exhibition catalog with 88 pages and 38 black and white illustrations. Catalog of the Museum of Modern Art's second exhibition — from December 13, 1929 to January 12, 1930 — and its first featuring American artists, selected by a vote of the trustees from a list of over one hundred contemporary artists. One of 2250 copies printed.
Catalog of 104 works by Charles E. Burchfield, Charles Demuth, Preston Dickinson, Lyonel Feininger, George Overbury "Pop" Hart, Edward Hopper, Bernard Karfiol, Rockwell Kent, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ernest Lawson, John Marin, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jules Pascin, John Sloan, Eugene Speicher, Maurice Sterne and Max Weber, with biographical notes and collections for each.
Barr wrote in his foreword that his selection was ''deliberately eclectic'' and that his aim was to offer a view of the ''principal tendencies in contemporary American painting.'' All the painters in the show are figurative. Their concern is everyday life. For the most part, their work is not narrative."
Several artists were included whose place in the pantheon of American art is now reasonably secure, including Charles E. Burchfield, Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe. Barr also included an Impressionist like Ernest Lawson, an Ash Can realist like John Sloan and several painters born abroad, like Max Weber, Jules Pascin and Yasuo Kuniyoshi.
Some of the painters are less familiar. George Overbury (Pop) Hart is represented by watercolors, the medium in which American artists may have felt most free before World War II. In his ''Shopper,'' Kenneth Hayes Miller, who is now best known as a teacher, saw in an ordinary woman the regal monumentality that is a trademark of Piero della Francesca. ''Buildings Near the River,'' by the largely forgotten Eugene Speicher, has a similar feeling for structure and a gritty weight.
The degree to which these artists have been dismissed or revered tends to conceal generational links. As different as they were, John Sloan, who is best known for painting the hard lyricism of New York City streets in the first years of the century, and John Marin, whose pictorial dynamism reflected the optimism about the modern city after World War I, were born a year apart. Rockwell Kent and Hopper - who brought to the classicist realism he shared with Kent an altogether different level of understanding and feeling - were born the same year.
—Michael Brenson, The New York Times, March 9, 1990