Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth-Century American Art

San Marino, CA, and University Park, PA: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens; and Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, 2010. Softbound. Color pictorial wraps with french flaps, [ix]74 pp, 59 illustrations, mostly color. VG (May have few marks from previous gallery owner.). Item #127682
ISBN: 9780911209686

From the publisher: In Taxing Visions, Leo Mazow and Kevin Murphy explore taxes, rents, economic depression, and financial inequity as subject matter in several visually provocative paintings and works on paper. Although this period is often identified artistically with leisure-laden impressionist landscapes, flowing-with-abundance still life paintings, and class-conscious official portraits, practitioners working in a variety of stylistic idioms reckoned with financial panics and occupational turmoil that marked the Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and early Progressive eras. These paintings, drawings, and prints demonstrate with sometimes startling clarity the experience of economic downturn, ultimately picking up where facts, figures, and the printed word leave off. Featured artists include William Michael Harnett, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as several lesser-known individuals. Taxing Visions shows satire and protest playing out through a sizable body of work, with artists confronting recession and depression with equal parts reportage, invective, humor, and hope. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition held in two locations September 2010 - May 2011.

Price: $20.00