Carl Wimar

Carl Wimar

Painters and the American West

"This book offers a tour of a collection of paintings of the American West still in private hands. The Anschutz Collection covers all the ground expected in a wide-ranging, major survey, yet still has plenty of room for surprises. Every phase in the history of American art since the 182Os is included. There are pictures of impressive quality by lesser-known artists and examples from all the major painters who have depicted the West. You'll discover works by artists such as Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Jan Matulka, and John Henry Twachtman, who painted western subjects only rarely, and pictures by those whose subjects were predominantly western. The collection is particularly rich in paintings made in Taos and Santa Fe during the first half of the twentieth century, when major American artists often found inspiration and stylistic renewal in the Southwest. Among the American masters represented here are George Bellows, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Ernest Blumenschein, George Catlin, Stuart Davis, Asher B. Durand, George Inness, John Marin, Alfred Jacob Miller, Thomas Moran, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and Walter Ufer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Great Heart of the Republic

In the battles to determine the destiny of the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, St. Louis, then at the hinge between North, South, and West, was ideally placed to bring these sections together. At least, this was the hope of a coterie of influential St. Louisans. But their visions of re-orienting the nation's politics with Westerners at the top and St. Louis as a cultural, commercial, and national capital crashed as the country was tom apart by convulsions over slavery, emancipation, and Manifest Destiny. While standard accounts frame the coming of the Civil War as strictly a conflict between the North and the South who were competing to expand their way of life, Arenson shifts the focus to the distinctive culture and politics of the American West, recovering the region’s importance for understanding the Civil War and examining the vision of western advocates themselves, and the importance of their distinct agenda for shaping the political, economic, and cultural future of the nation.