Peter John Brownlee – författare

More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, focusing on Lincoln's determination to save the Union, or highlighting the cruelty of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet battlefields were not the only landscapes altered by the war. Countless individuals saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Home Front reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front.Through contributions from leading scholars, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton industry; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battlefronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation's consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation's past, present, and future. A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.

A bold and richly illustrated survey of the traditions and stylistic evolution of landscape painting in the Americas As nations in the Americas gained independence in the early 19th century, a pictorial landscape tradition emerged. By 1840, landscape painting had become the primary medium for articulating conceptions of land and nation in the development of North and South American cultural identity. Picturing the Americas offers the first comprehensive treatment of this genre on both American continents, bringing into dialogue the landscape traditions of artists practicing between 1840 and 1940. The catalogue is brilliantly illustrated with 260 color images, including works by U.S. artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Canadian artists Joseph Legare, Frances Anne Hopkins, and Lawren Harris; Mexico's Jose Maria Velasco, Uruguay's Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Brazil's Tarsila do Amaral, among many others. Leading scholars offer a Pan-American perspective on these landscape traditions: essays consider the emergence of modernism, as well as how the development of landscape imagery reflects the intricately intertwined geographies and sociopolitical histories of the peoples, nations, regions, and diasporas of the two continents. Published in association with the Art Gallery of OntarioExhibition Schedule:Art Gallery of Ontario (06/20/15-09/20/15)Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (11/06/15-01/18/16)Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil (02/27/16-05/29/16)

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an entirely new understanding of vision.The Commerce of Vision integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision: from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians, from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly integrated with the machinery of commodity production and highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in antebellum America.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out of the intersection of these various discourses and practices emerged an entirely new understanding of vision.The Commerce of Vision integrates cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to explore how vision was understood and experienced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter John Brownlee examines a wide selection of objects and practices that demonstrate the contemporary preoccupation with ocular culture and accurate vision: from the birth of ophthalmic surgery to the business of opticians, from the typography used by urban sign painters and job printers to the explosion of daguerreotypes and other visual forms, and from the novels of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville to the genre paintings of Richard Caton Woodville and Francis Edmonds. In response to this expanding visual culture, antebellum Americans cultivated new perceptual practices, habits, and aptitudes. At the same time, however, new visual experiences became quickly integrated with the machinery of commodity production and highlighted the physical shortcomings of sight, as well as nascent ethical shortcomings of a surface-based culture. Through its theoretically acute and extensively researched analysis, The Commerce of Vision synthesizes the broad culturing of vision in antebellum America.

The Terra Foundation for American Art uses its impressive collection of American art spanning a two-hundred-year period to fulfill its mission. Since the Foundation's establishment in 1978, it has sought to share the collection's extraordinary pieces by renowned American artists like Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Edward Hopper with an international audience, encouraging the study of American art around the world. Conversations with the Collection helps to realize the Foundation's mission of serving as a "museum without walls," bringing art and scholarship to a global audience. The handbook entries and scholars' responses to the artworks that comprise these Conversations provide fascinating insight not only into the collection and its holdings, but also into the Foundation's history of making these works accessible to art historians and art lovers beyond the United States. The texts achieve a range of objectives, describing the significance of individual pieces in the collection, movements and themes that provide context for these works, and the Foundation's innovative objective of bringing its collection to an international audience. Indeed, this distinctive handbook demonstrates the success of the Foundation's mission: the works in its collection have had an impact on worldwide audiences, leading to a richer appreciation for American art.