Review by Choice Review
This book is very useful and informative as the catalog of an exhibition that will travel from the Brooklyn Museum to the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC, and to the Detroit Institute of Arts, by the end of this year. But it is much more than the usual exhibition catalog. In her introductory essay, Hobbs (a Smithsonian research collaborator) gives us the first full-length treatment of Dewing's career to be done since the artist's own day (he lived from 1851 to 1938). Hobbs explores how Dewing's aesthetics changed as he grew older, how his concept of beauty developed over the course of several decades; and how Dewing was influenced by his patrons and fellow artists. "Beauty Unmasked: Ironic Meaning in Dewing's Art," the contribution by Barbara Dayer Gallati (Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum), is a brilliant piece of scholarly detective work and writing. Gallati shows not only that Dewing was recording, in a general way, the difficulties of being a "modern" woman in a fast-changing America, but that he was also recording, unwittingly, his own hostilities and confusion about the "modern" woman. In addition to these two essays and a catalog of the exhibition, the book contains a short piece about Dewing's use of frames, a chronology, and hundreds of illustrations, many in color. Highly recommended. General; undergraduate; graduate; faculty. M. W. Sullivan Villanova University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Two neglected American painters of radically different temperaments and styles are rediscovered. Dewing (1851^-1938) was a "big, broad-shouldered man with a prickly personality," not the sort of artist you'd expect to create ethereal paintings of elegant women. At a casual glance, these dreamy paintings seem soothing, far removed from the hustle and bustle of Dewing's newly industrialized, shamelessly money-grubbing epoch, but as Hobbs and her contributor, Barbara Gallati, explain, there's much more going on in Dewing's strangely elusive canvases than first meets the eye. Hobbs deftly describes Dewing's social milieu, close friendship with architect Stanford White, and his influences, from Botticelli to Vermeer to Whistler. Gallati analyzes Dewing's unique aesthetic, which she describes as resulting in "deliberate thematic subterfuge." She concludes, and rightly so, that much of his work's ambiguity stems from a very modern preoccupation with paint and surface rather than with image. Gutmann (1869^-1936) is Dewing's complete opposite. His robust impressionist and postimpressionist paintings are electric with bright, contrasting color and animated brush strokes, and Gutmann obviously reveled in images drawn from real life. His landscapes are satisfyingly concrete, sun drenched, and welcoming; his portraits warm and personable, his still lifes absolutely voluptuous. A German immigrant who settled first in Virginia and then in New York, Gutmann was an illustrator and teacher as well as a tireless painter. He exhibited widely, but his works were, oddly enough, never purchased by museums, one reason for his having dropped from sight. North, happily, has resurrected the man and his work in this lively volume. Gutmann was not the most original of painters, but he had an ebullient love for pure, rampant color and the gift of translating his joie de vivre into art. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
