David M. Lubin

"Taking readers on a tour of the major historical events during and immediately after World War I, Grand Illusions considers the famous and forgotten artists and artworks that sought to make sense of America's first total war"--

American Art and the First World War

Grand Illusions

A vivid, engaging account of the artists and artworks that sought to make sense of America's first total war, Grand Illusions takes readers on a compelling journey through the major historical events leading up to and beyond US involvement in WWI to discover the vast and pervasive influence of the conflict on American visual culture. David M. Lubin presents a highly original examination of the era's fine arts and entertainment to show how they ranged from patriotic idealism to profound disillusionment. In stylishly written chapters, Lubin assesses the war's impact on two dozen painters, designers, photographers, and filmmakers from 1914 to 1933. He considers well-known figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Singer Sargent, D. W. Griffith, and the African American outsider artist Horace Pippin while resurrecting forgotten artists such as the mask-maker Anna Coleman Ladd, the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the combat artist Claggett Wilson. The book is liberally furnished with illustrations from epoch-defining posters, paintings, photographs, and films. Armed with rich cultural-historical details and an interdisciplinary narrative approach, David Lubin creatively upends traditional understandings of the Great War's effects on the visual arts in America.

This text looks at 'Titanic', the first film to earn over a billion dollars at the global box-office. This epic film reimagines one of the defining events of the 20th century through the lens of American romanticism.

Titanic

"From the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 to the declaration of war against Germany in 1917, American artists and designers used their well-honed visual skills to campaign for or against intervention. During this period, Old Glory assumed its present role as a patriotic icon. After the war, as Americans tried to forget the horrors their soldiers had encountered abroad, medical advances in facial reconstruction for disfigured combatants gave rise to cosmetic plastic surgery and a flourishing makeup industry, elements in a conspicuously new distaste for plainness and aging and obsession with youth and beauty. Flags and Faces analyzes these respective aspects of American visual culture in the shadow of the First World War"--Provided by publisher.

The Visual Culture of America's First World War

Flags and Faces

Alexander Nemerov

Jessica May

"A major survey of one of the world’s preeminent multimedia artists, Clifford Ross. American artist Clifford Ross is steeped in the traditions of modernism across a range of media, but his photographic and video practices over the past 30 years reveal one of the most incisive and technically sophisticated investigations into the nature of vision in the medium’s history. His art is characterized by relentless inventiveness and iteration; Ross explores the expressive possibilities of his subjects through newly created media, working at a variety of different scales. Viewers of his work might find themselves immersed in waves from a hurricane, printed with incredible resolution on 12-foot-tall panels of maple-veneered plywood or depicted as digital pixels crashing across enormous LED screens. Sightlines, the first major exhibition of Ross’ work in Maine, explores this relentless exploration of the natural world, prompting audiences to engage with the vitality and wonder of nature itself in an era of global climate change, as well as to reconsider the condition of the photograph. It showcases the range and depth of his photographs by presenting the inexhaustible variety of visual experiences he has created within his two primary subjects—a single mountain in Colorado, and hurricane-generated waves breaking along the coast of Long Island—demonstrating his capacity to convey creative energy through sustained looking at this limited number of subjects, and even through a limited number of source images. Ross uses his defined set of motifs to generate a large series of artwork across multiple media, each with a different and distinct character. Indeed, he has pushed the technical limitations of his chosen media to fundamentally new places, including through the invention of new technologies to achieve his vision, as with the case of his R1 camera. The exhibition promises to buoy viewers’ wonder at the experience of art and nature, helping them to reconnect with the instinct to want to “see more,” or “see more deeply”."--

David M. Lubin

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