Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

"Published on the occasion of the opening of the Clark Center, July 4, 2014."

Tadao Ando at the Clark

Shadow and Light

Roger Benjamin

David Prochaska

Renoir made two journeys to Algeria, in 1881 & 1882. He was the only Impressionist to paint Orientalist themes, but this aspect of his work has been little studied. This book places Renoir in the unfamiliar context of the French Orientalist tradition.

Renoir and Algeria

"Winslow Homer (1836-1910) is one of the core figures of 19th-century American art. While most well-known for his oil paintings of Civil War scenes and the windswept Atlantic coastline, Homer's oeuvre encompasses a variety of themes, ranging from childhood games through the life-and-death struggles of man and nature. The Clark Art Institute holds one of the greatest collections of Homer's work across all media, including wood engravings, etchings, watercolors, drawings, and paintings from nearly all phases of his career. The collection was assembled predominately by Robert Sterling Clark (1877-1956), who purchased his first Winslow Homer painting in 1915, followed by Two Guides in 1916 and maintained a passion for the artist throughout the rest of his collecting career, acquiring the small oil Playing a Fish in 1955. This book examines Robert Sterling Clark as a collector of Homer and the Clark's extensive holdings of the artist. Over thirty entries discuss the role of individual works in Homer's oeuvre and their larger significance to the art world. An illustrated checklist provides information on titles, dates, and media for the entire collection."--Publisher description.

The Clark Collection

Winslow Homer

Exhibit Twenty-nine, May 1965, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Curator's Choice

Old English Silver: Coffee Pots and Salvers

Marc Simpson

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is one of the core figures of 19th-century American art. While most well-known for his oil paintings of Civil War scenes and the windswept Atlantic coastline, Homer's oeuvre encompasses a variety of themes, ranging from childhood games through the life-and-death struggles of man and nature. The Clark Art Institute holds one of the greatest collections of Homer's work across all media, including wood engravings, etchings, watercolors, drawings, and paintings from nearly all phases of his career. The collection was assembled predominately by Robert Sterling Clark (1877–1956), who purchased his first Winslow Homer painting in 1915, followed by Two Guides in 1916 and maintained a passion for the artist throughout the rest of his collecting career, acquiring the small oil Playing a Fish in 1955. This book examines Robert Sterling Clark as a collector of Homer and the Clark's extensive holdings of the artist. Over thirty entries discuss the role of individual works in Homer's oeuvre and their larger significance to the art world. An illustrated checklist provides information on titles, dates, and media for the entire collection.

Wanda M. Corn

Through an innovative manner of handling paint, a group of American artists around 1900 created deceptively simple canvases that convey images of shimmering transcience, visions suggested rather than delineated. Focusing on this singular aesthetic characteristic - softness - this book explores this painterly phenomenon.

Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly

Like Breath on Glass

Richard Kendall

Edgar Degas

Douglas W. Druick

Joslyn Art Museum

Baltimore Museum of Art

Arthur Beale

This beautiful book is the first full-length study of the subject and offers entirely new perspectives on a work that is widely regarded as a key precursor of twentieth-century sculpture. In three chapters, Richard Kendall analyzes the origins of this distinctive figure in Degas's ballet imagery; explores the condition of French sculpture in the 1870s and the significance of Degas's choice of materials, procedures, and exhibition strategy; and describes the critical responses to the first public display of the statuette, particularly those comparing it with dolls and the art of ancient Egypt. Douglas W. Druick then explores the fascinating association between the sculpture and views of criminality current in the artist's day, and for the first time in the history of the work, Arthur Beale examines the technical character of its variant forms using laboratory analysis and X-ray photography. The book presents sixty-five color plates of major works by Degas that encompass the genesis and legacy of the Little Dancer, as well as a wealth of comparative plates and preparatory drawings, some never before published.

Degas and The Little Dancer

Alexander Nemerov

Celeste Olalquiaga

Ernst van Alphen

Mieke Bal

Serge Guilbaut

Joanne Morra

Alex Potts

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Marc Gotlieb

Clark Conference

Sina Najafi

Reva Wolf

W. J. Thomas Mitchell

With essays by Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Marc Gotlieb, Serge Guilbaut, Michael Ann Holly, Akira Mizuta Lippit, W. J. T. Mitchell, Joanne Morra, Sina Najafi, Alexander Nemerov, Celeste Olalquiaga, Alexander Potts, and Reva Wolf The discipline of art history is in a moment of self-consciousness, and art historians are increasingly more self-reflexive about their practices. In this volume, thirteen authors address both the philosophical and practical issues now facing those in the visual arts field by investigating the ever-pressing issue of research. Their essays explore the remarkable nature of art historians' personal, political, aesthetic, creative, and emotive curiosity and the process of doing research in the archive, library, studio, gallery, museum, and beyond. As such, the book considers the pleasures and dangers of researchers' obsessions and encounters with the incoherence, chaos, and wonder that lie at the heart of searching for the not-yet-known. The volume is based on the 2007 Clark Conference of the same name.

Obsession, Archive, Encounter

What is Research in the Visual Arts?

John H. Brooks

Highlights, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Michael Ann Holly

Marquard Smith

Exhibition August, 1964

Portrait of a Man (the Warrior), Jean Honoré Fragonard

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Mass.).

Beth Carver Wees

In this stunning catalog, Wees, curator of decorative arts at the Clark Art Institute, shares her extensive knowledge of silver. Robert Sterling Clark, who established the Art Institute in 1955, preferred Huguenot silver? especially that of Paul de Lamerie? so his collection, which contains typical objects from the early 16th to the mid-20th centuries, is especially rich in 18th-century examples. Wees arranges this collection according to general function ("Dining," "Lighting," etc.) and prefaces each chapter with exhaustively footnoted essays. She accompanies each item with crisp black-and-white photographs, a wealth of description, and helpful commentary. Analogous to Kathryn Buhler's standard catalog of American silver in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, this is a wonderful tool for researching makers and hallmarks, comparing stylistic elements, or just marveling at the beauty of an extraordinary collection. While not intended to be a historical compendium, this informative, visual feast belongs in all silver reference collections and will also certainly appeal to individual collectors. 19 colour & 1,222 b/w illustrations

English, Irish, & Scottish Silver at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Margaret C. Conrads

68 treasures of Massachusetts museum: Homer, Sargent, Cassatt, Inness, Remington in depth.

American Paintings and Sculpture at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Helene Barbara Weinberg

John Singer Sargent

Richard Ormond

Drawing on the correspondence of the artist, his friends and his family, as well as a review of contemporary critical responses, this text examines the work of Sargent's early maturity. The text is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Summer 1997.

The Public Career of the Young John Singer Sargent

Uncanny Spectacle

Jane R. Becker

Dixon Gallery and Gardens

Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian is the first book to examine late nineteenth-century Paris's most famous training ground for the leading women artists of the period. The Académie Julian was founded in Paris in 1868, initially to prepare students for entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the nineteenth-century's preeminent art school. Because women could not study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1897, Julian itself became an international equivalent for many of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century's most important women artists. Not only does Overcoming All Obstacles introduce the reader to many works by women artists-both famous and lesser known-but the essays offer a cultural and historical context in which to appreciate their art. Gabriel Weisberg's essay concentrates on the rigorous training methods enforced by Rodolphe Julian and the teachers at the Academy. Jane Becker explores the competitive environment of the Julian Academy as it affected the Ukrainian painter Marie Bashkirtseff and the Swiss painter Louise-Catherine Breslau. Essays by Catherine Fehrer, the leading scholar of the Académie Julian, and Tamar Garb, an art historian who focuses on the training of women artists, give us a richer understanding of the Académie Julian's place in the sphere of art education in late nineteenth-century Paris. Generously illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, this volume includes documentary photographs and caricatures that have never before been reproduced. The core of the book draws on the large collection of the Académie Julian Del Debbio, the Académie Julian's successor institution in Paris. This publication accompanied an exhibition organized by the Dahesh Museum in New York that opened after its exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. The exhibition subsequently continued to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis.

The Women of the Académie Julian

Overcoming All Obstacles

Sarah Lees

Barbara Guidi

Distinguished by his brilliantly energetic brushwork, Giovanni Boldini (1842–1931) was one of the most prominent Italian artists of the late 19th century. Still, he has remained little known beyond his native country. This beautiful book is the first published on Boldini in English in a generation and accompanies the first major exhibition of his works outside of Europe. Born in Ferrara, Boldini moved to Paris in 1871, where he lived for the rest of his life. This important volume focuses on his work from 1871 to 1886, which reflects the influence of his contemporaries—Degas, Manet, Caillebotte, Meissonier, and Fortuny, among others. It features Boldini’s fanciful paintings made for the art market and depictions of the city around him—from the bustling streets and squares to cafés, theaters, and concert halls—as well as paintings of friends and models, and a selection of later portraits that established him as one of the quintessential portraitists of the Belle Époque.

Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris

Royal Academy of Arts (Great Britain)

James A. Ganz

This book is the first to focus on Monet's pastels, drawings, and sketchbooks, offering a revolutionary new interpretation of the artist's life and work. Citing recently discovered, unpublished documents, the authors reveal an extensive group of graphic works created over the course of the artist's career.

Pastels and Drawings

The Unknown Monet

Business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909–2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton, assembled an outstanding collection of 18th- and 19th-century British art. A gift to the Clark Art Institute from the Manton Foundation in 2007, their collection features more than three hundred oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, including works by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake. In a series of wide-ranging essays, prominent scholars consider the major works and themes in the collection, relating them to larger issues within the field of British studies. Individual essays are devoted to Constable's oil sketches, cloud studies, and magisterial painting The Wheat Field; the growth of the watercolor tradition; print portfolios and narrative series; Thomas Rowlandson's satiric drawings; and Gainsborough's use of experimental materials as revealed through recent scientific analysis. The volume concludes with an illustrated checklist of the works in the collection.

The Manton Collection of British Art

Landscape, Innovation, and Nostalgia

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

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