<P>Featuring more than 100 stunning full-color photographs along with helpful diagrams and historic photos, Barns of Connecticut captures both the iconic and the unique, including historic and noteworthy barns. The book discusses the importance of barns to Connecticut agriculture across our state and up to the present day. Markham Starr's Barns of Connecticut offers a lovely introduction to the architectural, functional, and agricultural roles these structures played in early Connecticut. Through text and color photographs, it tells a story of change and continuity. From the earliest colonial structures to the low steel buildings of modern dairy farms, barns have adapted to meet the needs of each generation; they've stored wheat, hay, and tobacco, and housed farm animals and dairy cows. These enduring structures display the optimism, ingenuity, hard work, and practicality of the people who tend land and livestock throughout the state.</P>
<P>Gravestones are colonial America's earliest sculpture and they provide a unique physical link to the European people who settled here. Carved in Stone book is an elegant collection of over 80 fine duotone photographs, each a personal meditation on an old stone carving, and on New England's past, where these stones tell stories about death at sea, epidemics such as small pox, the loss of children, and a grim view of the afterlife. The essay is a graceful narrative that explores a long personal involvement with the stones and their placement in New England landscape, and attempts to trace the curious and imperfectly documented story of carvers. Brief quotes from early New England writers accompany the images, and captions provide basic information about each stone. These meditative portraits present an intimate view of figures from New England graveyards and will be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in early Americana and fine art photography.</P>
<P><B>Winner of the Ewell L. Newman Award from the American Historical Print Collectors Society (2009)</B><BR><B>Winner of the Betty M. Linsley Award from the Association for the Study of Connecticut History (2010)</B></P><P>This is the first book-length account of the pioneering and prolific Kellogg family of lithographers, active in Connecticut for over four decades. Daniel Wright Kellogg opened his print shop on Main Street in Hartford five years before Nathaniel Currier went into a similar business in New York and more than twenty-five years before Currier founded his partnership with James M. Ives, yet Daniel and his brothers Elijah and Edmund Kellogg have long been overshadowed by the Currier &amp; Ives printmaking firm. </P><P>Editor Nancy Finlay has gathered together eight essays that explore the complexity of the relationships between artists, lithographers, and print, map, and book publishers. Presenting a complete visual overview of the Kelloggs' production between 1830 and 1880, Picturing Victorian America also provides museums, libraries, and private collectors with the information needed to document the Kellogg prints in their own collections. The first comprehensive study of the Kellogg prints, this book demands reconsideration of this Connecticut family's place in the history of American graphic and visual arts.</P><P>CONTRIBUTORS: Georgia B. Barnhill, Lynne Zacek Bassett, Candice C. Brashears, Nancy Finlay, Elisabeth Hodermarsky, Richard C. Malley, Sally Pierce, Michael Shortell, Kate Steinway.</P>
Colleges and universities used to teach art history to encourage connoisseurship and acquaint students with the riches of our artistic heritage. But now, as Roger Kimball reveals in this witty and provocative book, the student is less likely to learn about the aesthetics of masterworks than to be told, for instance, that Peter Paul Rubens' great painting Drunken Silenus is an allegory about anal rape. Or that Courbet's famous hunting pictures are psychodramas about «castration anxiety.» Or that Gauguin's Manao tupapau is an example of the way repression is «written on the bodies of women.» Or that Jan van Eyck's masterful Arnolfini Portrait is about «middle-class deceptions … and the treatment of women.» Or that Mark Rothko's abstract White Band (Number 27) «parallels the pictorial structure of a pieta.» Or that Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream is «a visual encoding of racism.» In «The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art,» Kimball, a noted art critic himself, shows how academic art history is increasingly held hostage to radical cultural politics–feminism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, the whole armory of academic antihumanism. To make his point, he describes how eight famous works of art (reprinted here as illustrations) have been made over to fit a radical ideological fantasy. Kimball then performs a series of intellectual rescue operations, explaining how these great works should be understood through a series of illuminating readings in which art, not politics, guides the discussion.