Leo G. Mazow

Using recreated itineraries, travel along with Edward Hopper on his various road trips and encounter hotels, staff, and guests as seen through the artist's eyes The painter, draftsman, and illustrator Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is one of America’s best-known and most frequently exhibited artists. Hotels, motels, and tourist homes are recurring motifs in his work, along with streets, lighthouses, and gas stations forming a visual vocabulary of transportation infrastructure. In ten essays, this fascinating volume explores Hopper’s lifelong investigation of such spaces, shedding light on both his professional practice and far-reaching changes in transportation and communications, which affected not only work and leisure but also dynamics of race, class, and gender. Hopper’s covers for the trade journal Hotel Management, in addition to other well-known works, invite reflection on the complicated roles of the nascent New Woman; the erasure of hotel work and workers; contemporary associations of the color white with cleanliness and purity; the watercolors Hopper made from hotel windows and rooftops in Mexico; and the broader context of transportation history. A final chapter then situates Hopper's contribution to the fascinating role that the hotel has played in the broader development of American art in the 20th century. As a unique feature, the book's backflap also holds two "TripTik"-like, removable maps that trace the journeys that Hopper and his wife, the artist Josephine “Jo” Nivison Hopper, took by car in the 1940s and 1950s; selected correspondence and quotations from Jo’s own diaries join reproductions of postcards and ephemera illuminating their—and fellow Americans’—shifting travel habits. Distributed for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition Schedule: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (October 26, 2019–February 23, 2020) Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields (June 4, 2020–September 13, 2020)

Alternately praised as “an American original” and lampooned as an arbiter of kitsch, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton has been the subject of myriad monographs and journal articles, remaining almost as controversial today as he was in his own time. Missing from this literature, however, is an understanding of the profound ways in which sound figures in the artist’s enterprises. Prolonged attention to the sonic realm yields rich insights into long-established narratives, corroborating some but challenging and complicating at least as many. A self-taught and frequently performing musician who invented a harmonica tablature notation system, Benton was also a collector, cataloguer, transcriber, and distributor of popular music. In Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound, Leo Mazow shows that the artist’s musical imagery was part of a larger belief in the capacity of sound to register and convey meaning. In Benton’s pictorial universe, it is through sound that stories are told, opinions are voiced, experiences are preserved, and history is recorded.

In Taxing Visions, Leo Mazow and Kevin Murphy explore taxes, rents, economic depression, and financial inequity as subject matter in several visually provocative paintings and works on paper. Although this period is often identified artistically with leisure-laden impressionist landscapes, flowing-with-abundance still-life paintings, and class-conscious “official” portraits, practitioners working in a variety of stylistic idioms reckoned with financial panics and occupational turmoil that marked the Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and early Progressive eras. These paintings, drawings, and prints demonstrate with sometimes startling clarity the experience of economic downturn, ultimately picking up where facts, figures, and the printed word leave off. Featured artists include William Michael Harnett, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as several lesser-known individuals, in part because their art “taxes” our sensibilities of socioeconomic propriety. Taxing Visions shows satire and protest playing out through a sizable body of work, with artists confronting recession and depression with equal parts reportage, invective, humor, and hope. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University and the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino, California.

Images of waterways figure prominently in the art of Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975). His depictions of rivers, streams, gullies, and creeks form a subgenre of American landscape painting, inviting us to rethink the artistic meaning and historical legacy of even the narrowest of inlets. Among Benton’s most significant representations of this subject matter is a body of work from 1938 to 1942 depicting smaller, more intimate coves and creeks. The painting Shallow Creek (1938, Collection of James and Barbara Palmer) is a linchpin of this series, an extraordinarily personal canvas and one of the most symbolically charged works produced by the artist. This catalogue, accompanying an exhibition of the same name and organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, unravels the work’s richly expressive forms and densely loaded iconographies to reveal a narrative at once markedly public and deeply private in scope. Several additional works by Benton shed further light on the artist’s river imagery and related subject matter, especially his return to remarkably similar themes later in life, based on his numerous “float trips” on the Buffalo and White Rivers in northern Arkansas.

Although little known today, John R. Covert (1882–1960) played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism. He was a founder of the Society of Independent Artists, an active participant in the Société Anonyme, and produced innovative paintings and collage-constructions that reflect his experiences of the renowned art collection of his cousin, Walter Arensberg. Yet, in 1923, Covert broke off his association with key modernists like Marcel Duchamp and Charles Demuth, closed his New York studio, and went to work as a salesman for the Vesuvius Crucible Company of Pittsburgh. Generally, the artist’s story is thought to end there, but John Covert Rediscovered, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art, shows that Covert never abandoned his artistic endeavors even if he did spend the last decades of his life at the periphery of the art world. Drawing on Covert’s daybooks (recently conserved at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and art in the collection of the late Charles Covert Arensberg, John Covert Rediscovered not only establishes that Covert continued his artistic explorations long after his supposed retirement in 1923 but also introduces several hitherto lost works. No less surprising and significant is its revelation that Covert became a filmmaker and prolific photographer, working both within and against modernist ideas of the image. In his introduction, Leo G. Mazow presents a new view of Covert’s multifaceted activities, including his exercises in secret writing and cryptography. John Covert Rediscovered also contains an essay by Michael R. Taylor that breaks new ground by tracing Covert’s "conversion" to modernism back to his life in Munich and Paris during the turbulent years leading up to World War I. All the art in the exhibition is reproduced in this publication, the value of which is further augmented by Leo Mazow’s informative commentaries on each art work. The exhibition, "John Covert Rediscovered," organized by the Palmer Museum of Art, has also been shown at The Demuth Foundation and will be at the Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery, Lebanon Valley College, August 28–October 12, 2003.