Eye Contact
Subtitle: Modern American Portrait Drawings from the National Portrait Gallery
Contributors: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art (Corporate Author); Elmhurst Art Museum (Corporate Author)
Publisher: National Portrait Gallery; Natl Portrait Gallery Pubns
Published: July 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780295982670
Subjects: Drawing & drawings; Exhibition catalogues and specific collections; History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; Portraits in art; Art; Art & Art Instruction; USA; American - General; Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions - Museum; Techniques - Drawing - Portraiture; Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions - General; 20th century; Biography; Exhibitions; Portrait drawing; Portrait drawing, American; Portraits; United States; Washington (D.C.)
Description: "Fifty graphic masterpieces representing the American artistic tradition from the 1880s to the 1980s are showcased in this volume, including the work of such renowned artists as Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. Life portraits of well-known Americans, from politicians and inventors to writers, artists, and musicians are represented. Theodore Roosevelt, W. C. Fields, Alice B. Toklas, Igor Stravinsky, Stokely Carmichael, Truman Capote, and Robert F.

Kennedy number among them.".

"In her introductory essay for Eye Contact, Wendy Wick Reaves analyzes the history of twentieth-century portraiture in America and the changing role of drawing within it. Bernard F. Reilly Jr. follows with an essay about the intellectual developments that influenced artists' conceptualization of the figure. The volume also contains in-depth essays by Reaves and twelve other art historians on each of the highlighted National Portrait Gallery treasures.

What emerges are rich, wonderful stories: Gaston Lachaise capturing an exuberant Hart Crane dancing nude with his hands clapping over his head; William Zorach drawing Edna St.

Vincent Millay for Century magazine just after the young poet won the Pulitzer Prize; Beauford Delaney remembering James Baldwin after an intense, decades-long, mentoring friendship; Andy Warhol and Jamie Wyeth portraying each other, relishing their supposedly antithetical roles as the "Patriarch of Pop" and the "Prince of Realism.""--BOOK JACKET.