CWRU Faculty Authors

Abe Frajndlich, born in Frankfurt/Main in 1946, studied photography with American photographer Minor White and English literature at Northwestern University in Evanston/Illinois. His new book collects portrait photographs of famous contemporary photographers taken over a period of more than 20 years. It covers the old masters of American photography from Ansel Adams to Minor White and the young kids from the Dusseldorf School. The pictures are complemented by an autobiographical text by the photographer.

This book presents drawings that Andrew Wyeth retained for his own collection -- many preliminary to well-known paintings. Created over more than five decades, from 1951 to 2005, they range from portraits of family members and friends to vibrant depictions of objects, landscapes, and buildings in and around the artist's homes in Pennsylvania and Maine. These works reflect the insight, emotion, and technique that are uniquely his. They demonstrate Wyeth's extraordinary skill as a draftsman and the accuracy with which he sees light and dark, enabling him to model forms while suggesting the very substance and texture of what he sees. "I have always been powerfully affected by Andrew Wyeth's drawings and studies -- particularly those studies that do not attempt to cover the whole surface of the paper but instead focus on a few elements, so that the image seems to emerge magically from the empty white background, rather like a photograph that we observe in the process of development." -- Henry Adams

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Convivium33 Gallery, Jan. 2007.

Related exhibition held at The Dayton Art Institute, August 24, 2013-January 5, 2014.

Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs even when they broughthim personal and professional difficulty--as when he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for removing a model's loincloth in a drawing class. Yet beneath the surface of Eakins's pictures is a sense of brooding unease and latent violence--a discomfort voiced by one of his sitters who said his portrait "decapitated" her. In Eakins Revealed, art historian Henry Adams examines the dark side of Eakins's life and work, in a startling newbiography that will change our understanding of this American icon. Based on close study of Eakins's work and new research in the Bregler papers, a major collection never fully mined by scholars, this volume shows Eakins was not merely uncompromising, but harsh and brutal both in his personal lifeand in his painting. Adams uncovers the bitter personal feuds and family tragedies surrounding Eakins--his mother died insane and his niece committed suicide amid allegations that Eakins had seduced her--and documents the artist's tendency toward psychological abuse and sexual harassment of thosearound him. This provocative book not only unveils new facts about Eakins's life; more important, it makes sense, for the first time, of the enigmas of his work. Eakins Revealed promises to be a controversial biography that will attract readers inside and outside the art world, and fascinate anyoneconcerned with the mystery of artistic genius.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Cleveland Artists Foundation, Beck Center for the Arts, Lakewood, Ohio, Feb. 18-Apr. 15, 2006.

Sculptor Lorado Taft helped build Chicago's worldwide reputation as the epicenter of the City Beautiful Movement. In this new biography, art historian Allen Stuart Weller picks up where his earlier book Lorado in Paris left off, drawing on the sculptor's papers to generate a fascinating account of the most productive and influential years of Taft's long career.   Returning to Chicago from France, Taft established a bustling studio and began a twenty-one-year career as an instructor at the Art Institute, succeeded by three decades as head of the Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. This triumphant era included: ephemeral sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; a prolific turn-of-the-century period marked by the gold-medal-winning The Solitude of the Soul; the 1913 Fountain of the Great Lakes; the 1929 Alma Mater at the University of Illinois; and large-scale projects such as his ambitious program for Chicago's Midway with the monumental Fountain of Time. In addition, the book charts Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success.   Lavishly illustrated with color images of Taft's most celebrated works, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years completes the first major study of a great American artist.

This publication examines the art of this distinguished American watercolor painter and teacher.

Catalog of an exhibition "Out of the Kokoon: Cleveland's Festival of Modern Art and Dance, 1911-1938" held at Cleveland Public Library, Fine Arts and Special Collections, Aug. 1-Dec. 31, 2011.

Catalog of the exhibition 'Pioneering Modernism: Post-Impressionism in Cleveland, 1908-1913', Cleveland Artists Foundation, May 24-July 27, 2013. Exhibition curated by Lawrence Waldman and Henry Adams.

Few American artists have incited more controversy than Thomas Hart Benton. Argumentative, brilliant, and enormously influential, Benton painted for nearly seventy years, inspiring acclaim and loathing among students, friends, fellow artists, and outraged critics. Now, in a series of provocative essays, premier Benton scholar Henry Adams examines the many facets of the man as artist and the pitched battles of his long career, including the fight that raged over the subject matter of his murals, the real reasons for Benton's feud with the radical left and his fall from grace in the New York art world, and his tumultuous, 36-year-long love-hate relationship with the student with whom he worked most closely, another iconic artist of the 20th century, Jackson Pollock. Adams ends with an account of his own twenty-five-year struggle to expose fakes of Benton's work.

A groundbreaking portrait of the intense personal and artistic relationship between Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, revealing how their friendship changed American art. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock. In true Oedipal fashion, Pollock even fell in love with Benton's wife. Pollock later broke away from his mentor artistically, rocketing to superstardom with his stunning drip compositions. But he never lost touch with Benton or his ideas--in fact, his breakthrough abstractions reveal a strong debt to Benton's teachings. I n an epic story that ranges from the cafés and salons of Gertrude Stein's Paris to the highways of the American West, Henry Adams, acclaimed author of Eakins Revealed, unfolds a poignant personal drama that provides new insights into two of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.

This survey of the work of Viktor Schreckengost - an artistic inventor, an American DaVinci - marks the centenary of his birth. A key figure in the first era of modern design and one of its last living leaders, Schreckengost's paintings, sculpture, pottery, and industrial designs, are now being exhibited at more than 100 museums around the United States. Throughout his long working career, Schreckengost strove to apply a creative philosophy that liinked artistically dramatic form with an object's function. The result was design that was nearly always remarkable and very often revolutionary.

His name may be unfamiliar to many, but it is estimated that every adult alive in the United States today has handled objects designed by Viktor Schreckengost -- from dinnerware and lawn furniture to toys, bicycles, and pedal cars. Born in Sebring, Ohio, and educated in Vienna, by the mid-1930s, Schreckengost had begun to pursue his interest in industrial design. For American Limoges, he created the first modern mass-produced American dinnerware, called Americana. Along with engineer Ray Spiller, Schreckengost designed the first cab-overengine truck for Cleveland's White Motor Company. By the end of the decade, he had designed the first Mercury Bicycle for Murray. After World War II, Schreckengost created products for Sears, General Electric, Salem China Company, and Harris Printing, among many others. Approximately 100 million of his bicycles were manufactured by Murray.

Features illustrations with many iconic images from the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, including works of John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O'Keefe, among many others.

Published for the exhibition held 10 November 2011 - 12 February 2012
"Presents critical paintings and drawings by N. C. Wyeth, his son Andrew Wyeth, and his grandson Jamie Wyeth drawn from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection with additional selected works on loan."--back cover

A catalogue commemorating an exhibition curated by Kentaro Tomio and organized by the Tyler Museum of Art featuring works by N.C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth from private and public collections throughout Texas.