American Art
Adams, Ansel (Feb. 20, 1902 – Apr. 22, 1984), photographer and environmentalist, was born in San Francisco, California, the son of Charles Hitchcock Adams, a businessman, and Olive Bray. The grandson of a wealthy timber baron, Adams grew up in a house set amid the sand dunes of the Golden Gate. He is an almost mythic figure in the world of black and white photography and wilderness preservation. His love for nature was evidenced by his involvement with the Sierra Club for more than 50 years and played a seminal role in its evolution. The Sierra Club was vital to Adams’s early success as a photographer. His first published photographs and writings appeared in the club’s 1922 Bulletin, and he had his first one man exhibition in 1928 at the club’s San Francisco headquarters.
Norman left high school early settling at the Arts Student League to study art where his discipline, hard work, and sense of humor were widely recognized. As a student Norman was given small illustration jobs, but his major breakthrough came in 1912 with his first book illustration for C.H. Claudy's Tell Me Why: Stories about Mother Nature. By 1913 he was art editor for Boy's Life and just 19 years old.
It has often been said that Norman provided a
commodity that people could rely on. This is clearly reflected in
more than 4,000 illustrations completed throughout his 47 year
career. He is best known for his contributions to the Saturday
Evening Post for whom he produced 332 covers, beginning in 1916. It
is noteworthy that the Post could automatically increase its print
order by 250,000 copies when an issue had a cover by Rockwell.
Eighty magazines used his cover illustrations but, by far, no
paintings by an American were ever published on such a global scale
as Rockwell's "Four Freedoms." First appearing in the
Post, the originals were used by the United States Treasury in a 16
city tour seen by 1,222,000 people who purchased over $133,000,000
in war bonds.
Norman's ability to "get the point across" in one picture,
and his flair for painstaking detail made him a favorite of the
advertising industry. He was also commissioned to illustrate over 40
books including the ever popular Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn. His annual contributions for the Boy Scout
calendars (1925 - 1976), was only slightly overshadowed by his most
popular of calendar works - the "Four Seasons"
illustrations for Brown & Bigelow were published for 17 years
beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since
1964. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly
movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals
(including Yankee Doodle Dandy, was completed in 1936 for the Nassau
Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's oeuvre as an
illustrator. In his later years, Rockwell began receiving more
attention as a painter when he chose more serious subjects such as
the series on racism for Look magazine.
The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts has established a large collection of his paintings, and has preserved Rockwell's last studio as well.
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe ( Nov. 15, 1887 - March 6, 1986) was born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. She is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. O'Keeffe has been a major figure in American art since the 1920s. She is mainly known for paintings in which she synthesizes abstraction and representation in paintings of flowers, rocks, shells, animal bones and landscapes.
Andy Warhol (Aug 6, 1928 – Feb. 22, 1987), was an American artist, writer, director and social figure. With his background and experience in commercial art, Warhol was one of the founders of the Pop Art movement in the United States in the 1950s. Warhol is best known for his extremely simple, larger-than-life, high-contrast color paintings and silk-screen prints of packaged consumer products, and everyday objects,
