New World Visions of Household Gods and Sacred Places: American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1650-1914 - Hardcover

Scully, Vincent

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821216473 ISBN 13: 9780821216477

Publisher: New York Graphic Society, 1988

Synopsis

Offers a survey of pre-World War I American art, including architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts and discusses the social aspects of art

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Scully's text is the somewhat enlarged script of a two-part PBS television program that he hosted. As such, it loses the impact and visual continuity that TV viewers might experience. Even so, this is an unusually perceptive, erudite, even profound armchair tour of the alternating currents of earthy realism and Jeffersonian idealism in American painting, sculpture and architecture. Aided by 200 color and black-and-white plates, this Yale professor of art history tours the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American wing, but veers off to discuss pre-Columbian temples, pueblos, town planning as it relates to Washington, D.C., and Versailles, Ashcan School painters, skyscrapers, a Robert Venturi house. The "household gods" of the title are materialistic objectsa silver teapot, a Philadelphia high-chestcounterposed with the "sacred places" of home or public monument. Scully blows the dust off national treasures and makes them speak to us anew.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Behind the confusing title lies a highly personal and thematic look at American attitudes toward landscape, architecture, art, and the decorative arts. (Examples in the last two categories are culled largely from the Metropolitan's collection.) Scully's depth of knowledge allows him to draw convincing parallels between such diverse elements as a Mayan temple and a city skyscraper, the interiors of 17th-century dwellings and those of Frank Lloyd Wright. Based on the public TV series of the same name, this critical survey is in no way comprehensive, but it is though-provoking. For public libraries. Kathleen Eagen Johnson, Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, N.Y.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: New York Graphic Society
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0821216473
• ISBN 13: 9780821216477
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192