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October 2005
Hardback/dvd
ISBN 13: 9781555952280
ISBN: 1555952283
240 pages
9 x 12 in.
305 x 229 mm.
183 color plates
100 halftones
US $ 65
UK £ 35
Nancy Mowll Mathews
The interaction between American art and the new medium of the moving picture had profound consequences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are the basis for this groundbreaking exhibtion at the Williams College Museum of Art. “Both paintings and film emphasize movement,” says author Nancy Mowll Mathews, “which was crucial to the illusion of lifelikeness in both media. In recreating the modern experience of fragmentation and spectacle both art and film explore issues of human perception and understanding of reality that were part of the intellectual climate of their day.”
This publication explores the complex relationship between American art and early film. From the photographs of Muybridge, Marey, and Eakins of the 1880s, to the first films of the 1890s which drew from established conventions of American art, to the New York films and art of the first decades of the twentieth century, the struggle between art and film both polarized and inspired the artists of its era.
The striking visual parallels between particular films and works of art provoke new thinking about both the art and film histories of the early 1900s. The renewed scrutiny of “reality” brought about by film in its first decade opened the door to the modernist experiments that would dominate the twentieth century. Film made it possible to bring those exquisite paintings and still photographs to excited life.
Nancy Mowll Mathews is the Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art and Lecturer in Art, Williams College Museum of Art.