Picturing the Americas

As nations in the Americas gained independence in the early 19th century, a pictorial landscape tradition emerged. By 1840, landscape painting had become the primary medium for articulating conceptions of land and nation in the development of North and South American cultural identity. From Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic offers the first comprehensive treatment of this genre on both American continents, bringing into dialogue the landscape traditions of artists practicing between 1840 and 1940. The catalogue is brilliantly illustrated with 260 color images, including works by U.S. artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Canadian artists Joseph Legare, Frances Anne Hopkins, and Lawren Harris; Mexico's Jose Maria Velasco, Uruguay's Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Brazil's Tarsila do Amaral, among many others. Leading scholars offer a Pan-American perspective on these landscape traditions: essays consider the emergence of modernism, as well as how the development of landscape imagery reflects the intricately intertwined geographies and sociopolitical histories of the peoples, nations, regions, and diasporas of the two continents.