Commercial Art Research Articles

Bay Bridge anchorage construction: George Booth Post.

Bay Bridge anchorage construction: George Booth Post.

Faith Ringgold’s Die: The Riot and Its Reception

The year 1967 was a transitional moment for the rehabilitation of activist art and the formation of black identity. It was likewise significant for Faith Ringgold, who was preparing the solo exhibition that would introduce her to the New York art world. That summer, after riots devastated Detroit and Newark, NJ, she painted Die expressly for the show. The wall-size canvas depicts an interracial cast of clean-cut antagonists trying to kill one another. Although the painting represented the kind of large-scale, politically motivated figuration that had been out of favor since the 1940s, it earned favorable attention from key art journals. I argue that its warm reception indexes the painting’s ability to speak differently to different constituencies, from mainstream and African American modernists to the activists in the Black Arts and peace movements then beginning to make waves. The painting’s multivocal potential encompassed an iconography that reads as either warning against or wishing for social unrest and a format that inserts the large-scale figuration of public murals into the more rarified space of the commercial art gallery. As a microhistory focused on Die’s production and reception, this study aims to illuminate how racial politics influenced a politics of style in this volatile moment. To do so, it situates Die in relation to a mounting attention to protest, violence, social realism, and black aesthetics, especially as they crystallized in writer Amiri Baraka’s engagement with the Newark riot and in gallery director Robert Newman’s facilitation of Ringgold’s shift to large-scale imagery.

The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display by Dehn Gilmore (review)

Reviewed by: The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display by Dehn Gilmore Aviva Briefel Gilmore, Dehn. The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 242 pp. $95.00 hardcover; $76.00 ebook. Early in the introduction, Dehn Gilmore’s The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art sets forward its deceptively straightforward approach: to examine the novel not according to “what, but rather how the Victorians saw” (2). This provocative and elegant study goes on to suggest that new viewing practices in galleries, museums, and exhibition spaces had a transformative effect on the ways in which Victorian novelists conceived of their writings and their audiences. Gilmore emphasizes that her argument is based on “causality” rather than “analogy” (16), thereby encouraging us to consider the immediate and pervasive effects that nineteenth-century visual culture had on the literary sphere. She argues that the multiplicities, juxtapositions, and distractions of the art world compelled authors to shape their fictions with new viewing practices in mind. Novelists like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins began to work analogously to curators in laying out multiple plots and characters for their readers in ways that replicated tours through commercial art galleries or exhibition halls. This is an important argument, one that contributes substantially to ongoing critical discussions about the interconnectedness of the visual and the verbal in the Victorian period. The core of the book consists of four chapters, each of which serves as a case study on authorial assimilations of artistic viewing; as Gilmore contends, she is less invested in providing a “comprehensive history” than in “offering the ability to perceive and make sense of an experience of proliferation and changing ideas about reception” (19). This approach successfully conveys the experience of multiplicity as it offers snapshots into various exhibitionary and narrative strategies, which are explored and expanded through perceptive contextualizations and readings. The first chapter, on Dickens and exhibition culture, lays out a captivating discussion of the author’s incorporation of the “glare and bustle” (32) of the gallery into his fictions and his inclusion of characters and situations that anticipates the reception of his own multiplot novels by his readers. The second chapter focuses on Thackeray and the problem of historical fiction, creating a persuasive connection between debates around the restoration of art objects in British national collections and novels such as The History of Henry Esmond (1852), which also seek to revive a no longer extant past. Sensation fiction and the spectacular spaces of exhibitions such as the Crystal Palace of 1851 and the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 form the basis of the third chapter. Gilmore’s argument that both the sensation fiction reader and the exhibition visitor must balance new “attentive norms” based on selection and “repeated looking” (100) is, in my view, one of the most original in the book. The final chapter isolates Thomas Hardy’s fictions and his transition to writing poetry as a means of considering fin-de-siècle concerns about the “art of the future” and the investments (or lack thereof) of prospective audiences in novelistic and artistic matters. The book closes with a brief conclusion that offers glimpses of the works of writers including George Gissing, George Moore, and George Meredith, who were also drawing on the world of art to offer their audiences “new forms of reading” (163). As an aside, I was left wondering why the visual artist and novelist George Du Maurier was omitted from this selection of “literary Georges” (162). At certain moments, reading Gilmore’s book can be dizzying; her readings of novels can be quite epigrammatic and pass swiftly from one narrative space to another. This panoramic view demonstrates an impressive breadth of knowledge of the literature [End Page 126] of the period, paralleling the expertise with which Gilmore moves from one artistic concern (the eclectic nature of gallery space, for instance) to another (restoration and its critics). I did occasionally find myself wanting a more leisurely pace, consisting of longer and more in-depth analyses of individual texts. At the same time, however, I continue to debate whether such longer looks would...

Improving Student Engagement in Commercial Art and Design Programmes

AbstractThe continued viability of art and design programmes depends on our ability to produce graduates able to contribute successfully and confidently to the future of the creative industries. This in turn depends on our ability to lead students to develop both the ability and the motivation to learn. A significant proportion of our students however, are not adequately prepared or inclined to engage with the learning environment. Based on a review of the literature on student engagement, this article attempts to identify the origins and examine the impact of the perceptions and attitudes (the ‘mental pictures’) that currently limit our students' ability and inclination to engage as well as those factors (including the features of our programmes) through which these ‘mental pictures’ may be inadvertently reinforced. It then proposes a number of practical suggestions to make more effective use of the learning outcomes of art and design programmes in order to mitigate their influence and thereby improve both our graduates' capacity and inclination to become more competent professionals, as well as self‐directed learners.

Interventionist Curatorial and Display Practices in Beijing

Abstract Over the past decade, a number of curatorial and exhibitionary practices have developed in China that intervene into daily life. Interventionist practice partly develops from dissatisfaction with the marked division between the commercial art world and the everyday realities of cultural producers. They also develop from a desire to create a common space of engagement for artists and the local public. While much of this work is not overtly political, the prevailing social conditions of an authoritarian state lend these practices a critical edge, which can lead to surveillance, censorship and other consequences. This article surveys curatorial and artistic interventions in Beijing, placing them in the specific context of the various neighbourhoods, such as the 798 Art District, the city centre, Caochangdi village, and the industrialized suburbs.

絵画に表現された富士山

This study surveys pictures of Mt. Fuji in the following three categories: Japanese paintings, pictorial mountain-climbing guide maps, and panoramic maps. To date, art historians have conducted many studies on pictures of Mt. Fuji. However, there have been no studies that consider pictorial mountain-climbing guide maps and panoramic maps as “pictures” of the mountain. Certainly, this study's major contribution to research on Mt. Fuji is its comprehensive understanding of “picture.” More importantly, the fact that most art historians have ignored panoramic maps drawn by Yoshida Hatsusaburo, Kaneko Jyoko, and others in the first half of the twentieth century is a mistake. They did examine Ukiyoe prints by Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Hiroshige, and others from the nineteenth century; nevertheless, both these Ukiyoe prints and the panoramic maps drawn by Yoshida Hatsusaburo were forms of commercial art. Geographers dealt with panoramic maps, which have been examined by other geographers and map enthusiasts. From a geographical perspective, Mt. Fuji drawn as a panoramic map is a valuable research resource. In addition, by examining Japanese paintings and pictorial mountain-climbing guide maps, Mt. Fuji is recognized to be an awe-inspiring subject, as well as the one that can be revered. Furthermore, by examining of panoramic maps, it is demonstrated that Mt. Fuji was recognized to be an object of modern tourism.

Gimpel Fils, Barbara Hepworth and the promotion of British sculpture in the 1950s

During the 1950s, the commercial art gallery Gimpel Fils, London, established itself as a prominent space for showing and selling contemporary art. This paper considers the gallery’s role in promoting sculpture during that decade and examines the organisation, display and reception of the Barbara Hepworth’s first exhibition at Gimpel Fils, in 1956, as a case study.

Fractured compounds: photographing post-apartheid compounds and hostels

Hostels and compounds have held a compelling fascination for South African photographers over many decades, from the colonial to the post-apartheid era. The photographic representations of these spartan barracks have permeated the narrative of South Africa as the photographers showed the lives, recreations and living conditions, the institutionalised, alienating nature of the environment, its dehumanising conditions, and the cultural and geographical schizophrenia experienced by the migrant labourer navigating the urban/rural divide. In the last two decades, the monolithic structure of the hostel compound has become fractured, as aspects of this environment have altered due to changes in the political, social and economic landscape of South Africa. But it is not just the hostel that has changed, post-apartheid: the photographic representations have transformed too. These adjustments include: a shift from black and white to colour; an increased reluctance to present the hostel dweller as victim; decreased prominence of exposé; a more optimistic and less violent image of the hostels; essays which highlight the permanence of the hostel dweller; a trend which puts less emphasis on the hostel dweller and more on his or her environment; and new narratives around gender, sexuality and individuality have emerged. As a result of the use of colour, the display of these works in commercial art galleries and the decline of the human figure in the picture, the works are arguably less political. It is the complex nature of these shifts in post-apartheid hostel imagery that will be investigated in this paper, with specific reference to the work of Peter Magubane, T.J. Lemon, Sabelo Mlangeni, Angela Buckland, Jodi Bieber, David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Sam Nhlengethwa.

Miguel Covarrubias e Andrés Guevara: a influência do cubismo na ilustração editorial do início do século XX

This article is dedicated to the analysis of the contributions of cubism for the editorial illustration of the early twentieth century. To this end, opted for a particular moment represented by the beginning of the career of Mexican illustrator and caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias in the American market in the early 1920, and by the beginning of the work of the Illustrator and caricaturist Andres Guevara Paraguayan in Brazil around the same time. The text aims to address the issue of the influences and connections between modern artistic avant-garde of the beginning of the last century and the commercial art - customized works created for the publishing market - of caricature and illustration: which would be the magnitude of this exchange of graphical information; which are the contributions to the illustration field; and what are the differences between the production of the avant-garde and the works of illustration influenced by them. It intends, too, to reflect about the peculiarities of the design for the editorial market, guided – often - by the hybrid artists and clients interests.

Art Gallery Archives: Professionalization of a Commercial Sector

The authors describe the recent professionalization of archival practices in three large commercial art galleries based in Los Angeles: Gagosian Gallery, Blum & Poe, and L.A. Louver. Within the last three years, each of these galleries hired for the first time a dedicated, full-time MLIS archivist. The three pioneering Los Angeles gallery archivists share their collective experience of working in the commercial art world. Topics include how the archivist role fits into a commercial gallery organization, the challenges of working with non-traditional collections, and the merits and value of such collections for the long-term documentation and preservation of the contemporary art world.

Some Features of Decorative and Applied Arts of Kazakhs in Central Asia

In the article the priceless heritage of Kazakh folk artists in the applied arts are considered. The authors analyzed Kazakh carpets and rugs, their semantics. The study and the involvement of the collected materials revealed in the Kazakh commercial arts as original features, as well as the effects of the outside. The author traces the evolution of technology in the processing and manufacture of felt products. A special place in the article is informative study the Kazakh ornament. The majority of home-made products with a particular decorative finishes, used directly in the home, had a certain utilitarian. In the popular mind crafts was inseparable from the whole structure of everyday life. Arts and crafts of the Kazakhs represented carpet weaving, manufacture of various types of patterned felt rugs and household items from the ornamented felt, woven ornamental mats, embroidery, weaving, etc.At the present stage, in an age rapidly developing technology, rapid socio-economic and political changes, and the globalization of multicultural spaces, we feel particularly its origins, historical and cultural roots. Without knowledge of the past cannot be effectively build in the present, without the present and the future cannot be built.

Boris Artzybasheff and the art of anthropomorphic marketing in early American consumer culture

This paper undertakes a critical historical review of the role of anthropomorphism in marketing and advertising in American consumer culture from the 1940s onwards. We review the art of the acclaimed illustrator Boris Artzybasheff who among other artistic achievements created images that regularly featured on the covers of Life, Fortune, and Time. As well as working in media, Artzybasheff also produced advertising images, and imagery for propaganda. One of the characteristic features of Artzybasheff’s commercial art is the use of anthropomorphism, especially with technology industries and products. His art spans the periods prior to, during and after World War II, as well as the Cold War era and the onset of modern consumer culture in America.

A Moment Outside

In the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam in 1997, Alexander Brener defaced one of the art world's greatest treasuers. The target was Kazimir Malevich's Supremetism which in great part marked the birth of the Russian Avant-garde. Immediately after being apprehended by security guards, he loudly proclaimed that what he had done was performance art and a dialogue with Malevich about corruption in the commercial art world. Unlike Tony Shafrazi, Brener was not opportunistic about his vandalism and remains an elusive figure in the Russian art scene—managing to pen his manifesto while imprisoned for modifying Malevich's masterpiece valued at $7.5 million. What most critics overlook are the complexities of the context within which Brener and Malevich are embedded. The trajectory of a former Soviet Peoples' art object to proprietary traded commodity leaves much to be explored. This paper identifies and explores three concepts central to developing a nuanced understanding of Brener's work as art: The legal response to art vandalism; a qualitative comparison between Brener and Malevich; And Brener's situation within contemporary art context with an emphasis on post-Soviet culture and the international political economy.

An exploration of the qualities and features of art apps for art therapy

Using a participatory design (PD) approach, this study explored the qualifying features and qualities of digital art materials, specifically art apps on iPads, for art therapy use. The qualitative study included a questionnaire survey of 4 art therapists using iPads with clients in therapy and four separate focus groups with 15 art therapist participants. The focus group participants engaged in art directives with nine art making apps identified as potentially useful in art therapy. The results revealed that while no single commercial art app satisfied the needs of all art therapists and potential clients, three distinct qualities and six concrete features of an “ideal” art app for art therapy emerged. These desirable criteria of an art app can be used in the future development of a customized art app for art therapy. In addition, these findings may expand the parameters of art therapy's art making practice and artistic vocabulary by illustrating the potential therapeutic and expressive use of digital art media. While the findings reveal unlimited possibilities for the meaningful use of digital art media in art therapy, they also acknowledge how the unique characteristics of digital art media will require carefully considered limitations and restrictions.

Gentrification and the Artistic Dividend: The Role of the Arts in Neighborhood Change

Problem, research strategy, and findings: There is a conflict between recent creative placemaking policies intended to promote positive neighborhood development through the arts and the fact that the arts have long been cited as contributing to gentrification and the displacement of lower-income residents. Unfortunately, we do not have data to demonstrate widespread evidence of either outcome. We address the dearth of comprehensive research and inform neighborhood planning efforts by statistically testing how two different groups of arts activities—the fine arts and commercial arts industries—are associated with conditions indicative of revitalization and gentrification in 100 large U.S. metropolitan areas. We find that different arts activities are associated with different types and levels of neighborhood change. Commercial arts industries show the strongest association with gentrification in rapidly changing areas, while the fine arts are associated with stable, slow-growth neighborhoods.Takeaway for practice: This research can help planners to more effectively incorporate the arts into neighborhood planning efforts and to anticipate the potential for different outcomes in their arts development strategies, including gentrification-related displacement.

Modeling the future of US arts policy: Beyond supply-side pump-priming

This commentary begins with an examination of how culture, including the arts, sports and religion typically operates from an anthropological perspective. The acquisition of cultural knowledge from socially transmitted sources leads to individual cultural expression (amateur practice), which in turn generates demand for the consumption of professionally produced cultural goods and services. Using this generic model of culture, the article then traces the evolution of the arts and arts policy in the USA beginning with baseline policies protecting free speech and intellectual property, and providing tax-exempt status to non-profit forms of artistic production. Tax exemption is shown to be a significant element in the early twentieth century when emerging elites and immigrant artists split away from the mainstream of the commercial arts sector to found a separate high arts sector. In the postwar period, the high arts sector is judged to be lagging in quality and in financial decline, factors that are cited to justify major new policies characterized as “supply-side pump-priming”. Beginning in the mid-1960s, these policies become widespread among federal, state and municipal governmental agencies and many non-governmental funders, and though the high arts grow in quality, output, and geographic distribution, they never achieve a breakthrough in attracting substantial non-elite audiences, which continue to patronize the vastly larger commercial arts. In light of recent trends of declining audiences and reduced contributed and earned income, the future of supply-side policies becomes questionable. A case is made that demand-side policies may offer a more democratic way forward for both arts and sports policies. In addition, reference is made to a new online arts policy simulation, entitled “Medici's Lever”, which provides a laboratory for testing alternative demand-side and supply-side policies.

Houses at Murnau

Houses at Murnau

Collective Action Archive

Passage Gallery at SUNY Purchase College Purchase, New York September 6-29,2013 The Passage Gallery at Purchase College recently hosted Collective Action Archive, a small group exhibition that presented an array of photographs, videos, sines, posters, pamphlets, and stickers from contemporary artists collectiws located across the United States. Co-curated by Terri C. Smith and Sandrine Milet of the profit Franklin Street Works art space in Stamibrd, Connecticut, CollectiveAction Archive emerged as the result of a call Ion materials for the earlier exhibition Working Alternatives) Breaking Bread, Art Broadcasting, and Collective Action, which was on view at Franklin Street from October 27, 2012, to January 13, 21113. Drawing their theme from Gregory Sholcfre's book Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Gulture (2010) and Lucy Lippard's 1979 Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D) call to political artists, Smith and Mile( were curious to tap into the tenor of the current moment; the exhibition presented the views and voices of thirty-one artist collectives: ABC No Rio, Artists Against Apartheid, Big Tent, Conflict Kitchen, Critical Making, fierce pussy, Floating Lab Collective, Futurefarmers, Guerrilla Girls, Gulley Hollow, Howling Mob Society, Illegal Art, Justseeds, Kitchen Sink, Knifeandfork, Lucky Pierre, M12 Collective, Metne-Rider Media Team, National Bitter Melon Council, Okay Mountain Collective, Paper Tiger Television, Philly Stake, Preemptive Media, Publication Studio, Regional Relationships. Second Front, Students of the African Diaspora, subRosa, Temporary Services, the Pinky Show, WAGE. (Working Artists and the Greater a onomy), and Work Progress Collective. The curators received a wide variety of photographic, time-based, publication, and ephemeral materials from self-identified artist collectives that utilized these materials to convey their own image as well as present a series of responses to the sociopolitical issues that have evolved since the 2008 economic collapse unveiled the various chasms between economic classes. Collective Action Archive combines the eye of art history with the goal of cultural preservation and looks to the cultural movements that have accompanied the political movements or the past four decades, up to and including Occupy Wall Street. It presents a pointed, documented series of reactions that artists have generated in response to a broad array of social, political, and environmental issues--including those particular to artists, such as loss of government funding, increases in costs of services, and unemployment. Smith and Milet assembled an umdited installation that effectively captures something of the cultural mood beyond the limited confines of the commercial art world. The exhibition curators presented materials from the Regional Relationships collective (Clticago, IL) on a square table. A pirate's map lay open on one side showing locales such as New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Ecerglades written in calligraphic lettering. Both the drawn text and cartographic representation appeared compacted and visually exaggerated, mimicking the format of a hand-drawn pirate's map or a cartoon illustration embellished with various icons such as a raft, a bird, and a tortoise. A CD cover bearing the words Who's there? underscored an its concern for the continued compromise of the earth's resources. Opposite these materials were two copies of a diagram made by Matthew Friday titled The History of Mining in Ohio Has Produced This Assemblage (2011) selected by the artist from a large project titled A Map Without Boundaries (2011), which shows the flows of food production, consumption, and waste beginning with phosphorous, nitrogen. carbon, ground water, and pyrite and leading, finally. to a category labeled Bacteria. Regional Relationships ciigages artisis, scholars, writers, and activists to render critiques on the evolution of the American landscape, both urban ancl rural. …

The Third Biennale of Sydney: ‘White Elephant or Red Herring?’

The focus of this essay is the indisputably important 1979 Biennale of Sydney, which launched Sydney's biennial as an international event seeking out adventurous art from Western Europe and the USA. We will argue that it sought both to present an image of the world of contemporary art and also, more critically, to embody a key strand of the globalising art world's emerging contemporaneity.By the end of the 1970s, the arrival of relatively affordable international flights had pushed Australian artists, along with their peers from other 'margins' of contemporary art, into closer contact with North Atlantic art centres. The result was the beginning of a Balkanisation of art worlds beyond New York and Western Europe: within each art centre, a division into two overlapping art worlds, a provincial ghetto represented by one set of commercial art galleries or an international art world enclave represented by another, usually smaller and more exclusive, number of galleries and, increasingly, some artist-run spaces.1This was as true in Tokyo as it was in Sydney or Melbourne. The two art worlds overlapped but the latter world-that which saw itself as international and part of a nascent, globalised art world-did not at that time or later necessarily renew itself from the former's talent-pool of the best and brightest, and then only reluctantly or in such a way as to reinforce North Atlantic primacy over the image of what was contemporary art. Many scholars' recent work, particularly that of John Clark, has shown that this remained true even of the huge Asian biennials that flourished from the 1990s onwards though, increasingly, many younger artists moved easily from international artist residency to residency and from biennial to biennial.2Founding the Sydney BiennaleBoth the Sao Paulo and Sydney Biennales were founded by immigrants from post-War Europe-in Sao Paulo, Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho; in Sydney, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis. Their motivations were similar, and they had been affected by their own experiences of post-World War Π diaspora. They were European migrants who established themselves as important industrialists, proudly participating in their chosen city's civic and national desires for international recognition as nascent global cities and as nodes of business and capital in their respective regions in the Southern Hemisphere. Needless to say, civic and national aspirations were never identical nor necessarily in harmony, nor was the balance between the two always equal. Whereas the Federal Government's new Australia Council for the Arts wished primarily to support art-making nationwide and far less to project Australian art internationally. Its aim was to maximise direct support to Australian artists in the form of grants. Belgiorno-Nettis, on the other hand, wanted to replicate and import the cultural institutions of his homeland to his beloved Sydney, and in particular the venerable institution of the Biennale of Venice:My love affair with Venice, where I have been a frequent visitor for years, is the source of inspiration for the Biennale. How do you break the isolation of Australia, which I felt strongly myself in the early 50s? How do you inject that flavor of international extravaganza, originality and explosive vision that you see at gatherings in Venice, in the Giardini, in the Corderia, in the Arsenale, with their centuries of tradition?3Other biennial models than that of Venice were already available, principally the idea of a biennial of the South, current from 1955 onwards, that we have written about elsewhere.4 These ideas might just as easily have been adopted, but there is no evidence that they were discussed and Belgiorno-Nettis's civic-minded boosterism, nostalgia and philanthropy prevailed. He invented, underpinned and financially supported the new biennial with the organisational and curatorial resources provided by his family conglomerate, the powerful Transfield Corporation, which built bridges, railways and major infrastructure projects. …

The Martinos: A Legacy of Art

In the introduction to The Martinos: A Legacy of Art, the author writes, “Students of the art world can name families of artists such as the Peales, the Wyeths and the Calders, but there was another Philadelphia family of artists that does not readily come to mind. Yet the Martinos produced more artists than any of the aforementioned” (vii). The assertion of numbers is certainly true of the Calders, but is more questionable when applied to the Peales and the Wyeths. Coming to questions about national reputation and significance, this comparison becomes even dicier. However, we owe author McClelland a debt of thanks for compiling the first monograph devoted to what he called “this amazing family of artists [that] is very much underrated, under-appreciated, and relatively unknown” (vii).Central to the story are the seven Martino brothers, all of whom were artists to one degree or another. Two, Antonio and Giovanni, had important regional careers; another brother, Edmund, was lesser known. All the brothers supported themselves working as commercial artists, for a long time in their own family business, Martino Studios, in Philadelphia. Edmund eventually went to work for the Franklin Mint. The Martino Studios, a commercial arts firm, opened in 1926 and was successful enough that business-manager brother Alberto, primarily a photographer, “could be seen driving around town in his Du[e]senberg automobile” (69).The brothers, born between 1896 and 1915, were the children of an Italian immigrant couple, Carmine and Clementina, who were wed in Philadelphia in 1896. Two daughters were also in the family; one died at age two and the other committed suicide in her twenties. Carmine, a trained stonemason when he emigrated, worked on Bryn Athyn Cathedral and went on to become a foreman. He was prosperous enough to build a substantial three-story stone house for his family at 151 North Gross Street in Philadelphia.Modestino Francesco Martino (1896–1941), “Frank,” was the eldest of the children and the first to study art, attending the Pennsylvania Museum School of the Industrial Arts (now the University of the Arts). He is also credited with encouraging his brothers to study art as well—warning them that their only alternative was to be stone masons! A successful illustrator, he even had a commission from the Saturday Evening Post for a painting of a buccaneer, done very much in the style of N. C. Wyeth and used inside the magazine. In an article in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin about Martino Studios, Frank (the shortest-lived of the brothers) called himself “the business head of the outfit” and remarked, “I also paint nudes” (135).In addition to the brothers' works, McClelland presents pieces by Giovanni's wife, Eva, and their daughters, Babette (b. 1946) and Nina (b. 1942), as well as the paintings of Antonio's daughter, Marie Martino Manos. Mention is also made of Antonio Martino Jr., who studied art but gave it up for a career in business, and Carmen Martino, the son of Ernesto, a professional photographer,Antonio, Giovanni, and Edmund can all be classified as impressionist artists of the group today referred to as “The Pennsylvania Impressionists” or the “New Hope School.” While the brothers all painted in Bucks County, they also painted elsewhere, especially the Manayunk area of Philadelphia. Antonio, the most acclaimed of the artists, was the most prolific and hardest-working of the lot—and the one who did the most paintings of Bucks County scenery. Of the second-generation artists, Marie Martino Manos diverged from family tradition, being especially interested in portraiture and interiors.From a technical point of view the way in which McClelland has inserted text between the various galleries of illustrations is awkward and occasionally confusing. Very little attempt is made to relate the major players to the national art scene. While we know who the Martinos studied with, other influences are not explored. For example, many of Edward Hopper's themes are found in Giovanni's works—and Hopper (1882–1967) taught in Philadelphia for a while and several of his best-known works were done in Philadelphia.The Martinos: A Legacy of Art is a beautifully illustrated book presenting us with a sense of the talents and ranges of the artists. It would have been more valuable if more paintings in public collections had been included. As it is, most of the paintings illustrated belong to family members and several of the commercial galleries who helped support this publication. A brief genealogical chart of the artists would have been a useful aid for readers of this illuminating and needed book.