Books by Thomas Crow
Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975
by Melissa Ho, Thomas Crow, Martha Rosler, Mignon Nixon, Erica Levin, Katherine Markoski
How the Vietnam War changed American art
By the late 1960s, the United States was in a pitched conflict in Vietnam, against a foreign enemy, and at home―between Americans for and against the war and the status quo. This powerful book showcases how American artists responded to the war, spanning the period from Lyndon B. Johnson’s fateful decision to deploy U.S. Marines to South Vietnam in 1965 to the fall of Saigon ten years later.
Artists Respond brings together works by many of the most visionary and provocative artists of the period, including Asco, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Corita Kent, Leon Golub, David Hammons, Yoko Ono, and Nancy Spero. It explores how the moral urgency of the Vietnam War galvanized American artists in unprecedented ways, challenging them to reimagine the purpose and uses of art and compelling them to become politically engaged on other fronts, such as feminism and civil rights. The book presents an era in which artists struggled to synthesize the turbulent times and participated in a process of free and open questioning inherent to American civic life.
Beautifully illustrated, Artists Respond features a broad range of art, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, performance and body art, installation, documentary cinema and photography, and conceptualism.
Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Exhibition Schedule
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
March 15–August 18, 2019
Minneapolis Institute of Art
September 28, 2019–January 5, 2020
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$65.00
Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812-1820 (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 64)
by Thomas Crow
How social upheavals after the collapse of the French Empire shaped the lives and work of artists in early nineteenth-century Europe
As the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing national, religious, and social boundaries. In Restoration, Thomas Crow combines a sweeping view of European art centers―Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna―with a close-up look at pivotal artists, including Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Thomas Lawrence, and forgotten but meteoric painters François-Joseph Navez and Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas. Whether directly or indirectly, all were joined in a newly international network, from which changing artistic priorities and possibilities emerged out of the ruins of the old.
Crow examines how artists of this period faced dramatic circumstances, from political condemnation and difficult diplomatic missions to a catastrophic episode of climate change. Navigating ever-changing pressures, they invented creative ways of incorporating critical events and significant historical actors into fresh artistic works. Crow discusses, among many topics, David’s art and influence during exile, Géricault’s odyssey through outcast Rome, Ingres’s drive to reconcile religious art with contemporary mentalities, the titled victors over Napoleon all sitting for portraits by Lawrence, and the campaign to restore art objects expropriated by the French from Italy, prefiguring the restitution controversies of our own time.
Beautifully illustrated, Restoration explores how cataclysmic social and political transformations in nineteenth-century Europe reshaped artists’ lives and careers with far-reaching consequences.
Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
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The Long March of Pop: Art, Music, and Design, 1930–1995
by Thomas Crow
An original and insightful new history of Pop Art from one of the most important art historians of our time
Thomas Crow’s paradigm-changing book challenges existing narratives about the rise of Pop Art by situating it within larger cultural tides. While American Pop was indebted to its British predecessor’s insistence that any creative pursuit is worthy of aesthetic consideration, Crow demonstrates that this inclusive attitude also had strong American roots. Folk becomes Crow’s starting point in the advance of Pop. The folk revival occurred chiefly in the sphere of music during the 1930s and ’40s, while folk art surfaced a decade later in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Crow eloquently examines the subsequent explosion of commercial imagery in visual art, alongside its repercussions in popular music and graphic design. Pop’s practitioners become defined as artists whose distillation of the vernacular is able to capture the feelings stirring among a broad public, beginning with young participants in the politicized 1960s counterculture. Woody Guthrie and Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan, Ed Ruscha and the Byrds, Pauline Boty and the Beatles, the Who and Damien Hirst are all considered together with key graphic designers such as Milton Glaser and Rick Griffin in this engaging book.
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The Rise of the Sixties American and European Art in the Era of Dissent
by Thomas Crow, Thomas E. Crow
One of Thomas Crow’s most influential titles, The Rise of the Sixties, first published in 1996, provides an excellent overview of the major themes and figures in one of art history’s most radical and complicated decades. Presenting an international array of artists against the background of world events in the 1960s, Crow portrays the ways in which the American art scene—including such key figures as Leo Castelli, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol—fit into the corresponding European and international movements of the time, among them Situationalism, Conceptualism, Feminism, Environmentalism, and Op Art.
Generously illustrated with 120 images, 80 of which are in color, the newly available book encompasses all the major players in the art world of the 1960s and examines how they influenced and inspired one another. The author’s fascinating new afterword examines the themes of the 60s in the context of recent historical, political, and cultural events.
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