PA BOOKS on PCN

Philadelphia native Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founding figures of American modernism. Initially trained in impressionist landscape painting, he experimented early in his career with compositions inspired by European modernism before developing a linear, hard-edge style now known as Precisionism. Sheeler is best known for his powerful and compelling images of the Machine Age—stark paintings and photographs of skyscrapers, factories, and power plants—that he created while working in the 1920s and 1930s. Less known, and even lesser studied, is that he worked from 1926 to 1931 as a fashion and portrait photographer for Condé Nast. The body of work he produced during this time, mainly for Vanity Fair and Vogue, has been almost universally dismissed by scholars of American modernism as purely commercial, the results of a painter's "day job," and nothing more. Charles Sheeler contends that Sheeler's fashion and portrait photography was instrumental to the artist's developing modernist aesthetic. Over the course of his time at Condé Nast, Sheeler's fashion photography increasingly incorporated the structural design of abstraction: rhythmic patterning, dramatic contrast, and abstract compositions. The subjects of Sheeler's fashion and portrait photography appear pared down to their barest essentials, as sculptural objects composed of line, form, and light. The objective, distant, and rigorously formal style that Sheeler developed at Condé Nast would eventually be applied to all of his artistic forays: architectural, industrial, and vernacular.

Kirsten Jensen is the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum.

Shawn Waldron is the former Senior Director of Archives and Records at Conde Nast.

Description courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Press.

Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the "thorough deist" who emerges in his autobiography. As Thomas Kidd reveals, deist writers influenced Franklin's beliefs, to be sure, but devout Christians in his life—including George Whitefield, the era's greatest evangelical preacher; his parents; and his beloved sister Jane—kept him tethered to the Calvinist creed of his Puritan upbringing. Based on rigorous research into Franklin's voluminous correspondence, essays, and almanacs, this fresh assessment of a well-known figure unpacks the contradictions and conundrums faith presented in Franklin's life.

Thomas S. Kidd is distinguished professor of history and associate director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

Description courtesy of Yale University Press.

Based on a comprehensive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin Hayes reconstructs in vivid detail the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of Washington. Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt an acute sense of embarrassment about his relative lack of formal education and cultural sophistication, and in this sparkling literary biography, Hayes illustrates just how tirelessly Washington worked to improve. Beginning with the primers, forgotten periodicals, conduct books, and classic eighteenth-century novels such as Tom Jones that shaped Washington's early life, Hayes studies Washington's letters and journals, charting the many ways the books of his upbringing affected decisions before and during the Revolutionary War. The final section of the book covers the voluminous reading that occurred during Washington's presidency and his retirement at Mount Vernon. Throughout, Hayes examines Washington's writing as well as his reading, from The Journal of Major George Washington through his Farewell Address. The sheer breadth of titles under review here allow readers to glimpse Washington's views on foreign policy, economics, the law, art, slavery, marriage, and religion-and how those views shaped the young nation.

Kevin Hayes, Emeritus Professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, now lives and writes in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several books including "The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson" and "A Journey through American Literature."

Description courtesy of Oxford University Press.

This major retrospective catalogue explores the impact of time and place on the work of beloved American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). While previous publications have mainly analyzed Wyeth's work thematically, this publication places him fully in the context of the long 20th century, tracing his creative development from World War I through the new millennium. Published to coincide with the centenary of Wyeth's birth, the book looks at four major chronological periods in the artist's career: Wyeth as a product of the interwar years, when he started to form his own "war memories" through military props and documentary photography he discovered in his father's art studio; the change from his "theatrical" pictures of the 1940s to his own visceral responses to the landscape around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and his family's home in Maine; his sudden turn, in 1968, into the realm of erotic art, including a completely new assessment of Wyeth's "Helga pictures"—a series of secret, nude depictions of his neighbor Helga Testorf—within his career as a whole; and his late, self-reflective works, which includes the discussion of his previously unknown painting entitled Goodbye, now believed to be Wyeth's last work.

Audrey Lewis is curator at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

Christine Podmaniczky is curator of the N.C. Wyeth Collections and Historic Properties at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.

Description courtesy of Yale University Press.

A mostly forgotten episode of US history is brought to life in fascinating detail by historian and author Deborah deBilly dit Courville. Working from primary sources such as letters and household accounts, she has reconstructed the rhythm and rationale of daily life at the 18th century French immigrant colony along the Susquehanna River known as Azilum. Told through the fortunes and fates of one of the colony's founding families, the LaPortes, the novel explores the attitudes, desires and motivations of the French nobles who sought refuge in the New World: people who, much as we do today, struggled, loved, mourned and planned for their futures, all against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the politics and vast uncharted wilderness that was the fledgling United States.

Deborah deBilly dit Courville is a member of the Board of Directors of French Azilum and is a historical interpreter at the LaPorte House located near Towanda, PA.

Description courtesy of Samothrace Press.