The Montclair Art Museum has been a significant visual arts center for more than eighty-five years. Established in 1914, the museum's holdings have become an important cultural repository both for New Jersey and the nation.
This beautiful volume offers a selected cross-section of a collection of 15, 000 works. The more than two hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and photographs featured reveal the museum collection's breadth and many recent acquisitions. A special section covers the museum's important concentration of works by America's greatest landscape painter George Inness, whose presence in Montclair may be said to have inspired the founding of the museum. Another significant section features works of the Morgan Russell Collection and Archive, more than nine thousand works on paper that record the complexities of the artist's aesthetic and intellectual adventures, especially his development as part of the first declared American modern art movement, Synchromism, from 1912 to 1914.
The Montclair Art Museum is one of a surprisingly small number of U.S. museums dedicated solely to art produced in this country. This volume combines Native and other American art within a range of artistic media in provocative and insightful ways, and its commentaries reflect the careful scholarship and commitment to public education for which the museum is well known.
An essay covering the museum's history and the development of the collection rounds out the volume.