ART HISTORY INTRODUCTION

From the age of eight through seventeen, I lived in Hoboken, New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City and some of the most spectacular art museums in the world, both large and small. As an adult, I lived in Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Boston and frequented the art museums of those cities, as well as those of Philadelphia. In college, I took the art survey course popularly referred to as “Art in the Dark” but had no other formal art education until 1996 when I enrolled in a Bloomsburg University graduate course on the Italian Renaissance taught in Italy. Over the next nine semesters I worked steadily on a Masters degree in Art History.  Among the art that early attracted my interest were the sculptures of the Cycladic Islands off the coast of Greece; both the architecture and sculpture of ancient Greece, especially as represented at the Acropolis; early illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells, the Book of Darrow and the Lindisfarne Gospels; the medieval books of hours;  the sculptures of Michelangelo Buonarroti  and Donatello; and the paintings of Claude Monet and Mary Cassatt.  In time, I found myself increasingly focused on sculpture. I had long been attracted to the sculptures of Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi. In my later course work and for Bloomsburg University’s Art History Symposia, however, I ultimately focused on the work of three twentieth-century women sculptors: Anna Hyatt Huntington, Bashka Paeff and Nancy Cox-McCormack, the last of whom was the subject of my thesis. All had been friends or friendly acquaintences of my great-great aunt, Ethel Fairmont Snyder Beebe (1881-1977). It was from reading her papers after her death and organizing them in preparation to donating them to the University of Florida that I first learned about them. It was from researching them as part of my coursework in art history that I developed an appreciation of them as  women and as sculptors. Hence my decision to profile all three on this web site.

MY FAVORITE ART MUSEUMS ACCESSIBLE FROM CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA

• The Barnes Foundation
• Frick Collection
• Guggenheim Museum
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Morgan Library and Museum
• Museum of Modern Art - MoMA
• National Gallery of Art
• National Museum of Women in the Arts 
• Philadelphia Museum of Art

ART HISTORY REFERENCE WEB SITES

Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online. Sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Trust, this site provides “a structured vocabulary of around 34,000 concepts, including 131,000 terms, descriptions, bibliographic citations, and other information relating to fine art, architecture, decorative arts, archival materials, and material culture."

Art History Resources on the Web created by Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Professor of Art History at Sweet Briar College. Provides links to hundreds of sites organized around the text, Art through the Ages.

Imagebase Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco . Consists of more 85,000 well known artists worldwide with more than 110,000 images accessed by keyword searches, the artist last name, country or period.

Timeline of Art History. Metropolitan Museum of Art. “A chronological,geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated especially by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection.