Reviews
“Informative and richly illustrated.”—ARTnews
“This beautifully illustrated volume paints a new picture of Yosemite’s visual history.”—Antiques and the Arts Weekly
“Yosemite includes equally striking landscapes and related artworks in a variety of media, ranging from such early paintings as Albert Bierstadt’s otherworldly 1868 painting Sunset in the Yosemite Valley, to David Hockney’s photo-collage Merced River, Yosemite Valley, Sept. 1982.”—Natural History
“The season's most impressive art book, Yosemite is aptly subtitled Art of an American Icon. . . . In addition to the spectacular illustrations—the chapter on the early photographers includes some breath-taking panoramas—Yosemite boasts some unusually astute and readable analyses by a half-dozen guest scholars.”—Metro Newspapers
“A wonderful walk down art history lane while still being a balanced and fair assessment of Yosemite’s complexities. . . . And for the first time, in one single gorgeous volume, we can delight in a complete and wide-ranging artistic view of its wonder, power and mystery.”—Fresno Magazine
"For Americans of the nineteenth century, Yosemite, like Niagara Falls, offered a defining natural symbol of American possibilities. Here, in image and text, is the record of how the painters and photographers of that era-poised on California peaks in silent awe-celebrated the Yosemite as place and icon."—Kevin Starr, Professor of History, University of Southern California
“For 150 years Yosemite Valley has captured the American imagination through literary description, the photographer’s lens, and the artist’s palate. Yosemite: Art of an American Icon is a wonderful, multilayered cultural history of a spectacular American landscape. This is a story of the beauty of Nature melded with human perceptions, which tells us much about ourselves as well as the ‘incomparable valley.’ It is a spectacular, entertaining read.”—Robert Righter, author of The Battle over Hetch Hetchy
"Tracing the dynamic interconnections between art, nature, and commerce that transformed Yosemite into one of the most powerful and popular icons of wilderness in American culture, Yosemite: Art of an American Icon is a one-of-a-kind volume that graphically probes and exposes our ambivalent cultural love affair with pristine wilderness. Not only does it provide a nuanced and comprehensive survey of the art of Yosemite, but it also encourages us to critically examine our contradictory desire for Yosemite to be both untouched natural preserve and sought-after tourist destination."—Marguerite S. Shaffer, Director of American Studies, Associate Professor of American Studies and History, Miami University, Oxford Ohio
“As Amy Scott puts it in her introduction: “In Yosemite, visitors encounter nature but see a work of art.” For us to see nature it must be turned into a landscape, a work of art, but always then what we see is the work of art. It is this paradox that the book so skillfully elucidates, in a major contribution that places the visual creation of Yosemite at the heart of western studies, American art, and the role of wilderness in modern urban society. Scott and her colleagues do a magnificent job of capturing Yosemite’s significance and its hard realities and complexities, synthesizing current research on the development of Yosemite, and extending that research in many fruitful directions. And the book is beautifully written and illustrated.”—Bruce Robertson, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Consulting Curator, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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