conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Excels, I>Booklist</I with the genre: Arts & Photography, History & Criticism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'American Realism'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first three paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: American Realism
  This war party return is a victorious one. Three mounted warriors escort two prisoners who will be traded back to the raided tribe for horses, killed or made slaves to serve this band of the Blackfoot tribe. One of the warriors whips a bound prisoner wearing a scraped elk or buffalo hide coat. The horses are small Indian ponies, not the large American saddle horses ridden by the U.S. Cavalry. Remington uses the red saddle blanket on the lead horse, balanced by the almost white coat on the captive beneath a cold, roiled sky. The intricate beadwork and fringe on the lead warrior's jacket and breeches indicate at least a sub-chief, as does the ornate wampum belt at his waist. He carries a short barrel single-shot trade rifle adorned with brass tacks for decoration. The muskets only required powder and ball, not expensive cartridges. His hat is probably beaver or bearskin. The warrior with the whip behind him, almost equally well turned out, may be his son. Remington collected Indian garments and decorations as well as cowboy clothes and accessories that included weapons of all kinds as props.
  In 1890 he followed General Nelson Miles and the U.S. Cavalry into the Dakotas to put down what was interpreted as an insurrection by the Sioux Indians, who, by that time, were starving on mismanaged reservations. Remington saw this campaign as the last gasp of the Old West as the Indians faced extinction and assimilation. The pre-Custer cockiness had left the Army now and every confrontation with the Indians was entered into with great caution. The Sioux were particularly dangerous, having been part of the Custer massacre and the raids that had swept through Minnesota.
  Memorabilia of his trips into the West were everywhere. He relied on these actual objects in his work rather than memory when assembling one of his highly detailed scenes.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: During the 1920s, Benton had launched into a study of structured form and composition in abstract shapes that used every element within the frame as part of the whole. These were sharp-edged elements, not the insubstantial creations of the Pointillists and gauzy Impressionists. Though he continually spoke out against the broad concept of abstract non-representational art, he employed these shape paintings as learning tools to incorporate pure form relationships without regard for subject matter or surface treatments – and not as an end in themselves. The mechanics of form organisation within a frame related directly to the composition of representational painting. These earlier studies now combined with this new rich vein of American subject matter as he moved forward into the 1930s and 1940s.
  His exploration of depth and the use of a rhythm of forms organized around a single vertical pole can best to shown with human anatomy. The natural flow of bones and muscles flex and contort as movement takes place, revealing rhythmic patterns built around the central vertical core. Compositionally, paintings organised, in a vertical frame flow best when that central vertical pole is established, as with a piece of figural sculpture. In a horizontal composition, the painter has an advantage over the sculptor in that several vertical poles can be established and referenced to each other by horizontal elements to achieve a visual whole.
  Later, during his teaching days in Kansas City in the 1940s when Benton took on Jackson Pollock as a pupil, the younger artist embraced Benton's compositional principles, but rejected their relationship to representational art. Even though Pollock pursued abstract art, he never quite left those principles behind in the gestural drip paintings for which he became known.
  As Thomas Hart Benton's art moved into the modern era, reviewers placed him firmly in the Regionalist camp if only they judged his subject matter and its execution at that level. With a deeper understanding of his years of experimentation in modern forms of expression, his attempts to create a rich translation of forms and compositions into the lexicon of painting, that knowledge unlocks a greater intellectual pleasure in realising what he managed to create. The wonder is, with all the shabby twists and turns of his early life up through the 1920s, that he managed to use almost every creative tool he had learned to manipulate along the way. Like an athlete's muscle memory, once learned, the lessons remained with him. Despite the many personal wounds – many of them self-inflicted – Benton persevered and was reshaped by the friends who put up with him.
  Other motivators that got Benton out of the studio were the watercolour paintings of Charles Burchfield, an Ohio artist who began showing his work in New York in 1924. Like Burchfield, Benton found himself compelled to start on down the road and record snapshots of the American Scene, often covering 24 to 32 kilometres a day.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last three paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Finally, at the age of sixty-eight, Wyeth presented the collection to his startled wife. Betsy, who had always found security in her control of the household allowing Andrew free range for his creativity, suddenly confronted 240 pictures of this beautiful blonde girl, nude and clothed, close-up and full-figured. She knew Andrew was faithful, but she also knew he became who he painted, transported himself beneath their skin, explored every pore and hair, became intimate beyond love-making. When the surprise became reasonably settled between them, a single home for the collection was sought. In 1986, Leonard E.B. Andrews purchased the series and made it available for a coast-to-coast tour organized by the National Gallery of Art from 1987-89. Some time after the conclusion of the series debut, the Helga pictures came into the ownership of a private Japanese interest that still assembles exhibits of the works and allows access. [84] The release of the Helga collection to the public was traumatic for both Andrew and Betsy as the "single fifteen-year painting" came to an end. Many things came to an end with it. Chadd's Ford and its wonderfully eccentric neighbours became something else and age began shutting down Andrew's peripatetic lifestyle. Betsy continued her management of the Wyeth empire of shows, print collections and gallery requests. Helga joined the family as a care-giver to the ageing Andrew, who had endured hip surgery. His personality evolved as his work circulating as prints and reproductions or the occasional show further entrenched his iconic status. Interviews were few and far between as he eased into his nineties. The work was still there, experiments, fiddling with technique for a different look, a different vocabulary, but he couldn't paint the indignities of age and the perceptions that lingered, the ever-present image of his father's dead face in the coffin. Abandoned, and yet a stalwart example of Nietzsche's quote: "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger."
  A large collection of his work hangs today in the Brandywine River Museum, a converted grist mill in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania together with works by N.C. Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth. Andrew's granddaughter, Victoria, a clinical psychologist, spends time giving visitor tours that include inside stories about the works from when she knew them as a child. On occasion, Andrew and Betsy visited the museum, especially when one of his latest works was exhibited. At the age of ninety-one he still needed to see how the work looked "on the wall". When the Wyeths arrived at the gallery, visitors were quietly and courteously shooed from his presence since he no longer gave interviews or answered questions. He said, "Everything I have to say is on the walls."[85]
  The horror of being nailed down and defined can only be answered in the words of the productive patriarch, still bigger than life: