John Baeder's Road Well Taken

by Jay Williams (Text by)

Overview

A fascinating trip through the evocative remnants of a vanishing America, this book is also a portrait of an artist who has captured the nostalgic essence of what’s been lost. In 1972, John Baeder (b. 1938) left a career on Madison Avenue to become a full-time painter, gambling his livelihood on art dealer Ivan Karp’s evaluation of his first four canvases: a diner, a motel, a gas station, a tourist camp. Based on color postcards in his growing collection of roadside memorabilia, they launched a career that put him at the forefront of the growing photorealist movement. Baeder’s paintings, particularly of classic diners, were an immediate success, and he scoured the country for prime examples to document before they disappeared. Here, Jay Williams recounts the inside story of Baeder’s multifaceted career. With more than 300 illustrations of his highly collectible paintings, watercolors, vintage photographs, printed ephemera, and three-dimensional memorabilia, this is an artist’s journey, traveled along the back highways of the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865653191
Publisher:	Vendome Press
Publication date:	10/20/2015
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	10.20(w) x 10.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jay Williams has developed more than 40 major exhibitions during his 30-year career as a university and art museum curator, most recently for the Vero Beach Museum of Art, in Florida. He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs, including Pleasant Journeys and Good Eats Along the Way: The Paintings of John Baeder (2007–2009).

Editorial Reviews

02/01/2016
Photorealist artist John Baeder has been producing work consistently since the early 1970s. With almost 300 reproductions and abundant textual exculpations of the artist's oeuvre, university and art museum curator Williams (Vero Beach Museum of Art) delivers the definitive monograph of record on his subject. Rather than follow a strictly chronological survey format, Williams deconstructs formal elements such as color, line, weight, tone, and subject across many pieces while interweaving biographical circumstances to create a strong cumulative narrative. Baeder is renowned for his oils and watercolors depicting roadside diners, rendered in exacting detail, from the spectral highlights in windows or reflecting surfaces to idiosyncrasies of vernacular letterforms found along American back roads. Other subjects include airplanes, postcards, and hand-painted signs. Williams traces much of Baeder's fascination with vanishing material culture to WPA (Works Progress Administration) photographers such as Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott. Perhaps the most compelling element is the inclusion of revisited scenes or multiple views of the same diners, some coeval and others decades apart showing the building surrounded by newer structures. VERDICT This is a great choice for lovers of photorealism and Americana alike.—Dan McClure, Pacific Northwest Coll. of Art Lib., Portland, OR

Library Journal