Michael G. Kammen

Michael Kammen, author of Robert Gwathmey: The Life and Art of a Passionate Observer (UNC Press, September 1999), will be the first to admit that his new book on the twentieth-century Social Realist artist Robert Gwathmey may be a departure from his usual subject matter. But he will also say, as he recently told an interviewer for book publishing and selling magazine Publishers Weekly, that "life is too short to devote an entire career to one particular type of history."

Michael Kammen has taught American history and culture at Cornell University since 1965. He received the Pulitzer Prize for People of Paradox (1973), and the Francis Parkman Prize and the Henry Adams Prize for A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1987). Readers may know Kammen as a prominent historian of colonial America, but his interests and writing have progressed, and his nineteenth book, American Culture, American Tastes (Knopf 1999), reflects his changing interests.

Robert Gwathmey is Kammen's twentieth book. Gwathmey became a focus for Kammen after he ran across one of Gwathmey's pieces in Manhattan while researching another book. Kammen now owns a number of canvases and prints by Gwathmey and is co-curating a Gwathmey retrospective to open at The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, in September.

Gwathmey is perhaps best remembered as the first white American painter to depict African Americans in an unromanticized, respectful manner. Using a unique style that combined a deliberate two-dimensionality with deep and vivid colors, Gwathmey illuminated the inherent dignity of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers who were his subjects.

Kammen had the full cooperation of Gwathmey's widow, son, and former lover while conducting research for the book. Kammen conducted candid interviews with many people who knew the artist and collected his art. Because of the cooperation by those who knew Gwathmey, Kammen was able to capture the narrative of Gwathmey's life and career as a Social Realist painter, including his political activism and his love affairs.


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