ISBN: 0-88739-304-7
384 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 8/2001
Paperback
Price: $19.50
Hardcover
Price: $27.50
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Art in the Blood: Seven Generations of American Artists in the Fuller Family
Blair Fuller
Art in the Blood is an informal and intimate history of what it has been like to be an artist in America from Revolutionary times to the present, through the lives of members of a single family.
The first of the artists, Joel Negus, was born in 1768 in Petersham, Massachusetts. He was father to two painters and a daughter who married Aaron Fuller of Deerfield and gave birth to George Fuller, who became America's best-paid and most respected painter by 1884, the year of his death. Four generations of artists have followed.
Altogether there have been twenty-one professional family artists: portrait painters of rural Americans, slaves, Boston intellectuals and bankers; of seascapes; of desert mountains; and of dreams. They have been miniaturists and symbolists, impressionists and neo-classicists, surrealists and meticulous realists. One was an early abstract painter whose objective was to create religious experiences for his viewers, one a contemporary sculptor who makes art from junkyard materials.
Their lives have been as varied as their techniques. Based on their letters and on interviews with the living, Art in the Blood is an intimate portrait of this great artistic family.
In these years, George kept a notebook in which to jot down ideas and instructions to himself, such as: 'From chin to a point between the collarbones is two lengths of nose.' 'The hand is the length of the face.' 'Two faces from shoulder to shoulder.' 'From bottom of breasts to naval, one face.'
...Ernest Hemingway wrote Sherwood Anderson that he and his wife Hadley were as fond of each other as ever,' but there is no doubt he was crazy about Duff. She was tall and slender, dressed as a modest schoolgirl, and could drink all evening without losing equilibrium. Duff struck drolly stoic attitudes, which Hemingway would put into the speech of The Sun Also Rises' Lady Brett Ashley.
Review: "Fuller portrays the lives of the family artists with a particular sensitivity (and unabashed pride) that provides insight into the struggles of artists in 19th century America."
-Library Journal
"An exceptionally interesting American family and a fine family history, very well-researched and well-written."
-Peter Matthiessen
"I found myself captivated by Art in the Blood. There are over nine hundred paintings and works on paper by the Fuller family and relatives at Memorial Hall Museum. Reading Art in the Blood made me realize how little I knew of the personalities and the pathos behind this extraordinary family of artists."
-Suzanne Flynt
"A unique and honest account of what it has meant to be an artist in America over the past two hundred years. Often using his own words, Fuller probes the relationships, frailties, and achievements of his ancestors to create an affecting picture of how difficult the lot of the artist has been-and continues to be-in this country."
-Jacquelynn Baas
"Blair Fuller has not only climbed a fascinating family tree, but from its topmost branches he has looked out on a vast panorama of American art. If his own ancestors were mostly ordinary artists although some were very gifted, their friends and neighbors in artists' colonies and Upper Bohemia were extraordinary painters and sculptors, making this family history something close to a history of our national culture."
-Allan Temko, former art and architecture critic, San Francisco Chronicle
Bio: BLAIR FULLER, following a literary bent of family tradition, has been an editor of The Paris Review, the author of two novels, and the recipient of two O. Henry Awards for his short stories.
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