Alternately praised as "an American original" and lampooned as an arbiter of kitsch, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton has been the subject of myriad monographs and journal articles, remaining almost as controversial today as he was in his own time. Missing from this literature, however, is an understanding of the profound ways in which sound figures in the artist's enterprises. Prolonged attention to the sonic realm yields rich insights into long-established narratives, corroborating some but challenging and complicating at least as many. A self-taught and frequently performing musician who invented a harmonica tablature notation system, Benton was also a collector, cataloguer, transcriber, and distributor of popular music. In Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound, Leo Mazow shows that the artist's musical imagery was part of a larger belief in the capacity of sound to register and convey meaning. In Benton's pictorial universe, it is through sound that stories are told, opinions are voiced, experiences are preserved, and history is recorded.

In Taxing Visions, Leo Mazow and Kevin Murphy explore taxes, rents, economic depression, and financial inequity as subject matter in several visually provocative paintings and works on paper. Although this period is often identified artistically with leisure-laden impressionist landscapes, flowing-with-abundance still-life paintings, and class-conscious "official" portraits, practitioners working in a variety of stylistic idioms reckoned with financial panics and occupational turmoil that marked the Reconstruction, Gilded Age, and early Progressive eras. These paintings, drawings, and prints demonstrate with sometimes startling clarity the experience of economic downturn, ultimately picking up where facts, figures, and the printed word leave off.

Featured artists include William Michael Harnett, George Inness, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, as well as several lesser-known individuals, in part because their art "taxes" our sensibilities of socioeconomic propriety. Taxing Visions shows satire and protest playing out through a sizable body of work, with artists confronting recession and depression with equal parts reportage, invective, humor, and hope. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University and the Huntington Library and Art Collections in San Marino, California.

As some American artists began to eliminate people and remove extraneous details from their compositions, they often employed neat, orderly brushwork or close-up, unemotional photography. Artists as diverse as Patrick Henry Bruce, John Covert, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand and Arthur Dove navigated European and American avant-garde circles, picking and choosing new ideas and methods. Inspiration ranged from cubism and machine parts to new technologies, and they found ways to bring order to the modern world through extreme simplification. For them, abstraction involved absence and presence - the evacuation of human beings but also the desire to depict something that would not otherwise be visible or to render visible unseen natural processes like the passage of time, sound waves, or weather patterns. Their artworks provide a new context for the precisionist works in the subsequent sections and point to modern ideas about what art could be. How does a crisp painting technique relate to an aesthetic of absence?

The history of the banjo is as haunting as its music. Made popular in minstrel shows of the nineteenth century, the “banjar� derives from the stringed gourd instrument African slaves brought with them to plantations in the Caribbean and American South. From minstrelsy to the folk music revival of the twentieth century, the banjo has continued to attract audiences and acquire meaning. Picturing the Banjo gives this long history an entirely new dimension by tracing the instrument’s representation in American visual culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, Picturing the Banjo offers the first examination of the instrument’s portrayal in images that range from anonymous photographs of performers to paintings by Thomas Eakins and prints by Dox Thrash. Leo G. Mazow, contributing editor of the volume, and his collaborators demonstrate that the banjo became an American icon that links popular music to fundamental issues of race, class, and gender. Simple and appealing as the instrument may seem in Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson or Eastman Johnson’s Old Kentucky Home, it carries powerful associations with social conflict and change. Through its many color and black-and-white illustrations, this book allows readers to experience the works of visual art and period instruments brought together in the pioneering exhibition organized by the Palmer Museum of Art of The Pennsylvania State University. Picturing the Banjo will be of interest to banjo lovers, scholars in American studies, and all those concerned with the musical and artistic heritage of slavery.