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LOOKING NORTH
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Illustrations

Arnold Friberg made cultural heroes of the North West Mounted Police
for one of the longest-running campaigns in American advertising history.

THE MOUNTIE WORE HIS HEART (and ours) on his bright red sleeve; he stood for integrity, bravery, and a whole range of Victorian virtues that had been banished from the abstract art of the modern, 20th century.

The big calendars that carried these images were Northwest Paper Company’s pride and joy. To promote high-quality paper to the printing trade, it was crucial to show how well it reproduced the intended colors—how well it “printed.” Chicago ad man Frank Cash had the answer: The red Mountie tunic and the vivid hues of the outdoor landscapes would test the printing qualities of Northwest paper to its limits. The heroic male figure would appeal to the jobbers and printers; theirs was, in the 1930s, strictly a man’s world.

LOOKING NORTH features 140 color illustrations by Arnold Friberg, Hal Foster, and 13 other artists who created these stunning story-ads for the Northwest Paper Company in Cloquet, Minnesota, between 1931 and 1970.

"For the first time, this significant scholarly study of the collection has been made available to an eager audience throughout this country and abroad."—Martin DeWitt, Director, Tweed Museum of Art

Stunning late 19th - century American and European landscapes 
in the "American Sublime" tradition!

Gilbert Munger (1837-1903) achieved enormous artistic success by depicting recently discovered western landcapes with an accuracy and style admired by both scientists and art connoisseurs. By the 1870s his talent and keen eye had carried him to top of the New York and San Francisco art markets. But his decline was equally dramatic; when he died at age 65, he was an almost forgotten man.

This landmark study reestablishes the artist’s place in the history of American landscape painting. His early works are painted in the realistic style of the Hudson River School, while his later pictures are suffused with the atmosphere and color of J. M. W. Turner, or the rural repose and historic air of Barbizon.

"Thanks to Sweeney and Schroeder, we can now understand Munger's achievement in relation to American artistic culture of the period 1865-1900."—Alan Wallach

The Gág Family
German-Bohemian Artists in America

Rich in visual records—paintings, drawings, and photographs, The Gag Family explores and celebrates one family’s remarkable cultural journey from Bohemia to the American Midwest to New York and beyond. After settling in the Minnesota frontier town of New Ulm in 1879, German-Bohemian immigrant Anton Gag established himself as an artist and begat a family business. His oldest daughter and protégé, Wanda, made her reputation in New York as a printmaker and children’s book author and illustrator. Her younger sister Flavia was a prolific writer, illustrator, and painter. Using heretofore unavailable family papers and newly discovered documents, The Gag Family traces the influences of European family traditions on the art of these enterprising artists and places them in the context of American art.

"There is an exuberance and lavishness about the foliage that is intoxicating and the . . . plentitude of their form fills me with primitivism,"  twenty-nine-year-old Wanda Gag wrote after romping among daisies on a hilltop in June 1922.

A FEAST FOR THE EYES and also the spirit, Body of Clay, Soul of Fire will delight art lovers, potters, and collectors, as well as to everyone who is interested in Benedictine traditions.

Richard Bresnahan is a preeminent American potter and an ambassador for the natural environment. Reared on a farm in North Dakota, he graduated from Saint John’s University, a Benedictine school in Collegeville, Minnesota, and apprenticed as a potter in Japan. Returning to Saint John’s, where he is an artist in residence, he built a massive wood-burning kiln, which, with its innovative flame flues and water channels, dwarfs all other American kilns. By digging his own clay, using local seeds and hulls as glazing materials, and firing with deadfall, Bresnahan also practices a brand of environmentalism worthy of his Benedictine surroundings.

Author Matthew Welch is curator of Japanese and Korean art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. As a Fulbright scholar at Kyoto University in the 1980s, he developed an abiding passion for traditional Asian ceramics. Body of Clay, Soul of Fire resulted from an ongoing dialogue about pottery between Bresnahan and Welch over the past ten years.

"Many artists leave the Midwest and move to New York or L.A. to shun their rural background. But Richard chose to come back here, to create a center, and to promote the very earth of the place as an asset."—Stewart Turnquist, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Body of Clay, Soul of Fire: Richard Bresnahan and the Saint John’s Pottery accompanies a traveling exhibition of Bresnahan’s and his apprentices’ work that opens at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, in December 2001 and will tour to museums in Minnesota and the Dakotas.