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(b Veracruz, Mar 13, 1880; d Stamford, CT, Jan 10, 1961).

Mexican illustrator, writer, gallery owner, and publisher, active in the USA. He was the son of a wealthy Mexican lawyer and publisher. De Zayas started his career as an artist by providing drawings for his father’s newspaper in Veracruz. In 1906 he moved on to Mexico City’s leading newspaper, El Diario, but a year later, after the ascension of the dictator Porfirio Diaz, whom the newspaper had opposed, he fled to the USA. There he landed a position making caricatures for the New York Evening World. Shortly after his arrival in the USA, he came into contact with Alfred Stieglitz, who staged solo shows of De Zayas’s caricatures at his gallery Gallery 291 in 1909 and 1910, both of which proved to be huge popular successes.

In 1910 De Zayas traveled to Paris, where he stayed almost a year, scouting out adventurous forms of modern art for Stieglitz, notably the cubist work of Picasso and African sculpture. On his return, equipped with knowledge of European modern art and inspired by the work of the French modernist ...

(b Brooklyn, NY, Oct 27, 1877; d White Plains, NY, July 13, 1949).

American painter, illustrator and lithographer. As an organizer of the Armory Show (1913) alongside Arthur B. Davies, he played an integral role in unveiling European modernism to the USA. While he painted landscapes of Maine, Cézanne-inspired still lifes and a series based on the American West, his expressive portraits of circus and vaudeville performers remain his best-known works.

In 1901, he trained at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, but soon transferred to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich where he studied under Barbizon painter Heinrich von Zügel (1850–1941) until 1903. Upon returning to New York in 1903, he worked as an illustrator for publications such as Life and Puck, exhibited at the Salmagundi Club (1905) and organized artists’ balls for the Kit Kat Club. Working in an Impressionist style, he participated with Robert Henri in the Exhibition of Independent Artists (1910)....

(Bainbridge)

(b Norristown, PA, July 5, 1864; d Philadelphia, PA, Nov 20, 1942).

American painter, illustrator and teacher. Born in Norristown, near Philadelphia, McCarter enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879, at the age of 15. Of the several hundred students who moved through the classes of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy, none would move as far, stylistically and temperamentally, from their teacher as McCarter. Though later he would regard the five years he studied there as “years lost,” his training was sufficient to earn him a post drawing imagery for the Philadelphia Press.

In 1887 McCarter sailed to Europe for further studies under Léon Bonnat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and an apprenticeship to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the medium of lithography. On his return to the United States, McCarter, grounded in the international style of graphic arts, settled in New York to a prosperous career and continued transatlantic travels as an illustrator for McClure’s, Harper’s, Century...

(b Wilmington, DE, March 5, 1853; d Florence, Nov 9, 1911).

American illustrator and writer. Along with such figures as Edwin Austin Abbey, Arthur Burdett Frost and Charles Stanley Reinhart, Pyle was instrumental in raising American book and magazine illustration to a higher level, and inaugurating what is often termed the “Golden Age” of American illustration. Pyle was born in Wilmington, DE, counting among his ancestors some of the original Quaker settlers of the place. His mother, who encouraged his interest in literature, art and fantasy, introduced him to fairy tales, as well as to classic stories such as Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. After graduating from high school, Pyle attended a small private art academy in Philadelphia for three years, his only formal training. This was run by a Francis Adolf van der Wielen (b 1847), a graduate of the art academy in Antwerp, who was a stern taskmaster in matters of academic technique.

In 1876, Pyle produced an illustrated article on the wild horses of Chincoteague that was accepted by ...

American indexed catalog of building components and manufacturers published annually since 1906. This multi-volume series, which organizes building product information, details, and specifications, is a standard reference for architecture, engineering, and construction industry professionals. It was launched as “Sweet’s” Indexed Catalogue of Building Construction in 1906 by Clinton W. Sweet, founder and editor of the journal Architectural Record, in response to an industry need for a more systematic and scientific approach to the organization of building product data.

During the 19th century local and craft-based building traditions in the United States were gradually displaced by the rise of industrial production and the establishment of integrated transportation and distribution networks. The concomitant formation of a national market in building products, combined with new printing and marketing techniques, yielded an onslaught of manufacturers’ advertising brochures and catalogs inundating architects’ offices. By the early 20th century, this widely recognized “catalog problem” overwhelmed architects’ libraries and stymied the increasingly complex task of selecting and specifying building products. ...

(b Decatur, GA, Nov 18, 1885; d Decatur, GA, Nov 13, 1967).

American architect. Georgia’s first registered female architecture, Wilburn designed single-family houses, two-family houses and apartments in the plan book tradition. Wilburn and Emily Elizabeth Holman were the only early 20th century female architects whose published plan books have been documented. A plan book was a catalog of building designs; each design, or stock plan, was represented on a single page with an exterior perspective line drawing or exterior photograph, a descriptive paragraph and a floor plan. Home builders who chose a plan and paid a fee received construction drawings in the mail. Wilburn produced at least ten plan books. As Atlanta grew, Wilburn’s houses defined whole suburbs, a sphere of influence that can be measured on the landscape with thousands of buildings from Atlanta’s center in 1910 outward to districts built in 1965, and encompassing small towns in the region.

A drafting apprenticeship from 1906 to 1907 with the Atlanta architectural firm, B. R. Padgett and Son who designed “fine residences” influenced Wilburn’s choice of domestic architecture as a specialty. In ...

American journal found in 1980. Woman’s Art Journal was founded in 1980 in Knoxville, TN, by the art historian Elsa Honig Fine and has been published biannually in May and November since that time. The inspiration for the journal came in part because other journals devoted to women and women’s art that had been started in the 1970s, such as Feminist Art Journal and Womanart, had ceased publication for various reasons despite their important contributions to the feminist art movement.

In its first issue, Fine indicated Woman’s Art Journal’s dual focus on “recording a hidden heritage” and the “reinterpretation of art history from our new awareness as women.” The first several issues of the journal fully reflect these areas of concentration. For example, women artists and critics, some of whom were well known and others hardly at all, had essays devoted to their work: Josephine Hopper, Anna Jameson, Louise Nevelson, Anna Mary Robertson Moses, and Katarzyna Kobro. Essays on broader issues important to women and women artists in these early issues focused on themes such as sexuality and maternity in the late 19th century, the use of nature as image and metaphor, and domestic madness in American art and poetry. Neither did the journal avoid controversial topics, devoting part of its second issue to Judy Chicago’s ...