Albert Pinkham Ryder, Painter of Dreams

Dark and brooding, Ryder's (1847-1917) masterful paintings seem to well up out of the superconscious. His heavily textured canvases of storm-tossed ships, moonlit vistas or the haunting allegory Death on a Pale Horse are direct confrontations with nature and with our nature. He is surely one of America's greatest, most enigmatic artists, yet this definitive and beautifully illustrated biographical-critical study is the first full-length scholarly book on Ryder, according to University of Delaware art historian Homer, who collaborated with the late Goodrich, former director of New York's Whitney Museum. The authors shatter the conventional image of the self-taught recluse and give us instead a complex renegade who participated in New York anti-establishment art circles, mingled easily with ordinary workers and bent the influences of Wagner, the Bible, classical myths and dawning European modernism to his idiosyncratic vision. (Dec.)