Emerson Burkhart

Emerson Burkhart came into his artistic maturity during the 1940s as a portrait painter and a chronicler of the fast-changing urban and rural worlds around his studio in Columbus, Ohio. This is the first monograph to be published on Burkhart’s life and career. On one level, the Burkhart story is simply the account of a relatively unknown painter’s quest for artistic identity. On another, it speaks to hundreds of related stories involving many other 20th-century American artists who lived their lives in the shadow of a mainstream art history they helped to create, but from which they are generally excluded. In addition to chronicling Burkhart’s life, this book presents an important selection of illustrations representing the artist’s paintings from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, alongside images of works by his mentors, his rivals and his best-known contemporaries.