Books by John Wesley

Theres nothing like enjoying turkey and pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, the oldest American holiday, with nostalgic memories of family gatherings around the dining room table. See how illustrators have portrayed this day of thanks through the years. More than 700 illustrated newspapers, magazine covers, postcards, and prints trace this holidays history from the Pilgrims first observance to the present. Included are vintage postcards and well-known publications like Life, The Ladies Home Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers Weekly. History lovers and collectors will find this a wonderful resource and an entertaining look back at days gone-by.

Over the course of the past 40 years, painter John Wesley has created a remarkably singular body of work whose subject is no less than the American psyche. While many artists of his generation have used popular images to explore the cultural landscape, Wesley has employed comic strip style and compositional rigor to make deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that strike at the core of our most primal fears, joys and desires. In this first volume ever to collect the entire iconic Bumstead series, which spans from 1974 until the present, we are introduced to several paintings that have never been reproduced before. These are dark and erotic works, sly and witty without ever giving too much away. Linda Norden described them thus in Parkett 62: "The Bumstead paintings--whether detailing scenes of domestic misunderstanding, zooming in on off-camera moments of bafflement or simply scanning empty halls and walls for private memories--are excruciatingly specific representations of the gulfs between feeling and comprehension... smart, funny, startling, irreverently empathetic and often heartbreaking, they are a welcome antidote to more laborious discourse." With an insightful new essay by Robert Hobbs.