American Primitive: Discoveries in Folk Sculpture [SOLD]

Until recently, American primitive sculpture was seen as a kind of folk art: objects whose design and purpose were rooted in a community of tradition and related to the daily material and spiritual needs of ordinary people. But in recent years-belatedly following the precedent set by New York's Museum of Modern Art in a 1932 show-collectors and historians have begun to place this body of work within the realm of fine rather than folk art. Now, Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco, who are among the country's leading dealers in American primitive art, have gathered together more than 400 pieces-each seen for the first time in a bookto give us a magnificent view and celebration of this newly explored field of American art.

The pieces shown here include scarecrows and lampstands, hat forms and face jugs, weathervanes and whirligigs, toys, decoys, and carnival figures, icons, architectural embellishments, three-dimensional portraits, and ";self-generated"; art-for-art's-sake. In some cases the inspiration is clearly utilitarian, in some it is decorative-and some of the objects are pure expressions of a creative impulse. But all the sculptures are similar in that they are the work of artists with no formal training and no connection with or knowledge of the art world of their day.