John Baeder
Encyclopedia
John Baeder is an American painter closely associated with the Photorealist movement
. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside
diners and eateries.
, but was raised in Atlanta, Georgia
. The interest in small towns across America began when he was young by photographing old cars and other relics with a Baby Brownie camera
. While attending Auburn University
in the late 1950s, he made frequent trips between Atlanta and Alabama
, which drew his attention to rural landscapes and roadside diners.
in Atlanta for a branch of a New York advertising agency
in 1960, and subsequently moved to New York City
in 1964. He went on to have a successful career in advertising through the early 1970s, while continuing to paint, draw and photograph on his own time.
One of his ad agency offices in New York City was located near the Museum of Modern Art
. The museum’s photograph department became a source of inspiration for him, especially the work of artists such as Berenice Abbott
, Walker Evans
, Ben Shahn
, and other photographers of the Farm Security Administration
. In the late 1960s he also started collecting postcards of roadside America such as diners, gas stations, campsites, and motels.
in New York began exhibiting his artworks.
Since then, he has had more than thirty solo exhibitions at art galleries such as OK Harris Gallery in New York; Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, Thomas Paul Fine Art in Los Angeles and Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, as well as a traveling retrospective exhibition titled “Pleasant Journeys and Good Eats along The Way,” which started at the Morris Museum of Art
in Augusta, Georgia
in December 2007.
His work includes oil paintings, watercolors and photographs and can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art
, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Norton Museum of Art
, the Denver Art Museum
, the Milwaukee Art Museum
, the High Museum of Art
, the Detroit Institute of Arts
,the Indianapolis Museum of Art
, the Cheekwood Museum of Art
, the Tennessee State Museum
, the Yale University Art Gallery
, and the Morris Museum of Art among others.
According to John Arthur, “John Baeder is much more than a painter of diners. He is a knowledgeable and deeply committed chronicler of that rapidly disappearing facet of American vernacular architecture that has played such a unique role in our social and cultural history.” Vincent Scully
, professor of the History of Art in Architecture and author, further comments on Baeder’s visual style in his introduction to Diners, 1978, stating that his "paintings seem to me to differ from most of those of his brilliant Magic-Realist
contemporaries in that they are gentle, lyrical, and deeply in love with their subjects. Most of the painters of the contemporary Pop scene blow our minds with massive disjunctions, explosive changes of scale, and special kind of wink-less visual focus. Baeder does not employ any of those devices. He sees everything as its own size in its proper environment. His diners fit into their urban context like modest folk heroes."
Baeder is the recipient of the Tennessee Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award in 2009. He lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee
.
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...
. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside
Roadside attraction
A roadside attraction is a feature along the side of a road, that is frequently advertised with billboards to attract tourists. In general, these are places one might stop on the way to somewhere else, rather than being a final or primary destination in and of themselves. The modern...
diners and eateries.
Early life
John Baeder was born in 1938 in South Bend, IndianaSouth Bend, Indiana
The city of South Bend is the county seat of St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States, on the St. Joseph River near its southernmost bend, from which it derives its name. As of the 2010 Census, the city had a total of 101,168 residents; its Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 316,663...
, but was raised in Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...
. The interest in small towns across America began when he was young by photographing old cars and other relics with a Baby Brownie camera
Brownie (camera)
Brownie is the name of a long-running and extremely popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February, 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera...
. While attending Auburn University
Auburn University
Auburn University is a public university located in Auburn, Alabama, United States. With more than 25,000 students and 1,200 faculty members, it is one of the largest universities in the state. Auburn was chartered on February 7, 1856, as the East Alabama Male College, a private liberal arts...
in the late 1950s, he made frequent trips between Atlanta and Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
, which drew his attention to rural landscapes and roadside diners.
Early years
He started working as an art directorArt director
The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....
in Atlanta for a branch of a New York advertising agency
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
in 1960, and subsequently moved to New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in 1964. He went on to have a successful career in advertising through the early 1970s, while continuing to paint, draw and photograph on his own time.
One of his ad agency offices in New York City was located near the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
. The museum’s photograph department became a source of inspiration for him, especially the work of artists such as Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott , born Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.-Youth:...
, Walker Evans
Walker Evans
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
, Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
, and other photographers of the Farm Security Administration
Farm Security Administration
Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal in the United States, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat American rural poverty...
. In the late 1960s he also started collecting postcards of roadside America such as diners, gas stations, campsites, and motels.
Artistic career
Baeder left the advertising field in 1972 to pursue his artistic career full-time. The same year, OK Harris GalleryOK Harris Gallery
The OK Harris Gallery is an art gallery located at 383 West Broadway in SoHo, New York City.Previously located at 485 West Broadway, in the early 1970s it hosted exhibits by Alan Vega, some of which were advertised as "Punk Music" predating the later Punk rock by some years.-History:Ivan C...
in New York began exhibiting his artworks.
Since then, he has had more than thirty solo exhibitions at art galleries such as OK Harris Gallery in New York; Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, Thomas Paul Fine Art in Los Angeles and Cumberland Gallery in Nashville, as well as a traveling retrospective exhibition titled “Pleasant Journeys and Good Eats along The Way,” which started at the Morris Museum of Art
Morris Museum of Art
The Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia was established in 1985 as a non-profit foundation by William S. Morris III, in memory of his parents, as the first museum dedicated to the collection and exhibition of art and artists of the American South....
in Augusta, Georgia
Augusta, Georgia
Augusta is a consolidated city in the U.S. state of Georgia, located along the Savannah River. As of the 2010 census, the Augusta–Richmond County population was 195,844 not counting the unconsolidated cities of Hephzibah and Blythe.Augusta is the principal city of the Augusta-Richmond County...
in December 2007.
His work includes oil paintings, watercolors and photographs and can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Norton Museum of Art
Norton Museum of Art
The Norton Museum of Art is an art museum located in West Palm Beach, Florida. Its collection includes over 5,000 works, with a concentration in European, American, and Chinese art as well as in contemporary art and photography.-History:...
, the Denver Art Museum
Denver Art Museum
The Denver Art Museum is an art museum in Denver, Colorado located in Denver's Civic Center.It is known for its collection of American Indian art,and has a comprehensive collection numbering more than 68,000 works from across the world....
, the Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee Art Museum
The Milwaukee Art Museum is located on Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.Beginning around 1872, multiple organizations were founded in order to bring an art gallery to Milwaukee, as the city was still a growing port town with little or no facilities to hold major art exhibitions...
, the High Museum of Art
High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art , located in Atlanta, is the leading art museum in the Southeastern United States and one of the most-visited art museums in the world. Located on Peachtree Street in Midtown, the city's arts district, the High is a division of the Woodruff Arts Center.-History:The Museum was...
, the Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit Institute of Arts
The Detroit Institute of Arts is a renowned art museum in the city of Detroit. In 2003, the DIA ranked as the second largest municipally owned museum in the United States, with an art collection valued at more than one billion dollars...
,the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Indianapolis Museum of Art
The Indianapolis Museum of Art is an encyclopedic art museum located in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The museum, which underwent a $74 million expansion in 2005, is located on a campus on the near northwest area outside downtown Indianapolis, northwest of Crown Hill Cemetery.The...
, the Cheekwood Museum of Art
Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art
Cheekwood is a privately funded estate on the western edge of Nashville, Tennessee that houses the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art. Formerly the residence of Nashville's Cheek family, the Georgian-style mansion was opened as a museum in 1960.- The house that coffee built...
, the Tennessee State Museum
Tennessee State Museum
Tennessee State Museum is a large museum in Nashville depicting the history of the U.S. state of Tennessee. Starting from pre-colonization and going all the way to the 20th century, the museum describes the American Civil War, the Frontier, and the Age of Jackson. The museum includes an area of...
, the Yale University Art Gallery
Yale University Art Gallery
The Yale University Art Gallery houses a significant and encyclopedic collection of art in several buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Although it embraces all cultures and periods, the Gallery possesses especially renowned collections of early Italian painting,...
, and the Morris Museum of Art among others.
According to John Arthur, “John Baeder is much more than a painter of diners. He is a knowledgeable and deeply committed chronicler of that rapidly disappearing facet of American vernacular architecture that has played such a unique role in our social and cultural history.” Vincent Scully
Vincent Scully
Vincent Joseph Scully, Jr. is Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University, and the author of several books on the subject...
, professor of the History of Art in Architecture and author, further comments on Baeder’s visual style in his introduction to Diners, 1978, stating that his "paintings seem to me to differ from most of those of his brilliant Magic-Realist
Magic realism
Magic realism or magical realism is an aesthetic style or genre of fiction in which magical elements blend with the real world. The story explains these magical elements as real occurrences, presented in a straightforward manner that places the "real" and the "fantastic" in the same stream of...
contemporaries in that they are gentle, lyrical, and deeply in love with their subjects. Most of the painters of the contemporary Pop scene blow our minds with massive disjunctions, explosive changes of scale, and special kind of wink-less visual focus. Baeder does not employ any of those devices. He sees everything as its own size in its proper environment. His diners fit into their urban context like modest folk heroes."
Baeder is the recipient of the Tennessee Governor’s Distinguished Artist Award in 2009. He lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
.
Books and catalogues
- Baeder, John, Diners. With an introduction by Vincent Scully. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1978.
- Baeder, John, Diners; Revised and Updated. With a foreword by John Arthur and a preface by Vincent Scully. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1995.
- Baeder, John, Sign Language: Street Signs as Folk Art. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
- Baeder, John, Gas, Food, and Lodging. New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1982.
- Frank, Peter, John Baeder’s American Roadside: Early Photographs. Los Angeles, California: Thomas Paul Fine Art, 2009.
- Baeder, John, Jay Williams, ed., Pleasant Journeys And Good Eats Along The Way: A Retrospective Exhibition Of Paintings By John Baeder. With a preface by Kevin Grogan and an introduction by Donald Kuspit. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
- Edwards, Susan H., John Baeder: 1960's Photographs. Self-published, ltd. ed. of 175, 2009.
- Bonito, Virginia Anne, Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Museum of Art, 1998.
- Leeds, Valerie Ann, Ph.D, Introduction to Shock of the Real: Photorealism Revisited. Boca Raton, Florida: Boca Raton Museum of Art, 2008.
- Meisel, Louis K., Photorealism. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1980.
Films
- Baeder: Pleasant Journeys and Good Eats Along the Way. Directed by Curt Hahn. 2009, Nashville, Tennessee: Film House. http://www.filmhouse.com/baeder.php
Other
- Heller, Steven, "Why Does John Baeder Paint Diners?," The Design Observer Group, November 17, 2009, http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=11647.
- “Arts Tennessee Winter/Spring 2009 Newsletter,” Tennessee Arts Commission, http://www.arts.state.tn.us/artsTN/artstnwinter2009.pdf, 6.
- “John Baeder”, Indianapolis Museum of Art, http://www.imamuseum.org/art/collections/artist/baeder-john
- “John Baeder opening reception”, Tennessee State Museum, http://www.tnmuseum.org/Membership/Join_the_Fun%21/
- “Past Exhibitions,” Morris Museum of Art, http://www.themorris.org/pastexhibitions.html#2007.
- Nguyen, C. Thi. "Humble Trucks, Great Food," Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2008. p. A1.
- "Roadside America for the 21st Century," Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, June 1, 2003. p. 10.
- Reif, Rita. "A Fading Language Of the Roadway," New York Times, June 30, 1996. p. 31, http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/arts/arts-artifacts-a-fading-language-of-the-roadway.html?scp=1&sq=A%20Fading%20Language%20Of%20the%20Roadway&st=cse
- Hudson, Stacey. "On the Road," Metro Spirit (Augusta, Georgia), issue 19.21. December 19–25, 2007, http://www.metrospirit.com/index.php?cat=1993101070593169&ShowArticle_ID=11011812070736572