Film on the art of the Gilded Age to premiere at Reynolda House; David Lubin featured

December 6, 2017

This is a guest post from Reynolda House Museum of American Art:

Reynolda House Museum of American Art will host the North Carolina premiere of “America Rising: The Arts of the Gilded Age,” a film that tells the story of the painting, sculpture, music and literature of America’s renaissance featuring art historian David Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest. Lubin is the author of “Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War,” which will be available for purchase at the museum. Independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton of 217 Films will introduce the film and Lubin will join them for questions following its screening.

The one-night-only screening will take place Thursday, Dec. 14 at 6 p.m. in the museum’s auditorium. A brief reception will take place before the screening. Tickets are $15, and available online atreynoldahouse.org or at the door.

“America Rising” highlights works from what Mark Twain described “The Gilded Age,” the tremendous outpouring of artistic endeavor that occurred between the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and the death of Mark Twain in 1910. Featuring the only known film footage of Mark Twain, “America Rising” illustrates how, after the Civil War, American art and American artists came into their own on the world stage. In painting, sculpture, architecture and music, America found its artistic soul and voice in the art created during the explosion of American economic growth, which Twain wrote about in his novel, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.”

Using more than 90 works of art, featuring painters as diverse as Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast and John Singer Sargent – all artists represented in the Reynolda House collection – and with the great public sculpture of creative geniuses including Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his “Robert Gould Shaw Memorial,” “America Rising” creates a portrait of a country reinventing itself after the tragic events of the Civil War.

A review in “Artes Magazine” said that “this film is a tour de force, offering a comprehensive, multi-layered glimpse into many moving parts of an historical period…skillfully showing us what we as Americans were capable of becoming.”

Clips from the film can be viewed at this link: https://vimeo.com/two17films.