Benjamin Moser on Frederic Edwin Church

Hyperallergic’s July art-books roundup highlights a comprehensive new volume on photographer Helen Levitt and a new biography of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church. The book “Helen Levitt,” edited by Joshua Chuang, surveys Levitt’s decades-long practice with rarely seen images and essays covering her early Leica work, a 1941 trip to Mexico, experiments in color, two New York subway series, and photographs from the 1980s; Levitt was born in 1913 and died at 95 in Greenwich Village. Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and translator Benjamin Moser reviews Victoria Johnson’s biography of Church, arguing that the painter conveyed national anxieties about slavery, war, and disunion through landscapes of “clouds and trees.” The roundup also points readers to additional July releases, including a revisit of Susan Gubar’s “Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists.”

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