Alexander Nemerov Books in Order

Nemerov reexamines Remington's paintings and sculptures as imaginative constructions shaped by their era's politics. Connecting frontier imagery with imperialism, immigration, racial identity, and memory, he explores how the artist's aesthetics reflect the tensions of American culture.

Through Raphaelle Peale's still lifes, Nemerov examines how painted objects can suggest the artist's physical presence. Close readings of fruit, meat, and other subjects connect questions of embodiment and selfhood with early nineteenth-century Philadelphia's intellectual culture.

Nemerov reads Val Lewton's wartime horror films through their isolated ghosts, outsiders, and sorrowful figures. He argues that these images express grief and anxiety on the American home front that official appeals to optimism and patriotism obscured.

A performance of Macbeth attended by Abraham Lincoln in October 1863 becomes the starting point for exploring Civil War America. Nemerov connects the theatrical event to contemporary art, politics, technology, and the struggle to comprehend national tragedy.

Photographs and film scenes from the 1940s lead Nemerov through unexpected connections between Hollywood and World War II. His readings reveal desire and trauma within familiar and forgotten images, asking how visual fragments make the past emotionally present.

Nemerov explores the work of his aunt Diane Arbus and his father, poet Howard Nemerov, in two personal essays. Their differing artistic sensibilities and responses to one another reveal an unexpected kinship between photography and poetry.

Revisiting Lewis Hine's photographs of child laborers, Nemerov looks beyond their role in social reform. His reflections examine the vulnerability, beauty, and passing time captured in the images, alongside contemporary photographs of the places Hine documented.

Drawing on Ralph Eugene Meatyard's annotated personal library, Nemerov explores the photographer's influences and methods. Staged scenes, masked relatives, and symbolic dramas reveal how this self-taught artist used ordinary surroundings to create unsettling, elusive emotional worlds.

Beginning with a former Japanese kamikaze pilot's photo album, Nemerov asks how language and images bring historical events into the present. His meditation on Pearl Harbor explores remembrance, storytelling, and the ways descriptions make distant lives feel immediate.

Nemerov follows Helen Frankenthaler's emergence as an artist in 1950s New York through pivotal encounters, relationships, and paintings. Her determination to establish an independent voice unfolds within the opportunities and pressures of a largely male art world.

Brief stories blend documented and imagined lives in 1830s America, following artists, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans. Their intersecting ambitions reveal a society shaped by forests, material work, and the private visions of people navigating rapid change.