"American Workman presents a comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America's most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. With a full account of Kane's life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and around Pittsburgh in the early twentieth century, the authors explore how these occupations shaped his development as an artist and his breakthrough success...

Publisher's description: This book, the last to be completed by the author, is a study of a recurring phenomenon in the history of changing taste in the visual arts, namely the feeling that older and less sophisticated (i.e. 'primitive') works are somehow morally and aesthetically superior to later works that have become soft and decadent. In his first narrative work for over twenty years, Gombrich traces this idea back to classical antiquity and...

Discusses naive painting as an art form and presents 72 reproductions of the work of 60 representative artists.