John Baeder (born December 24, 1938) is an American painter closely associated with the photorealist movement. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside diners and eateries.

Early life

John Baeder was born in 1938 in

South Bend, Indiana South Bend is a city in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States, and its county seat. It lies along the St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan), St. Joseph River near its southernmost bend, from which it derives its name. It is the List of cities in ...

, but was raised in

Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...

. His 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 Auburn University (AU or Auburn) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Auburn, Alabama, United States. With more than 26,800 undergraduate students, over 6,100 post-graduate students, and a tota ...

in the late 1950s, he made frequent trips between

Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...

and

Alabama Alabama ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Deep South, Deep Southern regions of the United States. It borders Tennessee to the north, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gu ...

, which drew his attention to rural landscapes and roadside diners.

Early years

He started working as an

art director Art director is a title for a variety of similar job functions in theater, advertising, marketing, publishing, fashion, live-action and animated film and television, the Internet, and video games. It is the charge of a sole art director to supe ...

in Atlanta for a branch of a New York

advertising agency An advertising agency, often referred to as a creative agency or an ad agency, is a business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising and sometimes other forms of promotion and marketing for its clients. An ad agency is generall ...

in 1960, and subsequently moved to

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

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 of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

. The museum's photograph department became a source of inspiration for him, especially the work of artists such as

Berenice Abbott Berenice Alice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991) was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science ...

Walker Evans Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great ...

Ben Shahn Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an 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''. Born Benjamin Shahn in Ka ...

, and other photographers of the

Farm Security Administration The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States. It succeeded the Resettlement Administration (1935–1937). The FSA is famous for its small but ...

. 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 Gallery The OK Harris Gallery was an art gallery located at 383 West Broadway in SoHo, New York City. The gallery closed in 2014. Founded by longtime art dealer Ivan Karp after leaving the Leo Castelli gallery in 1969 where he had worked as gallery co-dir ...

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 The Morris Museum of Art is an art museum in Augusta, Georgia. It was established in 1985 as a non-profit foundation by William S. Morris III, publisher of The Augusta Chronicle, in memory of his parents, as the first museum dedicated to the coll ...

Augusta, Georgia Augusta is a city on the central eastern border of the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. The city lies directly across the Savannah River from North Augusta, South Carolina at the head of its navigable portion. Augusta, the third mos ...

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 Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

, the

Cooper-Hewitt Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum at the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 Smithsonian Institution museums and one of three Smithsonian facili ...

, the

Norton Museum of Art The Norton Museum of Art is an art museum in West Palm Beach, Florida. The museum has a collection that includes over 8,200 works, with a concentration in Western art history, European, Visual arts of the United States, American, and Chinese art ...

, the

Denver Art Museum The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With an encyclopedic collection of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums betwe ...

, the

Milwaukee Art Museum The Milwaukee Art Museum (also referred to as MAM) is an art museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its collection of over 34,000 works of art and gallery spaces totaling 150,000 sq. ft. (13,900 m²) make it the largest art museum in the state of Wis ...

, the

High Museum of Art The High Museum of Art (colloquially the High) is the largest museum for visual art in the Southeastern United States. Located in Atlanta, Georgia (on Peachtree Street in Midtown, the city's arts district), the High is 312,000 square feet (28, ...

, the

Detroit Institute of Arts The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is a museum institution located in Midtown Detroit, Michigan. It has list of largest art museums, one of the largest and most significant art collections in the United States. With over 100 galleries, it cove ...

, the

Indianapolis Museum of Art The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is an encyclopedic art museum located at Newfields, a campus that also houses Lilly House, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, the Garden at Newfields and more. It is located at the corner of No ...

, the Cheekwood Museum of Art, the

Tennessee State Museum The Tennessee State Museum is a large museum in Nashville depicting the history of the U.S. state of Tennessee. The current facility opened on October 4, 2018, at the corner of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Jefferson Street at the foot of Capitol Hill ...

, the

Yale University Art Gallery The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is an art museum in New Haven, Connecticut. It houses a major encyclopedic collection of art in several interconnected buildings on the campus of Yale University. Although it embraces all cultures and period ...

, the

Art Museum of Southeast Texas The Art Museum of Southeast Texas (AMSET) is an art museum in Beaumont, Texas, United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a fe ...

, and the

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 Joseph Scully Jr. (August 21, 1920 – November 30, 2017) was an American art historian who was a Sterling Professor of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale University, and the author of several books on the subject. Architect Phil ...

, 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.“Arts Tennessee Winter/Spring 2009 Newsletter,” Tennessee Arts Commission, http://www.arts.state.tn.us/artsTN/artstnwinter2009.pdf , 6. He lives and works in

Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, often known as Music City, is the capital and List of municipalities in Tennessee, most populous city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County in Middle Tennessee, locat ...

Notes

Sources and further reading

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, https://web.archive.org/web/20101031071030/http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=11647. *“Arts Tennessee Winter/Spring 2009 Newsletter,” Tennessee Arts Commission, https://web.archive.org/web/20090407181041/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, https://web.archive.org/web/20110219052035/http://www.tnmuseum.org/Membership/Join%5Fthe%5FFun%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, https://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

External links

Official websiteJohn Baeder at Thomas Paul Fine Art
{{DEFAULTSORT:Baeder, John 1938 births Photorealist artists 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters Auburn University alumni Living people People from South Bend, Indiana Artists from Atlanta Photographers from Georgia (U.S. state) Photographers from Indiana 20th-century American male artists

Early life

Early years

Artistic career

See also

Notes

Sources and further reading

Books and catalogues

Films

Other

External links