Wendy Van Wyck Good

A very nice tribute to three sisters whose acheivements in art were largely forgotten. This lavishly decorated oversived book has beautiful photos of the Bruton sisters and the art they produced during the early twentieth century. Their art is primarily in non traditional media like murals and mosiacs on a large scale primarily placed in government buildings, luxury hotels and cruise ships. Many have been lost over the years but some are beautifully preserved. It is great that this book pays the sisters the homage they deserve.… (más)

The author did an excellent job researching and organizing information about the Bruton Sisters. She saved the stories, artwork, and history of Margaret, Esther, and Helen from obscurity, only brought about by the wheel of time and their great modesty, not from lack of excellence.
These artists group up around San Francisco starting in the early 1900s. They were well known locally, and even grew to national acclaim through the years, as they were ever evolving artists. I loved reading how they switched mediums as time went on, mastering each one as they went.
Although at first I was a little bitter at how well they lived through the Great Depression, subsisting from big tobacco family money, I couldn't stay mad. They lived well below their means, were humble about their abilities, and were forward thinking in matters of appreciating and preserving Indigenous culture. The author conveys their reported joyous attitude about life and art throughout. They were also female artists leading in a male-dominated field for their time.
This is a great book if you like to read about a strong sister bond, women artists, or San Francisco Bay area history.… (más)

Margaret, Esther, and Helen Bruton were born into a wealthy Northern California family. From an early age, all three began studying art, and all three became professional artists. Though each had their own interests, they often collaborated, to the extent that many individual works were attributed to "the Bruton sisters".

They were an important part of the Northern California art scene, particularly through the '20s, '30s, and '40s, but because they weren't "publicity-minded", they are not as well known as they ought to be. This book is a good start at rectifying that.… (más)

This book is a necessary and timely entry into the canon of art historical texts visiting artists that fell outside the white, male, European/American demographic. The Bruton sisters were relentlessly fascinating and confident in their work and their abilities, giving testament to their support system (something most women of the time simply did not have). The book is detailed and extremely well-researched, however, it does seem incredibly biased towards adoration. It would seem unlikely the sisters never had dissenters or harsh critics, but perhaps they did not. If so, they led charmed lives, to be sure! But navigating their world in real time had to have had more challenges than were discussed.

All said, it was a wonderful scholarly text supportive of all three sisters in the hopes of garnering growing knowledge.

However, the one area where it fell woefully short was in the images of the works, the main reason anyone would pick up the book. Many of them were simply poorly executed with glare and poor lighting. But the thing that was rather unforgivable was the woeful captions: the lack of material, dimension and sometimes even the year created. The author would be well advised to follow the Chicago Turabian or MLA format when introducing such great works to readers, researchers and students, some of whom, this will be their first introduction to all of these powerful works. If presenting these women as the pioneers they were, the work is of utmost importance and we want to know the process and materiality, above all.… (más)