Posterity Press

Discovering Margot Peet:
The Artist and the Art World of Kansas City
Marianne Berardi and Henry Adams
Foreword by Marc F. Wilson, Director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
ISBN 978-1-889274-32-4
242 Pages; Illustrated in color, index
$90.00
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This is the "fascinating and affecting story of an unheralded artist," the Kansas City Star writes of Discovering Margot Peet: The Artist and the Art World of Kansas City. The lady was 90 when art historian Marianne Berardi interviewed her about studying with Thomas Hart Benton six decades earlier. Knowing Mrs. Peet to be a museum patron and socialite who painted for pleasure, Berardi was surprised to discover she was also a gifted artist of exceptional talent and achievement, yet unknown outside of her lifelong home, Kansas City. As co-author Henry Adams points out in his essay Kansas City has played important roles in the history of art in America and it thrives as a cultural capital of the Middle West. This gorgeous book establishes the record on both counts and in two narratives—one about the person, the other about her milieu.

Marianne Berardi's critical biography recounts the life and appraises the oeuvre of this unsung genius, a woman of parts. A grande dame and a mother, she was driven to make art both by boredom with her social status and by despair over a private tragedy that has driven other women to distraction. An amateur who rarely sold her art, Peet created deft portraits, sublime garden landscapes and vibrant floral still-lifes that display "the highest degree of excellence and finish," Dr. Berardi writes.

"Berardi is expert and energetic in her critique of Peet's incisive portraits, graceful landscapes and… flower paintings, zeroing in on the artist's exceptional talents as a colorist," as art critic Donna Seaman wrote in the Star on May 30. "Berardi has rescued and sensitively, even passionately, shared the fascinating and affecting story of an unheralded artist who navigated daunting obstacles, demands and sorrow." All this in Kansas City, her font and inspiration—not the farming hub and corny setting of musical comedy, but a dynamic metropolis whose early 20th-century civic leaders made a cosmopolitan oasis on the edge of the prairie in America's heartland.

Henry Adams's authoritative appreciation of Kansas City gives this neglected cultural capital the credit it deserves as a portal of art history in America and a cradle of our culture. Having nurtured superstars from Jean Harlow to Walt Disney, as well as such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Evan S. Connell and Richard Rhodes, Kansas City was home to artists Frederic Remington, George Caleb Bingham and Thomas Hart Benton (among others). In the 20th century it became a center of world art in its museums, most notably the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, indisputably one of the most distinguished art institutions between the Coasts. The Nelson-Adkins owns the finest array of Chinese art and objects outside of China, as well as important European and American collections.

Margot Peet and 20th-century Kansas City fit hand in glove. Or to put it precisely, the city's cultural climate—in both its hothouse society and hardscrabble nonconformity—was the perfect environment for this gifted woman who overcame heartbreak, created art for the love of it, and become a notable painter with a brilliant color sense and deep sensitivity. (Incidentally, she apparently inspired Ernest Hemingway to name one of his most notorious short story characters after her.) Both the artist and her milieu are revealed in this double-barreled book, which was printed in exquisite color in China. Designed by the distinguished bookman Robert L. Wiser who has produced prizewinning volumes for Library of Congress, Abrams, Abbeville, Rizzoli and other trade houses, Discovering Margot Peet features 150 illustrations, a bibliography and full index.

Marianne Berardi, the recognized authority on Rachel Ruysch, the 17th-century Dutch artist known for exquisite flower paintings, is now at work on the catalogue raisonné of this Northern Baroque master. The recipient of postgraduate degrees in Northern Baroque Art and American Art from the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Berardi served as director of Kansas City's Albrecht-Kemper Museum where she curated the exhibition Under the Influence: The Students of Thomas Hart Benton. She also organized the first retrospective of Margot Peet's work at the Johnson County Museum of History in Mission, Kansas. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with her husband and co-author of this volume, the art historian Henry Adams, and their son, Tommy.

Henry Adams was named curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art to organize the landmark 1989 exhibition celebrating Thomas Hart Benton's centennial. Dr. Adams, who studied at Harvard and earned a doctorate in art history at Yale, has written 250 essays and books. The latter include the definitive catalog of that centennial exhibition, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original, and Thomas Eakins' much discussed biography Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist, published by Oxford University Press. A professor of American Art at Case Western Reserve University, his latest book is Tom and Jack; The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollack, published by Bloomsbury.

From Donna Seaman's lead review in the Kansas City Star, Sunday, May 30, 2010

Berardi is expert and energetic in her critique of Peet's incisive portraits, graceful landscapes and unusually freighted flower paintings, zeroing in on the artist's exceptional talents as a colorist and her "ability to blend truth with humor." …[W]hat matters is that Berardi has rescued and sensitively, even passionately, shared the fascinating and affecting story of an unheralded artist who navigated daunting obstacles, demands and sorrows.

While Berardi focuses intently on bringing one overlooked Kansas City artist to light, Henry Adams seeks in the last third of the book to renovate the image of Kansas City's entire art world from its earliest years to the present….

An audacious biographer of Thomas Eakins and author of the groundbreaking "Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock," Adams ably assembles a portrait gallery of key artists, collectors, movers and shakers, beginning with the first two artists of stature associated with Kansas City, George Caleb Bingham and Frederic Remington&hellip.

Larger-than-life Benton inevitably commands the most space, but Adams' portrait of "curator of genius" Laurence Sickman, the visionary behind the Nelson's famous Chinese art collection, is a standout, and his brief coverage of a painter in Benton's circle, Fred James, and the enigmatic and quietly subversive Thomas King Baker is tantalizing.

"Discovery" is the operative word here as Berardi and Adams reclaim and illuminate the lives of Kansas City artists both celebrated and covert, and track the birth and growth of the city's determined, vital and influential art world with its roots in regionalism and its long reach for the universal.