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Variations on AmericaMasterworks from American Art Forum Collections

George Gurney, Eleanor Jones Harvey, Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Joann Moser, George Speer and Elaine Yau. With a Foreword by Elizabeth Broun, Director, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Published by GILES in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C

Publish Date — June 2007 (UK and USA)

Dimensions — 192 pages, 267 x 267mm (10 ½ x 10 ½ in.)

Illustrations — 91 colour illustrations

Hardback price — UK£29.95/US$59.95

ISBN — 1 -904832- 42- 3

ISBN — 978-1-904832-42-3

Book Details (pdf) — Variations_on_america_ai.pdf

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About the Book

This volume celebrates the 20th anniversary of the founding of the American Art Forum, by presenting 72 treasured works of art selected by the curators of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In six thematic and chronological sections, the curators cover the huge variety of American art: luminous images of nature from the mid-nineteenth century, such as Martin Johnson Heade’s Newburyport Meadows I, and fine landscape masterpieces in the Hudson River tradition, including Sanford Robinson Gifford’s The Marshes of the Hudson (1876); light-filled impressionist canvases, such as Mary Cassatt’s Reading “Le Figaro” (1878); dazzling Gilded Age glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany and paintings by John Singer Sargent; gritty Ashcan records from a dynamic New York City, such as George Bellows’s Noon (1908); vivid aesthetic creations of the modern age; the triumphant abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning; and resonant contemporary works by Andrew Wyeth and David Hockney.

The book also showcases major canvases by Georgia O’Keefe, such as Black Cross with Red Sky (1929), John Marin’s Taos Canyon, New Mexico (1929), Cyrus Edwin Dallin’s major statue Appeal to the Great Spirit and James Earl Fraser’s emotive bronze sculpture End of the Trail (1918).

About the Author(s)

Eleanor Jones Harvey is chief curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is the author of The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature (1830–1880) (1998) and co-author of Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (2003); George Gurney is deputy chief curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum and co-author of George Catlin and His Indian Gallery (2002); Virginia Mecklenburg is senior curator, painting and sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum and co-author of Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (1999); Joann Moser is Senior Curator, Graphic arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and author of Singular Impressions (1997); George Speer is former Luce Foundation Center curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Elaine Yau is curatorial assistant, Smithsonian American Art Museum.