Modern MastersAmerican Abstraction at Midcentury
Published by GILES in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Release Date — February 2009 (UK and USA)
Dimensions — 264 pages, 305 × 254 mm (10 × 12 in.), portrait
Illustrations — 85 colour and 66 b&w illustrations
Hardback price — UK£30.00 / US$65.00
ISBN — 1-904832-59-8
ISBN — 978-1-904832-59-1
Book Details (pdf) — Modern-Masters-AI-LR.pdf
Trade Orders — Please visit our Trade Orders section
Press Release — “Modern Masters” - new survey of postwar American
Sales Points
An invaluable survey for students in schools and colleges
Publication accompanies the inaugural exhibition at the new Yann Weymouth building designed to house the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, in November 2008, the first stop on a 9-venue U.S. tour
Features works by 31 artists, including Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers
About the Book
This brand new volume presents in, stunning colour, over 60 postwar artworks from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and looks at the rise to prominence of New York as the centre of the modern art scene in the two decades following the Second World War.
Some 31 major artists are featured, including Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Grace Hartigan, Robert Motherwell, Romare Bearden, Richard Diebenkorn, Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers and Theodore Roszak. In her main essay Virginia Mecklenburg draws heavily on contemporary photographs, magazine and newspaper articles, diaries and personal recollections, to bring to life the works of art, the lives of the artists who created them, the galleries that exhibited them and the public’s reaction to them. She explains how the unique combination of the media, individual critics, and curators and gallery owners, was so important in shaping a distinctly modern American art form during the late 1940s and 1950s.
