Friday 12 December 2008“Modern Masters” - new survey of postwar American painting
Modern Masters
February 2009 sees the publication of a highly illustrated new book on a formative period in American art. Published by D Giles Limited in association with The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Modern Masters: American Abstraction at Midcentury is a survey of the intellectual and creative atmosphere in which the mid-century moderns developed and flourished
This new volume examines New York’s rise to prominence as the centre of the modern art scene in the two decades following the Second World War. It features 31 of the most celebrated artists who reshaped American art in the 1940s and 1950s, highlighting over 73 paintings and sculptures selected from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s notable collection
Virginia M. Mecklenburg, in Abstract Roundup: Making and marketing postwar modernism, explains how the artists’ disparate styles redefined the postwar art scene and became known collectively as abstract expressionism. Drawing heavily on contemporary photographs, magazine and newspaper articles, diaries and personal recollections, she brings 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 papers and magazines, such as the New York Times and Vanity Fair, individual critics like Harold Rosenburg and Clement Greenberg, and curators and gallery owners, including Peggy Guggenheim and Dorothy Miller, was so important in shaping a distinctly modern American art form during the late 1940s and 1950s. Finally she looks at how first the critics, and then the dealers, began to react against abstract expressionism, and how, following the splintering of the movement between 1957 and 1959, a new form of “Pop” art emerged in the early 1960s.
Organized into three main themes, this book guides us through a complex period of art. Grand Gesture explores the autographic mark, in sweeping strokes of brilliant colour, which became the expressive vehicle for Franz Kline, Michael Goldberg, Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell and others who came to be known as abstract expressionists. Optics and Order highlights Josef Albers, his exploration of mathematical proportion and carefully balanced colour, and the artists who built on his ideas: Ilya Bolotowsky, Louise Nevelson, Esteban Vicente, Ad Reinhardt, and Anne Truitt. New Images of Man features Nathan Oliveira, Romare Bearden, Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, David Driskell and Grace Hartigan, whose work saw the return to figuration.
Publication accompanies a 9-venue traveling exhibition in 2009-2010, opening at the new Yann Weymouth building designed to house the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami.
Virginia M. Mecklenburg is senior curator, Painting and Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is author of Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (1999) and co-author of Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (1996)
MODERN MASTERS: AMERICAN ABSTRACTION AT MIDCENTURY
256 pages, 10” x 12” (305 x 254mm), portrait
85 colour and 66 b&w illustrations, hardback
Text: Up to 53,000 words
ISBN: 978 1 904832 59 1 (13 digit)
ISBN: 1 904832 59 8 (10 digit)
Price: US$65.00/UK£30.00
Publication date: February, 2009
Publisher: D Giles Limited, London
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