Research Catalog

Modern masters : American abstraction at midcentury / Virginia M. Mecklenburg ; with contributions by Tiffany D. Farrell.

Title
Modern masters : American abstraction at midcentury / Virginia M. Mecklenburg ; with contributions by Tiffany D. Farrell.
Author
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Publication
Washington, DC : Smithsonian American Art Museum ; London : In association with D. Giles Ltd. ; [Easthampton, MA : Distributed in USA and Canada by Antique Collectors' Club], 2008.

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors
  • Farrell, Tiffany D.
  • Mecklenburg, Virginia M. (Virginia McCord), 1946-
Description
255 p. : ill. (some col.); 32 cm.
Summary
"Modern Masters: American Abstraction at Midcentury features more than thirty artists who transformed American art in the years after World War II. More than seventy full-color illustrations present American postwar painting and sculpture in terms of the personal lives of the artists." "Virginia Mecklenburg chronicles the emergence of postwar abstraction, and abstract expressionism in particular, from the mid-1940s through its triumph in the late 1950s. She highlights the dealers - the connecting links between artists, collectors, and the press - as well as major critics, who interpreted the new abstraction for an initially skeptic public. Accounts of museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad detail this complex, sometimes contradictory story from its beginning to the rise of modern art and minimalism in the 1960s."--Jacket.
Alternative Title
American abstraction at midcentury
Subject
  • Art > Washington (D.C.) > Exhibitions
  • Art, Abstract > United States > Exhibitions
  • Art, American > 20th century > Exhibitions
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum > Exhibitions
Genre/Form
Exhibition catalogs
Note
  • Distributor from jacket flap.
  • Exhibition catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition Modern masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which tours the United States from 2008 through 2011.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (p. 246-249) and index.
Processing Action (note)
  • committed to retain
Contents
Foreword -- Abstract roundup : making and marketing postwar modernism -- Optics and order -- Significant gestures -- New images of man -- For further reading.
ISBN
  • 9781904832591 (hardcover : alk. paper)
  • 1904832598 (hardcover : alk. paper)
  • 9780979067822 (softcover : alk. paper)
  • 0979067820 (softcover : alk. paper)
LCCN
^^2008026102