Variations on America: Masterworks from American Art Forum Collections

Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2007. Hardcover. VG/VG As New. Sea foam-colored cloth, gilt letters on spine, color illus. dust jacket, 192 pp., many color illus. Issued in conjunction with a 2007 exhibition featuring "72 treasured artworks" from the American Art Forum collections. Quite a variety of artists are included here. With essays by George Gurney, Eleanor Jones Harvey, Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Joann Moser, George Speer, and Elaine Yau. Contents as follows: Flowering of liberty -- Destiny and desire -- From innocence to experience -- The work of the world -- Reflections of the modern -- Visions of America. Presents colour plates of over 70 paintings by the leading names in 19th- and 20th-century American art. 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 Heades Newburyport Meadows I, and fine landscape masterpieces in the Hudson River tradition, including Sanford Robinson Giffords The Marshes of the Hudson (1876); light-filled impressionist canvases, such as Mary Cassatts 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 Bellowss 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 OKeefe, such as Black Cross with Red Sky (1929), John Marins Taos Canyon, New Mexico (1929), Cyrus Edwin Dallins major statue Appeal to the Great Spirit and James Earl Frasers emotive bronze sculpture End of the Trail (1918).