| Summary: | A unique, lavishly illustrated history of 300 years of American art and American artists--recorded by the artists themselves in their letters, journals, notebooks, and in their paintings and sculpture. Since Colonial days the artists and craftsmen of America have recorded prolifically, and of ten with brilliant insights, self-portraits, the portraits of their contemporaries, the sights, scenes, and episodes of the world they lived in. Their finished work--paintings, drawings, sculptures, and carvings--is displayed in museums and in the homes of private collectors. A great deal of memorabilia--private papers, sketches, photographs, bills--has been gathered and catalogued by the staff of the Archives of American Art in Detroit. Drawing from the Archives and diverse sources, the editors of Art in America have assembled a brilliant visual feast that adds up, formally and informally, to a composite artistic history of our country as well as a collective self-portrait of our major artists. The Artist in America covers every important period in American art and samples of the work of every major artist, from the formal portraiture of Smibert, West, and Peale, in Revolutionary days, to the diverse and often bewildering movements (abstract, op, pop, and struc-tural) of today, as expressed by the work of Pollock, Nevelson, Lichtenstein, and Segal. The oeuvres of Homer, Eakins, and Inness are among the exemplars of the Realist period; the opening of the West is brought vividly alive by such artists as Bierstadt, Catlin, Remington, and Russell. Hicks, Durand, Brewster, and many anonymous limners define the richness of our primitive artists. We see the spirit of the Ashcan artists--Bellows, Luks, Sloan, and Shinn--in relation to the social commentary and inventions of the 1930's and 1940's, when people like Dove, Marin, de Kooning, and Brooks were the leaders and innovators. [From jacket flap].
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