Modern Masters

Published to accompany the inaugural exhibition of works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at the new Frost Art Collection, Florida International University, this highly illustrated new book 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 30 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, Larry Rivers and Theodore Roszak. This volume draws heavily on contemporary photographs, magazine and newspaper articles, diaries and personal recollections, to bring to life the works of art, the artists who created them, the studios that exhibited them and the public's reaction to them. In doing this the author shows how important the media and individual gallery owners were in developing art movements like Abstract Expressionism, and how this in turn would develop into Pop Art and beyond.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.