Published to accompany the inaugural exhibition at the new Patricia aPhillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, this brand new volume presents, in stunning colour, more than 60 postwar artworks from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and 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 60 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, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers and Theodore Roszak. In her main essay, Virginia Mecklenburg draws heavily on contemporary photographs, magazine and newspaper articles, diaries and personal recollections, to bring 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. The author takes you into the studios, galleries and the intellectual and creative atmosphere in which the mid-century moderns developed and flourished. 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 who wrote for them, and curators and gallery owners, including Peggy Guggenheim and Dorothy Miller, was so important in shaping distinctly modern American art form during the late 1940s and 1950s. Mecklenburg finally 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. AUTHOR: Virginia Mecklenburg is senior curator, painting and sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is principal author of Edward Hopper: The Watercolors and co-author of Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. 85 colour i66 b/w illustrations
