Variations on America : Masterworks from American Art Forum Collections

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 Heade’s Newburyport Meadows I, and fine landscape masterpieces in the Hudson River tradition, including Sanford Robinson Gifford’s The Marshes of the Hudson (1876); light-filled impressionist canvases, such as Mary Cassatt’s 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 Bellows’s 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 O’Keefe, such as Black Cross with Red Sky (1929), John Marin’s Taos Canyon, New Mexico (1929), Cyrus Edwin Dallin’s major statue Appeal to the Great Spirit and James Earl Fraser’s emotive bronze sculpture End of the Trail (1918).