Katherine Bourgignon, with essays by Leo Mazow and Lauren Kroiz

Publisher: Ashmolean Museum

ISBN:9781910807217

Size:8.5 in x 11 in

Pages:224

Illustrations:130 color, 20 b&w

Paperback Price: $39.95 

• America's modernism movement is brought to the U.K.  

 .Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, e.e. cummings and Charles Sheeler among the highlights in this fabulous selection of  20th-century American art

• Contributors from both sides of the Atlantic: Leo Mazow, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Katherine Bourgignon, Terra Foundation, Paris, Lauren Kroiz, Associate Berkeley College  

What can art be? As some American artists began to eliminate people and remove extraneous details from their compositions, they often employed neat, orderly brushwork or close-up, unemotional photography. Artists as diverse as Patrick Henry Bruce, John Covert, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand,  Arthur Dove and ee cummings (he was an artist before he began to write) navigated European and American avant-garde circles. This might be called a Golden Age of contemporary art and it came out of America. The artists picked and chose their new ideas and methods and found ways of bringing order to the modern world through extreme simplification, inspired by cubism and machine parts and new technologies. It was a brave new world. For them, abstraction involved absence and presence -- the evacuation of human beings but also the desire to depict something that would not otherwise be visible and/or to render visible unseen natural processes like the passage of time, sound waves, or weather patterns.  

Their artworks provide a new context for precisionist works. and ask how modern pointing techniques relate to an aesthetic of absence. 

Authors: Katherine Bourgignon is a curator at the Terra Foundation in Paris. She has conducted research into a variety of transatlantic ties among American and European artists and acted as curator for several exhibitions devoted to American Art. 

Leo Mazow is the Head of the Department of American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. 

Lauren Kroiz is an Associate Professor of 20th Century American Art at the University of California, Berkeley.

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