The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000 | 
 enlarge | Author: Lisa Phillips
Creator: Whitney Museum Of American Art
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $60.00
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 986882
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 398
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.1
Dimensions (in): 11 x 9.5 x 1.3
ISBN: 0393048152
Dewey Decimal Number: 709.730747471
EAN: 9780393048155
ASIN: 0393048152
Publication Date: October 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: excellent condition
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
This lively compendium is the catalog for the second half of the Whitney Museum of American Art's nine-month, two-part exhibition on American culture of the last 100 years. The author, Lisa Phillips, is now director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, but she spent 20 years at the Whitney overseeing many of its famous (or infamous) biennials and producing a number of exhibitions about American culture in fields beyond the museum. Like the first, this volume pulls together an array of cultural icons, defined inclusively. This being the Whitney's gig, the visual arts are appropriately dominant. The book's six sections cover every development from abstract expressionism through pop and minimalism to "Questioning the Canon," and "Market Power." Oddly, however, it is the insertions of short sidebars on Hollywood, theater, realism in the novel, modern dance, the nonfiction novel, feminist literature, hip-hop, and the like that give the book (and the exhibition) its special resonance. Pictures of Bob Dylan, Diana Ross and the Supremes, one of Robert Morris's disarrayed installations, and a bedroom at the Hog Farm community are spread across two facing pages, for example. The whole effect--a feel for the late '60s--is greater than the sum of its parts. And this happens throughout The American Century. Oddly, the art is less well evoked than the cultural iconography. The book's designer has sometimes enlarged a smallish painting or reduced an immense one, giving a distorted view both of the works in relation to one another and of their place in cultural history. With that quibble, however, this jam-packed tome records a notable exhibition as well as the long, strange trip the second half of the century has been. --Peggy Moorman
Book Description
A compelling panorama of art in America during the second half of this century. Shortly after the Second World War a group of American artists moved away from representation and realism toward a completely nonrepresentational style which became known as abstract expressionism. Led by Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and others, it was the first truly American painting style, and it quickly moved the United States into the forefront of innovation. A succession of other movements followed, including Pop Art, with adherents like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; the performance art of John Cage and others; video art, led by Nam Juin Paik; and installation art of grand proportions. In this expansive volume Lisa Phillips explains the excitement and inventiveness of American artists in the context of the varied and sometimes turbulent social environment as well as the expanding economy of postwar America. Essays by experts in related fields illuminate parallel and diverse developments in architecture, dance, music, literature, painting, sculpture, cinema, and design. With over 700 color and duotone illustrations, this volume is a companion to Barbara Haskell's The American Century: 1900-1950. Published in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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| Customer Reviews:
A Cup Half Full December 29, 1999
Naomi DePlume (indianapolis, in USA)
45 out of 46 found this review helpful
I strongly recomend this book for someone who wants a "Who's Who" of the American fine arts scene. I have spent many hours scanning the names and pictures, aborbing the exciting 50 years of American contempoary arts. I cannot recommend this book as an especially well-written commentary on that scene, however. Some sentences contain refrences to handfulls of artists with little direction or explanation. Of course the authors were required to give fair coverage to thousands of artists who had their 15 minutes of fame in US art galleries. I follow this scene pretty closely professionally. I can report that I did not find any glaring ommissions from their collection of artists. As you might expect, regional artists received barely a nod and little is said about "outside" art. If you are looking for a great explanation of "modern" art, try "The Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes, which Amazon indicates is still in print (and rated 5 stars, almost). But if you are interested in the "Sears Catalog" of the fine arts in the past 50 years, this is the book you want.
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