This book explores the development of modern American art through the works of its signature artists. This collection of rarely seen masterpieces from The Phillips Collection traces the development of American art from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism. During the Gilded Age, American artists like Julian Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, Ernest Lawson, and others developed landscape paintings which set the course for modern art in America. Revelations such as these are common within the pages of this book, which examines Duncan Phillips’s interest in collecting and his promotion of living artists. Including essays by European and American experts, this publication of 68 works by 50 artists presents paintings by Maurice Prendergast, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, and Richard Diebenkorn. Together these magnificent works tell the tale of a nation and artistic expression growing in confidence and diversity.

Ortrud Westheider is Director of the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany.