America's Art: Masterpieces from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
*Starred Review* The Smithsonian American Art Museum will reopen in July 2006 after a six-year renovation effort. To mark the occasion, the museum has created a capacious and colorful volume showcasing 225 diverse works from its varied and stellar collection. Expert and engaging commentary links the lushly reproduced artworks to the many-faceted story of America: its landscapes wild and cultivated, its small towns and big cities, its people indigenous and immigrant, and the myriad changes technology has instigated. Art itself has evolved in sync with changes social, political, and technological, a process clearly delineated in this stirring pageant, a procession that includes John Singleton Copley's 1765 portrait of the singularly self-possessed colonist Mrs. George Watson; George Catlin's 1832 portrait of a Native American beauty, Sha-ko-ka; Albert Bierstadt's grand 1868 vision of the Sierra Nevada; Civil War-era photographs; Berenice Abbott's photographs of 1930s New York; Jacob Lawrence's paintings of African American life; works by Edward Hopper and Willem de Kooning; and a video installation by Nam June Paik. Here is American art in all its glory and innovation as a quest for understanding and connection, and a public collection that constitutes a genuine national treasure.Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved