In 1921/22 Edouard Vuillard created a cycle of six paintings for the entrance hall of the Villa Bauer in Basel. Four large-format pictures show exhibition rooms in the Louvre from Antiquity to French Rococo painting. Two overdoors provide an intimate insight into the artist's art collection. The cycle of paintings is of outstanding quality as regards both content and form, but it to date has seldom been examined and exhibited. It was created immediately after the end of the First World War and the re-opening of the Louvre. Vuillard's Louvre pictures are a humanist manifesto for the social importance and responsibility of museums as places that preserve the evidence of human creativity for future generations.

A sweeping survey of the arts of Ireland spanning 150 years and an astonishing range of artists and media This groundbreaking book captures a period in Ireland's history when countless foreign architects, artisans, and artists worked side by side with their native counterparts. Nearly all of the works within this remarkable volume-many of them never published before-have been drawn from North American collections. This catalogue accompanies the first exhibition to celebrate the Irish as artists, collectors, and patrons over 150 years of Ireland's sometimes turbulent history. Featuring the work of a wide range of artists-known and unknown-and a diverse array of media, the catalogue also includes an impressive assembly of essays by a pre-eminent group of international experts working on the art and cultural history of Ireland. Major essays discuss the subjects of the Irish landscape and tourism, Irish country houses, and Dublin's role as a center of culture and commerce. Also included are numerous shorter essays covering a full spectrum of topics and artworks, including bookbinding, ceramics, furniture, glass, mezzotints, miniatures, musical instruments, pastels, silver, and textiles. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: The Art Institute of Chicago (03/17/15-06/07/15)

Pont-Aven has lent its name to one of the most famous schools of painting in modern art and is now automatically associated with Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard. In 1888, in this Breton village in southern Finistere, the two painters set about inventing the features of a completely new style of painting: Synthetism. Breaking with academic orthodoxy and heavily influenced by Japanese prints, they introduced novel aesthetic principles distinguished especially by a belief in simple forms and the use of colour applied in large patches edged by a dark line. This approach further distanced itself from the art that preceded it in its taste for matt tones and the rejection of traditional perspective. This new book reveals to a wider public the important collection that Alexandre Mouradian amassed in only a few years. The collection reflects its creator's great passion for the artists of the Pont-Aven group, as well as others in Brittany and beyond who embraced the new ideas of Bernard and Gauguin without ever losing their individuality. Whether in painting or printmaking, each of these was able to move beyond the imitation of observed reality to express the deepest aspect of his personality: his emotions. The works selected by the collector eloquently show the international reach of what was not strictly speaking a school, in the full sense of the term. Since the private Paris academies were closed during the summer, artists from all over Europe went to Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu to seek inspiration and 'to dare' like Gauguin. Written contributions by Jean-Marie Rouart of the French Academy and the author and art historian Adrien Goetz, are supported by detailed notes on the works by the museum curator Estelle Guille des Buttes, providing invaluable insights into this exceptional collection.

Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) was an undisputed professional success during his lifetime. Crowds flocked to see his vividly rendered historical and Orientalist compositions, and thanks to the mass marketing of his work through mechanical reproduction, he reached audiences on an unprecedented scale.From the outset, however, his success met with critical hostility. emile Zola, champion of edouard Manet, dismissed Gerome as a cynical manufacturer of anecdotal images for popular consumption--a critique repeatedly echoed by historians of modern art. In light of revisionist and postmodern trends over the past four decades, however, Gerome's work is now being approached with unprecedented seriousness and refreshing creativity. The ten essays in this volume go far in challenging critical biases against the artist and suggesting new avenues of research. These papers indeed suggest that we are just beginning to learn how to "read" Gerome's paintings in their full complexity.

The odore Rousseau (1812-1867), arguably the most important French landscape artist of the mid-nineteenth century and a leader of the so-called Barbizon School, occupies a crucial moment of transition from the idealizing effects of academic painting to the radically modern vision of the Impressionists. He was an experimental artist who rejected the traditional historical, biblical, or literary subject matter in favor of "unruly nature," a Romantic naturalism that confounded his contemporaries with its "bizarre" compositional and coloristic innovations. Lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented, this volume includes five essays by experts in the field. Scott Allan and Edouard Kopp alternately examine Rousseau's diverse techniques and working procedures as a painter and as a draftsman, as well as his art's mixed economic and critical fortunes on the art market and at the Salon. Line Clausen Pedersen's essay focuses on Mont Blanc Seen from La Faucille, Storm Effect, an early touchstone for the artist and a spectacular example of the Romantic sublime in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek's collection. This catalogue accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 21 to September 11, 2016, and at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek from October 13, 2016, to January 8, 2017.

Antosha and Levitasha is the first book in English devoted to the complex relationship between Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan, one of Russia's greatest landscape painters. Outside of Russia, a general lack of familiarity with Levitan's life and art has undermined an appreciation of the cultural significance of his friendship with Chekhov. Serge Gregory's highly readable study attempts to fill that gap for Western readers by examining a friendship that may have vacillated between periods of affection and animosity, but always reflected an unwavering shared aesthetic. In Russia, where entire rooms of galleries in Moscow and St. Petersburg are devoted to Levitan's paintings, the lives of the famous writer and the equally famous artist have long been tied together. To those familiar with the work of both men, it is evident that Levitan's "landscapes of mood" have much in common with the way that Chekhov's characters perceive nature as a reflection of their emotional state. Gregory focuses on three overarching themes: the artists' similar approach to depicting landscape; their romantic and social rivalries within their circle of friends, which included many of Moscow's leading cultural figures; and the influence of Levitan's personal life on Chekhov's stories and plays. He emphasizes the facts of Levitan's life and his place in late nineteenth-century Russian art, particularly with respect to his dual loyalties to the competing Itinerant and World of Art movements. Accessible and engaging, Antosha and Levitasha will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in art history, late nineteenth-century Russian culture, and biographies.

A bold and richly illustrated survey of the traditions and stylistic evolution of landscape painting in the Americas As nations in the Americas gained independence in the early 19th century, a pictorial landscape tradition emerged. By 1840, landscape painting had become the primary medium for articulating conceptions of land and nation in the development of North and South American cultural identity. Picturing the Americas offers the first comprehensive treatment of this genre on both American continents, bringing into dialogue the landscape traditions of artists practicing between 1840 and 1940. The catalogue is brilliantly illustrated with 260 color images, including works by U.S. artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Canadian artists Joseph Legare, Frances Anne Hopkins, and Lawren Harris; Mexico's Jose Maria Velasco, Uruguay's Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Brazil's Tarsila do Amaral, among many others. Leading scholars offer a Pan-American perspective on these landscape traditions: essays consider the emergence of modernism, as well as how the development of landscape imagery reflects the intricately intertwined geographies and sociopolitical histories of the peoples, nations, regions, and diasporas of the two continents. Published in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario Exhibition Schedule: Art Gallery of Ontario (06/20/15-09/20/15) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (11/06/15-01/18/16) Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil (02/27/16-05/29/16)

The American realist artist John Sloan (1871-1951) is best known for his portrayals of daily life in early 20th-century New York and as a member of The Eight and the Ashcan School, alongside peers like Robert Henri, Everett Shinn, and George Luks. Sloan's artistic approach was shaped by his experience as a commercial illustrator, a type of work that inaugurated his professional career--at newspapers like the "Philadelphia Press" and later for mass-market magazines--and which he pursued even after he turned his focus to painting. In "John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration," Michael Lobel explores the impact of Sloan's illustrating on his wider output, including his paintings, his drawings for the radical journal "The ""Masses," and his response to the watershed 1913 Armory Show. Illuminating the interaction between art and popular culture, this book provides an important new framework for understanding the modern genre of illustration, and in so doing touches on major 20th-century currents, including the rise and expansion of the mass media and the visual legacy of European modernism.

This volume of thirteen essays presents rigorous new research by western and Russian scholars on Russian art of the nienteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Over More than three decades after the publication of Elizabeth Valkenier's pioneering monograph, Russian Realist Art, this impressive collection showcases the latest methodology and subjects of inquiry, expanding the parameters of what has become an area of enormous intellectual and popular appeal. Major artists including Ilia Repin, Valentin Serov, and Wassily Kandinsky are considered afresh, as are the Peredvizhnik and Mir iskusstva movements and the Abramtsevo community. The book also breaks new ground to embrace subjects such as Russian graphic satire and children's book illustration, as well as stimulating aspects of patronage and display. Collectively, the essays include a range of approaches, from close textual readings to institutional critique. They also develop major themes inspired by Valkenier's work, among them: the emergence and evolution of cultural institutions, the development of aesthetic discourse and artistic terminology, debates between the Academy of Arts and its challengers, art criticism and the Russian press, and the resonance of various forms of nationalism within the art world. These and other questions engage multiple disciplines-those of art history, Slavic Russian studies, and cultural history, among others-and promise to fuel a vibrant and ascendant field.

This book focuses on interpretations of the myth that lead to the Symbolist period and explores the Symbolist understanding of the Prometheus myth. It examines the main projections that were made onto the Prometheus figure, through a study of the artistic works devoted to the Titan.

This is the third of three text books, published in association with the Open University, which offer an innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation" includes essays which engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalisation, cultural difference and curating, as well as explorations of key canonical artists and movements and of some less well-documented work of contemporary artists.

"Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age" offers a stunning new look at late-nineteenth-century American art, and demonstrates the profound role humor played in determining the course of culture in the Gilded Age. By showing how complex humorous strategies such as deadpan and burlesque operate in a range of media - from painting and sculpture to chromolithography and architectural schemes - Greenhill examines how ambitious artists like Winslow Homer and Augustus Saint-Gaudens rethought the place of humor in their work and devised strategies to both conform to and slyly undermine developing senses of "serious" culture. Exhibiting an awareness of the emerging requirements of serious art but maintaining an investment in humor, they played it straight.

Due to the technological advances of the nineteenth century, an abundance of black drawing media exploded onto the market. Charcoal, conte crayon, and fabricated black chalks and crayons; fixatives; various papers; and many lifting devices gave rise to an unprecedented amount of experimentation. Indeed, innovation became the rule, as artists developed their own unique-and often experimental-processes. The exploration of black media in drawing is inextricably bound up with the exploration of black in prints, and this volume presents an integrated study that rises above specialization in one over the other. This richly illustrated catalogue brings together such diverse artists as Francisco de Goya, Maxime Lalanne, Gustave Courbet, Odilon Redon, and Georges Seurat and explores their inventive works on paper. Sidelining labels like "conservative" or "avant-garde," the essays in this book employ all the tools that art history and modern conservation have given us, inviting the reader to look more broadly at the artists' methods and materials. This volume accompanies an exhibition of the same name on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from February 9 to May 15, 2016.

A beautiful presentation of fifty masterworks of late 19th- to mid-20th-century avant-garde European art from one of America's most distinguished private collections Cezanne and the Modern showcases fifty masterworks of late 19th- to mid-20th-century avant-garde European art from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, one of the most distinguished private collections of modern art in the United States. Among the iconic images represented are Paul Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire, Vincent van Gogh's Tarascon Stagecoach, and Amedeo Modigliani's portrait of Jean Cocteau, as well as an outstanding suite of sixteen watercolors by Cezanne. The volume opens with Henry Pearlman's "Reminiscences of a Collector," a fascinating first-person narrative, newly annotated to identify key individuals and dates mentioned in the text. An essay by art historian Rachael Z. DeLue places Pearlman in the context of mid-20th-century American collecting, and a detailed chronology illuminates Pearlman's collecting practices in relation to noteworthy events in the art world. A series of sixteen brief essays by leading scholars focuses on each of the represented artists and their works, richly illustrated with sumptuous color plates, select details, and numerous comparative images. A comprehensive checklist documenting each of the works-including detailed provenance, exhibition history, bibliographic references, and commentary by a conservator-rounds out this handsome volume, which is published to accompany the first international tour of this important collection. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (03/13/14-06/22/14) Musee Granet, Aix-en-Provence (07/11/14-10/05/14) High Museum of Art, Atlanta (10/25/14-01/11/15) Vancouver Art Gallery (02/07/15-05/18/15) Princeton University Art Museum (09/12/15-01/03/16)

Volume III in the 'Studies in the History of Collection' series, published in association with the Beazley Archive in the University of Oxford. 14 papers on The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660-1830 presented at a symposium at the Wallace Collection, London in December 2003. Contents: Introduction (Neil De Marchi); 1) The Art Trade and its Urban Context: England and the Netherlands compared, 1550-1750 (David Ormrod); 2) The Auction Duty Act of 1777: the beginning of institutionalisation of auctions in Britain (Satomi Ohashi); 3) The Almoneda: the second-hand art market in Spain (Mari-Tere Alvarez); 4) The Market for Netherlandish Paintings in Paris, 1750-1815 (Hans J. Van Miegroet); 5) Le tableau et son prix a Paris, 1760-80 (Patrick Michel); 6) The System Governing Appraised Value in Ancien Regime France (Alden R. Gordon); 7) The Marquis de Vasse Against the Art Dealer Jacques Lenglier: a case-study of an eighteenth-century Parisian auction (Francois Marandet); 8) Pierre Sirois (1665-1726): le premier marchand de Watteau (Guillaume Glorieux); 9) The Purchase of the Past: Dr Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755) and the collecting of history (John Cherry); 10) John Anderson and John Bouttats: picture dealers in eighteenth-century London (David Connell); 11) Sir Godfrey Copley as Patron and Consumer, 1685-1705 (David Mitchell); 12) The Rise and Fall of a British Connoisseur: the career of Michael Bryan (1757-1821), picture dealer extraordinaire (Julia Armstrong-Totten); 13) 'In Keeping with the Truth': the German art market and its role in the development of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century (Thomas Ketelsen); 14) Abraham Hume e Giovanni Maria Sasso: il mercato artistico tra Venezia e Londra nel settecento (Linda Borean).

This is an insightful survey on the materials and techniques of American artistis, from 1860 to 1945. This second volume in the American Painter's on Technique series is the first overview of an important but largely unknown aspect of American art from 1860 to 1945. The study is based primarily on firsthand descriptions of the materials and techniques that artists used to make paintings. The book is into two parts: 1860 to 1910 and 1910 to 1945. Between 1860 and 1910, the predominant theme is the increased number of Americans who traveled to Europe for instruction, resulting in an explosion of transplanted techniques. The period 1910 to 1945, was marked by a fundamental change in the attitudes of painters toward their materials. An epilogue summarizes the lessons American painters' experiences over 250 years can hold for contemporary artists interested in the long-term preservation of their paintings.

Randall Griffin's book examines the ways in which artists and critics sought to construct a new identity for America during the era dubbed the Gilded Age because of its leaders' taste for opulence. Artists such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Anshutz explored alternative "American" themes and styles, but widespread belief in the superiority of European art led them and their audiences to look to the Old World for legitimacy. This rich, never-resolved contradiction between the native and autonomous, on the one hand, and, on the other, the European and borrowed serves as the armature of Griffin's innovative look at how and why the world of art became a key site in the American struggle for identity.

Not only does Griffin trace the interplay of issues of nationalism, class, and gender in American culture, but he also offers insightful readings of key paintings by Eakins and other canonical artists. Further, Griffin shows that by 1900 the nationalist project in art and criticism had helped open the way for the formulation of American modernism.

Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz will be of importance to all those interested in American culture as well as to specialists in art history and art criticism.

An archive of never-before-published illustrations of insects and plants painted by a pioneering naturalist. During his lifetime (1751-ca. 1840), English-born naturalist and artist John Abbot rendered more than 4,000 natural history illustrations and profoundly influenced North American entomology, as he documented many species in the New World long before they were scientifically described. For sixty-five years, Abbot worked in Georgia to advance knowledge of the flora and fauna of the American South by sending superbly mounted specimens and exquisitely detailed illustrations of insects, birds, butterflies, and moths, on commission, to collectors and scientists all over the world. Between 1816 and 1818, Abbot completed 104 drawings of insects on their native plants for English naturalist and patron William Swainson (1789-1855). Both Abbot and Swainson were artists, naturalists, and collectors during a time when natural history and the sciences flourished. Separated by nearly forty years in age, Abbot and Swainson were members of the same international communities and correspondence networks upon which the study of nature was based during this period. The relationship between these two men-who never met in person-is explored in John Abbot and William Swainson: Art, Science, and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century Natural History Illustration. This volume also showcases, for the first time, the complete set of original, full-color illustrations discovered in 1977 in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand. Originally intended as a companion to an earlier survey of insects from Georgia, the newly rediscovered Turnbull manuscript presents beetles, grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, and a wasp. Most of the insects are pictured with the flowering plants upon which Abbot thought them to feed. Abbot's journal annotations about the habits and biology of each species are also included, as are nomenclature updates for the insect taxa. Today, the Turnbull drawings illuminate the complex array of personal and professional concerns that informed the field of natural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These illustrations are also treasured artifacts from times past, their far-flung travels revealing a world being reshaped by the forces of global commerce and information exchange even then. The shared project of John Abbot and William Swainson is now brought to completion, signaling the beginning of a new phase of its significance for modern readers and scholars.

Art historians have in the past narrowly defined primitivism, limiting their inquiry to examples of direct stylistic borrowing from African, Oceanic, or Native American imagery. The drawbacks of such an approach have become increasingly apparent, the most problematic being its perpetuation of the notion that certain traditions are indeed "primitive." Frances Connelly argues that "primitive" art was not a style at all, but a cultural construction by modern Europeans, a cluster of concepts principally forged during the Enlightenment concerning the nature of the origins of artistic expression. She contends that, instead of the paintings of Gauguin, the publication of Vico's New Science in 1725 lies much closer to the origins of primitivism because it first articulated the essential framework of ideas through which Europeans would understand "primitive" expression.

Based upon a close reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, including voyage accounts, ethnographies, aesthetic theories, and popular journals, The Sleep of Reason establishes that the term "primitive" art did not refer so much to actual stylistic traditions but to a collection of visual attributes that Europeans construed to be universal characteristics of "primitive" expression, specifically the hieroglyph, the grotesque, and the ornamental. Connelly provides case studies of artists and aestheticians who advocated, attempted, or realized the assimilation of these "primitive" characteristics, including some artists never before associated with primitivism as well as significant re-evaluations of Gauguin and Picasso.

The Glasgow Boys revolutionized Scottish painting from 1880 until around 1895, although their influence lasted until just before World War 1. Painters such as Sir John Lavery, Sir James Guthrie, George Henry, Edward Atkinson Hornel, Joseph Crawhall, Edward Arthur Walton, and William Kennedy formed the main group of painters, although there were 18 in total. They were a loose group, with various friendships and painting groups among them. Influenced by the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, they were also inspired by Japanese and Dutch art. Their style went against Victorian sentimentality and they brought the look of some forms of Impressionism and post-Impressionism to Scotland, with fresh views of the Scottish countryside and typical scenes from Scottish life. They painted outdoors, and captured a way of life that changed Scottish painting. Many settled after their early rebellious phase into quieter styles, or moved away as the art scene evolved into the Scottish Colourists' phase. As Glasgow became the fourth largest city in Europe, with a massive explosion in its population, money from wealthy industrialists, publishers and merchants became available to support the art commissioned from The Glasgow Boys. New walls needed art, as Glasgow celebrated its prosperity in a new phase of building - the city centre saw a new Art School, and City Chambers, and industrialists built homes in the country. The author's understanding of the art world and the importance of financial support and also painting techniques makes this book a unique contribution to books written on The Glasgow Boys. The Glasgow Boys are the subject of an exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery in spring/summer 2010, and then at the Royal Academy, London until January 2011.

In his most ambitious endeavour since Freud, acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of Modernism in the arts, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. He traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York, presenting along the way a thrilling pageant of hereitcs that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Walter Gropius and Any Warhol. The result is a work unique in its breadth and brilliance. Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superb achievement by one of our greatest historians.

The Carved Line is about printmaking and printmakers in New Mexico over a significant period of timefrom 1890 to present. It features block prints, including new works, by New Mexicos best-known printmakers and brings to the forefront little-known artists deserving wide recognition and a place in New Mexicos art historical canon. This volume includes 120 beautifully reproduced prints by internationally known New Mexico artists including Gustave Baumann, Willard Clark, Howard Cook, Betty Hahn, T. C. Cannon, Fritz Scholder, Frederick OHara, Adja Yunkers, and previously unpublished works by other artists such as Juan Pino, Margaret Herrera Chavez, Tina Fuentes, Yoshiko Shimano, and Ruth Connely. The extraordinary range of block prints in this book shows the types of production, sociopolitical and cultural influences, and wide variety of subjects in New Mexico.

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time. From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored. In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present. Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley

Struggling to create an identity distinct from the European tradition but lacking an established system of support, early painting in America received little cultural acceptance in its own country or abroad. Yet despite the initial indifference with which it was first met, American art flourished against the odds and founded the aesthetic consciousness that we equate with American art today.

In this exhilarating study David Rosand shows how early American painters transformed themselves from provincial followers of the established traditions of Europe into some of the most innovative and influential artists in the world. Moving beyond simple descriptions of what distinguishes American art from other movements and forms, "The Invention of Painting in America" explores not only the status of artists and their personal relationship to their work but also the larger dialogue between the artist and society. Rosand looks to the intensely studied portraits of America's early painters -- especially Copley and Eakins and the landscapes of Homer and Inness, among others -- each of whom grappled with conflicting cultural attitudes and different expressive styles in order to reinvent the art of painting. He discusses the work of Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and Motherwell and the subjects and themes that engaged them. While our current understanding of America's place in art is largely based on the astonishing success of a handful of mid-twentieth-century painters, Rosand unearths the historical and artistic conditions that both shaped and inspired the phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism.