Max Weber studied under Matisse, associated with influential figures including Apollinaire, Picasso, and Delaunay, and is credited with bringing firsthand knowledge of the Parisian avant-garde to Alfred Stieglitz s modernist circle in New York, inspiring a generation of artists. While his works are in important collections, they have not yet received the close study of the artist s peers, such as Picasso, Braque, and Leger. William C. Agee, a veteran museum curator and renowned scholar of twentieth-century American art, and scholar Pamela N. Koob take up the challenge in a lavishly illustrated volume, gathering together a selection of Max Weber s best cubist works. Close readings of Weber s paintings open the most complete survey to date of American cubism, with entries on key cubist works by Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Hans Hofmann, Charles Sheeler, Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Alice Trumbull Mason, and David Smith, among many others. Filling in a missing piece of one of the twentieth century s most influential movements, this critical reevaluation is long overdue.

Modernism, referring to the period dating roughly from the late 19th century to 1970, is regarded as a crucial moment in the history of American art. Although Modernist artists adopted a wide range of styles, they were linked by a desire to interpret a rapidly changing society and to cast aside the conventions of representational art. Some, such as Stuart Davis and Joseph Stella, responded to consumerism, urbanism and industrial technology; others, such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe, found inspiration in nature and the Native American culture of the Southwest. This magnificent new book presents the works of the Vilcek Collection, an unparalleled private collection of American Modernist paintings, drawings and sculpture. Art historian Lewis Kachur explores almost 100 rarely seen works by 20 leading artists active during the first half of the last century, while William C. Agee contributes an incisive introduction. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Masterpieces of American Modernism provides an outstanding overview of the radical shift in art driven by this major aesthetic movement.

A celebration of the work of the beloved American artist Wolf Kahn (b. 1927), this volume focuses on the vivid colors of his luscious landscapes made in the past ten years. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Kahn immigrated to the U.S. in 1940, and after settling in New York he studied with influential artist and teacher Hans Hofmann. His radiant hues, tangy color contrasts, and pervasive sense of light combine realism with the discipline of color-field painting and place him at the forefront of American representational artists. This book features a generous selection of paintings and pastels that showcase his bold, freewheeling style and feature a unique blend of realism and abstraction. During the past decade of his long and accomplished career, Kahn has traded in the often-lyrical palette of his earlier landscapes for an increasingly brash and assertive chromatic vision evidenced in electric hues ranging from acid yellow and hazard orange to saturated thalo blue. His most recent large-scale oils, depicting his favored subjects of barns and tree-lined fields and rivers, abound with visual energy. Art historian Sasha Nicholas puts Kahn in context with other artists and situates his recent work within his broader career. William C. Agee and Kahn discuss his process and most recent paintings

Early in his career, Ralston Crawford (1906-1978) earned acclaimed for his Precisionist paintings of architectural subjects associated with a forward-looking, industrialized America, most famously his Overseas Highway of 1939. But Crawford was a multifaceted artist with an adventurous spirit and a curiosity for the world beyond the United States, one whose work in various media and painting styles continued to evolve throughout his life, with his later, more abstract painting having a remarkable emotional dimension. This new book, published to accompany an exhibition at the Vilcek Foundation in New York focuses on two series of works - 'Torn Signs' and 'Semana Santa' - that Crawford developed mostly over the course of the last 20 or so years of his life (although his first 'Torn Signs' photographs date from the late 1930s, thus making this Crawford's most enduring theme or motif). Rick Kinsel, President of the Vilcek Foundation, begins by considering how and why his travels to Europe, especially to Andalusia in Spain, were so inspiring to Crawford. Semana Santa, or Holy Week, the last week of Lent, is observed in Seville with public processions of penitential confraternities through the streets. Witnessing this event proved to be a moving experience for Crawford, and he revisited the subject of the penitents, with their distinctive conical hats, multiple times across a number of years. The art historian William C. Agee provides a biographical essay on Crawford's peripatetic life, examining in particular the relation between the 'Torn Signs' and 'Semana Santa' bodies of work and the artist's later decades, after the Second World War, when Crawford was interested less in the life-affirming view of modernity associated with Precisionism, and more in giving expression to disillusion and decay. Crawford's son John writes about the complex interrelationship of the two series, with emphasis on the way in which Crawford's photography relates to his painting and printmaking. Individual works in both series are then explored in depth in the main part of the book by Emily Schuchardt Navratil, Curator of the Vilcek Foundation. Reproductions of the pages of sketchbooks from 1971 (the year he was diagnosed with leukaemia) illuminate Crawford's approach to remembering colour through writing and his incredible visual memory; here, drawings of torn signs, Semana Santa and the streets of Seville are interspersed with the artist's thoughts on colour, the connection between drawing and writing, and his own life and death.

The highly anticipated, definitive reference on Stuart Davis's paintings, watercolors, drawings, and published illustrations Stuart Davis (1892-1964) made a mark on the art world early in his career, first with his Ashcan works and then with his highly personal version of Cubism, which firmly established American modernism as a force that could rival its European counterpart. Over the course of six decades, Davis produced artworks that drew inspiration from the European modernists but were deeply rooted in the popular culture of the United States. Jazz music and hipster talk, vaudeville stages, city streetscapes, New England fishing villages, gasoline stations, store fronts, and commercial packaging and advertising images were among the sources that infused his art with energy, bringing crisp edges, radiant color, and syncopated rhythms to a vast body of paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Documenting the life's work of this prolific and highly influential artist-who affected almost every development in American art from second-generation Ashcan realism around 1912 to color field and geometric painting in the 1960s-is a monumental achievement. In these three volumes, the editors have catalogued 1,749 artworks by the artist-including more than 600 works never previously illustrated-providing extensive documentation and information about each one. A detailed chronology of Davis's life, as well as an enlightening discussion of the compositional relationship between certain works spanning his oeuvre, rounds out this study. Exquisitely designed and produced, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonne will be the definitive reference on the artist's work for many years to come. Published in association with the Yale University Art Gallery