This volume celebrates the 20th anniversary of the founding of the American Art Forum, by presenting 72 treasured works of art selected by the curators of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In six thematic and chronological sections, the curators cover the huge variety of American art: luminous images of nature from the mid-nineteenth century, such as Martin Johnson Heade's Newburyport Meadows I, and fine landscape masterpieces in the Hudson River tradition, including Sanford Robinson Gifford's The Marshes of the Hudson (1876); light-filled impressionist canvases, such as Mary Cassatt's Reading "Le Figaro" (1878); dazzling Gilded Age glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany and paintings by John Singer Sargent; gritty Ashcan records from a dynamic New York City, such as George Bellows's Noon (1908); vivid aesthetic creations of the modern age; the triumphant abstract expressionism of Willem de Kooning; and resonant contemporary works by Andrew Wyeth and David Hockney. The book also showcases major canvases by Georgia O'Keefe, such as Black Cross with Red Sky (1929), John Marin's Taos Canyon, New Mexico (1929), Cyrus Edwin Dallin's major statue Appeal to the Great Spirit and James Earl Fraser's emotive bronze sculpture End of the Trail (1918).

This book presents 100 of the greatest paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints by a group of artists derogatorily dubbed the Ashcan School by the critics. George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan ignored the romantic and lofty themes of many of their contemporaries and chose instead to depict the dramatic changes and conflicting social mores among the common people in turn-of-the-century New York City. The Ashcan artists documented the city and its people in an almost journalistic fashion, exploring the same subjects occupying the press: immigration, the lower-middle class, and gender issues. They portrayed life at the street level, gravitating to bars, street corners, boxing clubs, beaches, parks, restaurants, movie theaters, and neighborhood meeting places. In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine the American tradition in painting without these wonderful and moving works.