The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000 [Hardcover]

Lisa Phillips (Author), Whitney Museum of American Art (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393048152 | ISBN-13: 978-0393048155 | Publication Date: October 17, 1999 | Edition: 1St Edition

A compelling panorama of art in America during the second half of this century.

Shortly after the Second World War a group of American artists moved away from representation and realism toward a completely nonrepresentational style which became known as abstract expressionism. Led by Jackson Pollock, Willem DeKooning, and others, it was the first truly American painting style, and it quickly moved the United States into the forefront of innovation. A succession of other movements followed, including Pop Art, and adherents like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; the performance art of John Cage and others; video art, led by Nam Juin Paik; and installation art of grand proportions.

In this expansive volume Lisa Phillips explains the excitement and inventiveness of American artists in the context of the varied and sometimes turbulent social environment as well as the expanding economy of postwar America. Essays by experts in related fields illuminate parallel and diverse developments in architecture, dance, music, literature, painting, sculpture, cinema, and design. Over 700 color and duotone illustrations

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This lively compendium is the catalog for the second half of the Whitney Museum of American Art's nine-month, two-part exhibition on American culture of the last 100 years. The author, Lisa Phillips, is now director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, but she spent 20 years at the Whitney overseeing many of its famous (or infamous) biennials and producing a number of exhibitions about American culture in fields beyond the museum. Like the first, this volume pulls together an array of cultural icons, defined inclusively. This being the Whitney's gig, the visual arts are appropriately dominant. The book's six sections cover every development from abstract expressionism through pop and minimalism to "Questioning the Canon," and "Market Power." Oddly, however, it is the insertions of short sidebars on Hollywood, theater, realism in the novel, modern dance, the nonfiction novel, feminist literature, hip-hop, and the like that give the book (and the exhibition) its special resonance. Pictures of Bob Dylan, Diana Ross and the Supremes, one of Robert Morris's disarrayed installations, and a bedroom at the Hog Farm community are spread across two facing pages, for example. The whole effect--a feel for the late '60s--is greater than the sum of its parts. And this happens throughout The American Century. Oddly, the art is less well evoked than the cultural iconography. The book's designer has sometimes enlarged a smallish painting or reduced an immense one, giving a distorted view both of the works in relation to one another and of their place in cultural history. With that quibble, however, this jam-packed tome records a notable exhibition as well as the long, strange trip the second half of the century has been. --Peggy Moorman

From Library Journal

The second installment in the Whitney museum's primer on 20th-century American art fairs somewhat better than the first volume, covering 1900-50 (LJ 6/1/99), thanks to the superiority of the art here. Given the ascendance of the Abstract Expressionists and the continued dominance of American artists through much of the second half of the century, Phillips can more easily maintain the unerringly American focus throughout the narrative (though the rigid marginalization of certain key non-Americans seems all the more chauvinistic). Like its predecessor, however, the volume suffers from a compulsion to contextualize that is both less needed in coverage of these recent years and more problematic in addressing a fractured contemporary art world. Aside from the subjectivity of many of the pronouncements ("The arts...thrived during Carter's administration, in no small part thanks to Joan Mondale"), one wonders at the constant stress on national events and the deemphasis of community politics and changes in the marketing of art. Academic art libraries will want this volume as documentation of a major show, but public libraries can wait and purchase as demand warrants.AEric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 408 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition (October 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393048152
• ISBN-13: 978-0393048155
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 9.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #158,477 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Cup Half Full, December 28, 1999

By 

marcus (indianapolis, indiana, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000 (Hardcover)

I strongly recomend this book for someone who wants a "Who's Who" of the American fine arts scene. I have spent many hours scanning the names and pictures, aborbing the exciting 50 years of American contempoary arts.

I cannot recommend this book as an especially well-written commentary on that scene, however. Some sentences contain refrences to handfulls of artists with little direction or explanation. Of course the authors were required to give fair coverage to thousands of artists who had their 15 minutes of fame in US art galleries. I follow this scene pretty closely professionally. I can report that I did not find any glaring ommissions from their collection of artists. As you might expect, regional artists received barely a nod and little is said about "outside" art.

If you are looking for a great explanation of "modern" art, try "The Shock of the New" by Robert Hughes, which Amazon indicates is still in print (and rated 5 stars, almost).

But if you are interested in the "Sears Catalog" of the fine arts in the past 50 years, this is the book you want.