Customer Reviews

Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting 1710-1920, Three Volumes: The East and the Mid-Atlantic, The South and the Midwest, The Plains States and the West

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Library Journal said the author "... produced not a coffee-table book but the coffee-table itself ..."
The coffee table indeed. These are large, heavy books full of color plates and the reader will need a table or stand upon which to set each book to read it. The physical quality of the set and its slipcase is superb.

I bought this set in 1990 and I still refer to it regularly. As an artist and as a reader, I rate this set as absolutely outstanding and without peer as an encyclopedic historic survey of American painting. Its focus is on painters who worked outside the New York-Boston-Philadelphia area, or outside the recognized mainstream of painting. It is not a source for in-depth coverage of any one artist but rather a sweeping and inclusive survey of painters and painting communities in America for the last two hundred years.

The set is organized by region so that some painters are mentioned in more than one of the three volumes if they were active in more than one region. For instance, Georgia O'Keeffe is mentioned in volumes 2 and 3. In her case, the author does not give her more than a few paragraphs as her work is already well-documented, but he does document where she worked in South Carolina and Texas, and the community of artists in New Mexico with which she associated.

This gorgeous set of books, of all the thousands of books I own, occupies a space of honor amongst the others in my library. I cannot recommend it more highly.