Twentieth-century American Art (Oxford History of Art S.)

Beautifully written and well organized, excellent summary of 20th century American art. One of the most informative books on 20th century American art I have read.

Good condition

This is an excellent introduction to the history of American art, its changing focus and its interpretation of the society in which it has operated. It would be a very useful guide to the art museums of America, and the fact that it is available on an I-pad means that it can be a valuable companion wherever American art is displayed.

When I got my item, it was still good.

This book clearly laid out information about every art movement within America within the previous century. The diction is fairly easy allowing one to breeze through it. A lot of the images within the text were in black and white which I felt took away from some of the pieces, but was still able to convey the essence of the artwork. This is a wonderful book and I recommend it to artists and for art history classes.

Can anyone please tell me why I can only ready part of this book? After location 42, it jump to location 56? Is that how this kindle book works or its just me?

A good primer of 20th century American Art but it does not go as in-depth as other reviews had led me to believe. More of a surface treatment. However, if you don't have any background in American art this will serve as a good introduction.

It's a beautiful book that goes into an area I didn't study very much in art history way back in the 60s.

Excellent book, such good value and everything that I needed to know whilst on my course.

The good points - this is a highly readable, well illustrated history of 20th Century American art that is commendably free of critical jargon while explaining the development of the principal movements in critical and cultural theory. It would particularly suit beginning students in US art history as well as being a good read for the interested practitioner, the practising critic and the collector.The bad points - it leaves out important figures (while including many marginal ones) and fails to even mention some important art movements, and most fundamentally it doesn't attempt to trace movements in popular and amateur art - the stuff that keeps commercial galleries, art stores and art teachers fed!Let's talk about the movements first.Neon art gets only a tangential mention as a subset of minimalism and Dan Flavin, Robert Irwin and Keith Sonnier none at all. Neon art is so much more than just minimalism, it spread world wide and is still going strong. I recently saw a major Flavin installation in Munich, my own close friend of 55 years Peter Kennedy has had a very recent major exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (his first shows there in 1969). In short this is too important a movement, which was really started by Flavin in the US, to miss out.Similarly Neo-Romanticism, Photorealism, Magic Realism, Contemporary Realism and Neo-Symbolism receive scant if any attention at all - swept up perhaps under the discussion of Post Modernism which is over focussed on appropriation.So far as major figures are concerned I will mention only a few. First let's take David Hockney. He lived a large part of his active artistic life in California. He painted some of the definitive American images of the late 20th century - California Housewife, the Splash series of paintings and prints, Mulholland Drive, A Bigger Grand Canyon - the list could go on. In the globalised world of the 20th century Hockney, who exhibited and designed operas in the US, was as much an "American" artist as Mary Cassatt who lived almost all her art life in Paris. Similarly RB Kitaj who spent his childhood, youth and older age in the US was surely as much a transatlantic artist as Whistler or Sargent. Cy Twombly and Ed Ruscha are simply not mentioned. Nor is the extraordinary contribution of Kenneth E Tyler to the development of print technique in the US and internationally.But perhaps my biggest sadness is that the book focuses almost exclusively on (the self identified) avant garde for each period, along with the art favoured by cultural theorists and activists of the day (and sometimes a little editorial bias creeps in here as to which critics to valorise and which to dismiss). Apart from the extraordinary surge in the 1980s, there is little sustained discussion of the art market at both the elite and popular level. There is little recognition of the millions of Americans for whom their practice, appreciation and collection of art is still conducted within the broad themes of modernism - transparent and mediated realism.