Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, June 26-Sept. 12, 2005, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oct. 20, 2005-Jan. 16, 2006, and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Feb. 27-May 28, 2006.

“This book constitutes a very welcome contribution to the public appreciation and scholarly study of Henry Ossawa Tanner, a painter of considerable significance in both Europe and America, and one whose religious imagery merits careful consideration. These well-researched essays by an international team of scholars offer substantial reflections on complex issues of race and religion, and situate the artist’s work and career within the context of his life and times. This is a robust framing of Tanner as a cultural phenomenon and one that readers will find quite rewarding.”—David Morgan, Professor of Religion at Duke University and author of The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling “Henry Ossawa Tanner has finally been recognized as an important artist in the last twenty years, and is now firmly part of the American canon as the first major African American painter to emerge from the academy. This book enriches our understanding of Tanner’s historic place in American art by considering his work as an early modernist religious artist—a status entwined with his race, but not defined by it. These essays, by an impressive collection of scholars, are full of substantially new material, and succeed in broadening our conception of Tanner’s life and work.”—Bruce Robertson, Professor of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Drawing from a wide range of archival materials and interviews with artists, Hills interprets Lawrence's art as distilled from a life of struggle and perseverance. She brings insightful analysis to his work, beginning with the 1930s street scenes that provided Harlem with its pictorial image, and follows each decade of Lawrence's work, with accounts that include his impressions of Southern Jim Crow segregation and a groundbreaking discussion of Lawrence's symbolic use of masks and masking during the 1950s Cold War era. Painting Harlem Modern is an absorbing book that highlights Lawrence's heroic efforts to meet his many challenges while remaining true to his humanist values and artistic vision.

This text examines the collection of feminist art in the Museum of Modern Art. It features essays presenting a range of generational and cultural perspectives.

Since its founding in 1929, The Museum of Modern Art in New York has brought the history of modern and contemporary art to vivid life through its extraordinary holdings. MoMA Masterpieces provides a fresh look at the Museum's exceptional collection as it stands today. Ann Temkin's introduction addresses the historical construction of the Museum's collection and explores the shifting issues that have guided its acquisitions, while the thoughtful selection of reproduced works highlights the range of artworks and ideas that constitute the evolving foundation of the Museum's collection. With 126 years spanning the distance between the works on the first and last pages of this book, MoMA Masterpieces offers an unparalleled opportunity to immerse oneself in the multitude of artistic approaches encompassed under the banner of modern art.

The first comprehensive publication exploring the life and art of pioneering American abstract artist Alice Trumbull Mason is perfect for audiences eager to discover unsung yet brilliantly talented women artists. A groundbreaking artist, Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971) was one of the earliest painters of the twentieth century to embrace abstract painting in America. Mason's early paintings have been compared to those of Gorky, Kandinsky, and Miró, and in 1936 she became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and one of its leaders in the promotion of abstract work by artists such as Josef Albers, Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, and many others. Mason was a true artist's artist whose efforts helped lead to the great movements of later twentieth-century art, such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Post-Modernism, and Conceptual Art. Alice Trumbull Mason features essays that illuminate and contextualize the artist's multifaceted work and personal life through her paintings, prints, poetry, and letters. The book reveals the full life story of a seminal abstractionist, making a sound argument for adding her to the annals of great twentieth-century artists.

This publication contains a survey of female abstract expressionist artists, revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work and the movement as a whole as well as highlighting the lack of critical attention they have received to date.