cover image American Paint Sculpture 1945

American Paint Sculpture 1945

Diana Strazdes. Hudson Hills Press, $95 (511pp) ISBN 978-1-55595-055-2

The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh boasts one of the finest collections of American paintings and sculptures. Illustrated with 470 black-and- white plates and 38 color ones, this catalogue of the museum's holdings in American art to 1945 includes reproductions of seminal works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows, Albert Ryder and Georgia O'Keeffe along with those of exciting lesser-known works like Dwight Tryon's turn-of-the-century tonalist paintings and Elihu Vedder's mystical fantasies, which were inspired by Buddhism and theosophy. Early modernists such as Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley are represented; the collect i on is strong on Pennsylvania artists, among them Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, Edward Hicks and Horace Pippin. Sculpture ranges from Augustus Saint-Gaudens's statue of Abraham Lincoln to Elie Nadelman's cryptic Circus Performer . Organized alphabetically, the text combines profiles of each artist with in-depth commentaries on the plates. Strazdes, a former Carnegie curator, is now a research consultant with San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums. (Feb.)