The American Art Book

Accessibility is the code word for Phaidon's new 500-page dictionary of American art. Valuing images over words, the longest text is the book's introduction, which, printed in large, bold face hardly fills one page. But it does describe its mission well: "Each artist is represented by a full-page colour plate of a significant work, accompanied by an informative and engaging text that places the artist in the context of contemporary movements and preceding traditions ..."-- concise and informative. By arranging the artists alphabetically the editors set up some odd and amusing juxtapositions. For example, the suited subject of an Alice Neel painting appears to speak and gesticulate excitedly about the over-stacked cornucopia of Louise Nevelson's crates found on the opposing page. The caption over each work includes four artists' names in bold print that function as hyper-links of a sort, allowing readers to skip, for example, from Willem de Kooning's Woman I to Jean Michel Basquiat's Skull to Alfred Maurer's cubist-like painting Woman with Curlers. This way, with each visit to the to The American Art Book, readers can discover and follow countless narratives throughout the three centuries of American art.