The American Art Book (Art Reference)

Amazon.com Review Accessibility is the code word for Phaidon's new 500-page dictionary of American art. The book values images over words, and its longest text is the introduction, which is printed in large, bold face and hardly fills one page. But it does describe the book's mission well: "Each artist is represented by a full-page color 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 overstacked 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 hyperlinks of a sort, allowing readers to skip, for example, from Willem de Kooning's