America’s Art is published on the occasion of the Museum’s reopening and gathers 225 of its best works, culled from a collection of forty thousand objects. Like the Museum’s renovation, this catalogue embraces a bit of innovation itself. The book broadly sketches periods in America’s history--from the colonial period and Revolution through the Civil War, to the Gilded Age, World War II, and modern art--to create a vibrant portrait of creativity, reflection, and celebration.

From its earliest stirrings as a republic to the information age, America has been a country of triumph and struggle, imagination and innovation. And for nearly three centuries the country’s artists, witnesses to the nation’s extraordinary arc of development, have created a rich, visual record that offers insights into our beginnings and growth as a nation.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum, home to one of the country’s finest collections of American art, is housed in the building that once served as the United States Patent Office, a nineteenth-century clearinghouse for patents on inventions. It seems appropriate that an art museum, dedicated to collecting and preserving the nation’s artistic creativity, has found a home in the very building that promoted innovation early in the nation’s history And innovation is still the watchword: For the past six years, the landmark building underwent extensive renovation, allowing the Museum to expand its gallery spaces--and its capacity--to present its collections to the American people.

America’s Art is published on the occasion of the Museum’s reopening and gathers 225 of its best works, culled from a collection of forty thousand objects. Like the Museum’s renovation, this catalogue embraces a bit of innovation itself. The book broadly sketches periods in America’s history--from the colonial period and Revolution through the Civil War, to the Gilded Age, World War II, and modern art--to create a vibrant portrait of creativity, reflection, and celebration.

The opening chapter looks at European influences in the religious images of New Spain, while classical images from colonial New England reveal the young nation’s early gifts for adaptation. Subsequent chapters track the visual splendor of the western landscape, the great expansion west, and the tragic eclipse of the Native American way of life. "Brother against Brother" illustrates the Civil War: Painting and sculpture of individuals, particularly Lincoln, frame classical ideals of presentation, while photographs offer candid, elegiac images of war’s destruction.

Foreword

ELEANOR HARVEY

Introduction

ELIZABETH BROUN

ONE

From Distant Shores

TWO

This Other Eden

THREE

Liberty More than Life

FOUR

Ever Westward

FIVE

Hand to the Plow

Six

Brother against Brother

SEVEN

The Rise of Industry

EIGHT

An Eye for Beauty

NINE

Seeing the City

TEN

The Harlem Renaissance

ELEVEN

South by Southwest

TWELVE

The Great Depression

THIRTEEN

Folk Traditions

FOURTEEN

Americans at Midcentury

FIFTEEN

The Abstract Impulse

SIXTEEN

Toward the Millennium

Catalogue

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments