Art of Grace and Passion: Antique American Indian Art [SOLD]

ART OF GRACE AND PASSION—ANTIQUE AMERICAN INDIAN ART

Suzanne Abel-Vidor; George Everett Shaw

Publisher: Aspen Art Museum, 1999

Hardcover with slip jacket, first edition, 108 pages

From the Preface

        Artists of the Ashcan School at the turn of the century to American modernists such as Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley collected Indian art.  Surrealists of the early 1940s, including such notables as Max Ernst, André Breton, and Yves Tanguy, collected Northwest Coast and Inuit masks, and Hopi kachina dolls.  In fact, in 1946 Max Ernst and Barnett Newman curated a show on Northwest Coast art at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.  Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and other prominent 1950s artists carried on this special interest the art community had begun to display.  The late 1960s and 1970s saw Andy Warhol, Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, and Kenneth Noland continue what had come to be a multigenerational passion of modern artists for collecting antique North American Indian art.

        Against this background, the Aspen Art Museum shares with the public premier examples of North American Indian art.  Examples were selected based primarily on their visual appeal and artistic merit.

The book is oversize, pages measuring 13 x 11-3/4 inches.  Beautiful full-color photographs of the art objects fill each page. This is an extraordinarily beautiful book with extraordinarily beautiful Native American objects.

This book and the previous George Everett Shaw book we posted, Art of the Ancestors, which is still available, make a beautiful pair.  Together, they provide the reader with the most spectacular American Indian art ever made.