Master drawings in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art1997

The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1871, has grown from an outpost of culture on the midwestern prairie to one of the world's great museums. This volume presents 149 of the museum's greatest European and American paintings, from the Renaissance to the 1980s. A generous sampling of the Art Institute's world-renowned collection of French Impressionist painters is featured. Also included is a group of earlier European paintings, ranging from jewellike Renaissance panels and El Greco's vast Assumption of the Virgin to singular works by Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn. The selection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American paintings captures the unique flavor and variety of the art of the growing nation, from colonial portraits and rustic landscapes to such memorable pictures as Winslow Homer's Herring Net, James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Gray and Gold, Frederic Remington's Advance Guard, and Mary Cassatt's Bath. The twentieth-century paintings included here illustrate the vast territory the art of this century has encompassed. The artistic trends of the last forty years are seen in works by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and the contemporary German artist Anselm Kiefer. The quality and variety of the selection in this book reflect the scope of the Art Institute's paintings collection. Each of the 149 paintings is illustrated in magnificent color and is accompanied by a brief, informative text. An introduction describes the origins of the museum and the growth of its collections.