From Jackson Pollock to Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol, the influence of American painters in the history of modern art is well-known and well-documented. However, such artists' work did not develop spontaneously after WWII, nor was it simply transplanted from Europe. There is a lengthier, more nuanced history of modernism's growth in relation to American artists, professors, patrons, and collectors that may be tracked through the first half of the twentieth century.
 
William C. Agee's analysis includes artists working in the first half of the century, such as Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, and John Marin, as well as a discussion of the continuity between this period and the artists who went on to become celebrated internationally, such as Arshile Gorky, Edward Hopper, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Morris Louis, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Donald Judd.
 
Agee also incorporates the work of several European artists who became pivotal in the development of modern American art. Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, and Piet Mondrian, as well as Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, became influential teachers (and eventually American citizens), profoundly influencing the likes of Stuart Davis and many others who had previously not been compared or connected to the European art canon.
 
This remarkable new account of American modernism is a must-read for students and scholars of art, as well as all those interested in modernism and its wider cultural history. It is a radical re-evaluation of art history from the early twentieth century through the late 1960s.