>
> --- Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net> wrote:
>> Also, at Modern Times saw a nice new coffeetable
>> book from Yale Univ.
>> Press, if memory serves, on American Communism and
>> Art from the 30's and
>> 40's.
>
> Michael, was that a coffeetable book OR was that a
> beside book? I got to think that looking at a hundred
> pages of romantacized workers and smokestacks
> would be a cure for anybody's insomnia.
I was given a copy for Christmas by my Scottish stepfather-in-law, and it looks very well done. It's a serious book by a serious person (Andrew Hemingway, reader in the History of Art at University College, London), it's called "Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956".
I haven't settled down to make my way through it, but I'm looking forward to it, and I suspect it would function well as a coffee-table book or a bedside book for the LOBster crowd: there are illustrations on most of the book's 282 pages of the main text, many in colour reproductions, and the narrative isn't stuffy or jargon-filled.
But then I've always had a soft spot for this kind of American art: my wife and I went up the Coit Tower in San Francisco on our wedding day two years ago to get some pictures of the two of us in front of the murals there.
Chris