Phoenix Art Museum: Collection Highlights

by Michael K. Komanecky

The Phoenix Art Museum is one of the premier cultural institutions of the Southwest. This illustrated volume, which presents much new scholarship by the Museum's curators, is the first to highlight its collections.
The finest holdings of the Museum's six major departments are represented. Among treasures from the Department of American and Western American Art are canvases by Gilbert Stuart and Mary Cassatt, along with major works on Western themes by Thomas Moran, Maxfield Parrish, and John Mix Stanley. The collection of Chinese paintings and decorative arts is world famous, and the extensive holdings of the Asian Art Department also include noteworthy examples from Japan, Tibet, and India. The European Art Department has selected paintings by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Edouard Vuillard from among its more than 1,000 works; important decorative-arts objects, including an Italian Renaissance altarpiece and a 1603 German collector's cabinet, are also featured.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2002

Reviews

[Gerald Thomson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very high-level view at the gem that is the Phoenix Art Museum. With beautiful photographs of the most popular pieces by Jean-Leon Gerome, Claude-Oscar Monet, Cornelia Parker, and hundreds more, this book is a great reminder (or introduction) of what the museum has in store for visitors. The text, unfortunately, does not go very deep in the analysis of the art, an obvious choice by the editor, and this is unfortunate. The more one knows about a piece of art the more one is able to experience it fully. Still, a luscious visual volume.