Modern Masters: American Abstraction at Midcentury features more than thirty artists who transformed American art in the years after World War II. More than seventy full-color illustrations present American postwar painting and sculpture in terms of the personal lives of the artists.<BR>Virginia Mecklenburg chronicles the emergence of postwar abstraction, and abstract expressionism in particular, from the mid-1940s through its triumph in the late 1950s. She highlights the dealers - the connecting links between artists, collectors, and the press - as well as major critics, who interpreted the new abstraction for an initially skeptic public. Accounts of museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad detail this complex, sometimes contradictory story from its beginning to the rise of modern art and minimalism in the 1960s.