Legacy The Emily Fisher Landau Collection Dana Miller, Adam D. Weinberg, Donna M. De Salvo

In May 2010, New York philanthropist Emily Fisher Landau promised 370 works by more than 85 artists to the Whitney Museum of American Art. This handsome volume highlights each of the artists in the gift, including Carl Andre, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Ed Ruscha, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, and other seminal figures. Much more than simply a record of the pledge, Legacy: "The Emily Fisher Landau Collection" showcases the best of the art made in the United States during the past five decades. Informative entries, written by the museum's curators and other scholars, cover all works in the gift and are accompanied by 125 stunning colour plates. Also included are an essay on the nature of collecting by Donna De Salvo and a full-colour checklist of the entire gift.

Dana Miller is Curator of the Permanent Collection, Adam D. Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Director, and Donna De Salvo is Chief Curator and Associate Director for Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

"Miller has written an extravaganza of a book that could only have been produced by a remarkably adroit mind functioning at the very topmost top of its form. If he has lost nearly as much cortical circuitry as he asserts, there is no evidence of it here....Even as he is claiming the onrush of debility, the graceful sound of his prose and its sly, wry insights betray him with an abundance of wit, wisdom, and erudition. I suspect that he wants it both ways: 'See how I'm losing it, but see also how brilliant I continue to be.' Well, he most emphatically cannot have it both ways, so he'd better settle on the brilliant."--Sherwin Nuland, "The New Republic"--Sherwin Nuland"The New Republic" (06/25/2012)

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