William Steiger: Transport

by Richard Vine

Includes 100 colour plates of the work of this American artist who uses iconic American imagery in a contemporary presentation

Essays by 12 art historians offer insight into Steiger's subject matter

New York-based painter William Steiger's focus is on fundamental representation of the American landscape. His subjects are industrial and recognisable - grain towers, cable cars, trains, and amusement park attractions. His graphic, distinctly schematised work is grounded in the traditions of classic American landscape painting and the machine-age Precisionism of figures like Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth.

As Richard Vine, senior editor at Art in America, puts it in his introductory essay, Steiger has "moved inexorably toward an ever more elegiac representation. [Images] such as an outmoded water tower set against blank sky and an extinct industrial building seek to commemorate...the passing away not simply of a lifestyle or one individual consciousness but of all creatures. Subdued, decorous, yet unblinking, such works are visual odes on mortality."

Steiger received an MFA in painting from Yale University. His works have been shown around the world and are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

180 pages, Hardcover

First published September 16, 2011

About the author

Richard Vines was a British food critic. He was the chief food critic for Bloomberg News.