Various Authors

Sotheby's & Abbeville Capsule Libraries present a curated selection of Abbeville Press books from the personal archive of publisher Bob Abrams, in conjunction with Art without Boundaries: The Abrams Family Collection.

The American Masters Collection is a set of 6 books on American art, including the following titles:

• Lichtenstein.
• Lawrence Alloway (English).
• New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.
• First edition.
• 128 pages.

• Jackson Pollock.
• Elizabeth Frank (American).
• New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.
• First edition.
• 128 pages.

• George Segal.
• Phyllis Tuchman (American).
• New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.
• First edition.
• 128 pages.

• Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move Into Mainstream 1970-85.
• Randy Rosen and Catherine Coleman Brawer.
• New York: Abbeville Press, 1989.
• First edition.
• 300 pages.

• Isamu Noguchi.
• Bruce Altshuler (American).
• New York: Abbeville Press, 1994.
• First edition.
• 127 pages.

• Audubon's Birds of America: The Baby Elephant Folio.
• Edited by Roger Tory Peterson and Virginia Marie Peterson.
• New York: Abbeville Press, 2023.
• 435 color plates by John Ames.
• 696 pages.

Abbeville Press’ Modern Masters series was invented to meet the needs of students and art lovers with a series of affordable monographs on modern and contemporary artists. This type of affordable, standardized series has a long history in art book publishing (for example, Thames & Hudson’s World of Art or the Phaidon Colour Library). Abbeville’s Modern Masters series was distinguished by its unusually high-quality texts from well-known critics and historians, as well as the unusually full apparatus in each volume, which included statements by the artist and notes on technique. Nancy Grubb served as series editor, who worked at Abbeville from the early 1980s to 2000 and had strong contacts with the world of academic art history.

Two other texts have been included in this capsule library: Audubon’s Birds of America Baby Elephant Folio and Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream 1970-1985. The Audubon book reproduces all 435 of the brilliant hand-colored engravings derived from the original plates of the rare Double Elephant Folio (lot 530), which was a personal passion project and career highlight for Bob Abrams. Making Their Mark was one of the first survey exhibitions to bring to the forefront the wide range of female artistic production, of which Bob Abrams was a fierce champion.