“An Audience of Artists goes a long way toward finally clarifying the networks of contacts both within specific avant-garde circles in America and among them. It helps us understand what Duchamp thought of the painters who came to fame toward the end of his career—and how his reactions to these artists clarified his own artistic identity. Finally, this book fills a gap in the scholarship by placing Abstract Expressionism in relationship to the postwar strategies of Dada, rather than in terms of Surrealism and the unconscious. Craft’s study of Motherwell’s Dada anthology is especially enlightening as a microcosm of all varieties of interchange.”

Janine Mileaf, Swarthmore College

“An Audience of Artists is elegantly written and deeply pondered, with an analytical sophistication and emotional sensitivity that gets under the skin of cultural history and the forces that change art. Catherine Craft knows how history feels. She presents documentation with an interpretive skill that causes a reader to sense past events as if they were just occurring. Craft’s visual description is no less convincingly vivid. It is exciting to read this innovative study. I found myself rereading it, not only for edification but for the intellectual pleasure of it.”

Richard Shiff, University of Texas at Austin

 “This well-written, engaging book . . . [focuses] on the circumstances and relationships that fostered [neo-Dada’s] development.”

Choice

 “Craft makes the rather compelling argument that through its reception of Dada, the New York School was able to map its own position within a previously populated modernist terrain. . . . Such a claim offers a valuable counter to the narratives of American modernism as holed up in the privacy of its own thoughts and reproductive of post-war narratives of American hegemony and individualism.”

Art History

“[Craft’s] performance is engagingly instructive and, at its most compelling moments, full of compassionate insight.”

Art in America