American art has been essential to The Phillips Collection since its founding by Duncan Phillips in 1921. Phillips’s collecting interests were decidedly against the grain: he acquired the work of living American artists when it was unpopular to do so and promoted diversity, as seen in works by self-taught artists, artists of color, and naturalized Americans, resulting in a rich assembly of independent-minded artists, including Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove,  and Georgia O’Keeffe. The Phillips Collection’s superb collection of American art, acquired over half a century, is presented here for the first time in a comprehensive overview, featuring 160 works from heroes of the late 19th century—such as William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer, who set the course for modern art in America—to abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, whose efforts to create a new visual language following World War II brought a new global significance to American art. A perennial guide to this important collection, the book includes scholarly essays on Phillips and on the Rothko Room, introductions to key groups of works in the collection, and more than one hundred biographies of the most influential artists represented.