American Paintings at the High Museum of Art

Atlanta's High Museum of Art boasts strong paintings by early 20th-century artists like Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Charles Burchfield and William Glackens. Offering an abundance of riches, this catalogue proceeds from colonial portraitist John Singleton Copley to Alice Schille's exuberantly colorful 1930 watercolor of an Ohio factory. Among the treasures reproduced in 78 color plates with wonderfully germane facing-page mini-essays are Henry Ossawa Tanner's Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1929-1930), which fuses French symbolism with biblical imagery; Martin Johnson Heade's exotic, erotically charged Two Hummingbirds with an Orchid (1875); Henry Inman's portraits of Native Americans made in the 1830s; and works by Maurice Prendergast, Robert Henri, Albert Bierstadt, John Twachtman and Frederick Carl Frieseke. Larson and Hoopes are guest curators; Peet teaches women's studies at Monterey Peninsula College in California. (Dec.)