Rebels on Eighth Street

Book excerpt: A champion of artists, the first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a pivotal influence on the way American art has been perceived and received, Juliana Force was a creative and flamboyant personality who dominated the New York art world for decades. Yet her life, an American success story of the most classic type, has never been chronicled. In this authoritative biography, Avis Berman focuses long-overdue attention on a dynamic woman who claimed as her raison d'être the very development of American art.