Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience


Book Description

Irving Sandler, the preeminent chronicler of postwar American art, returns to the subject with this new study drawing fresh conclusions about Abstract Expressionism that he has arrived at since his first publication of the movement 1970.







Women of Abstract Expressionism


Book Description

This publication contains a survey of female abstract expressionist artists, revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work and the movement as a whole as well as highlighting the lack of critical attention they have received to date.




Abstract Art


Book Description

A leading authority on the subject presents a radically new approach to the understanding of abstract art, in this richly illustrated and persuasive history. In his fresh take on abstract art, noted art historian Pepe Karmel chronicles the movement from a global perspective, while embedding abstraction in a recognizable reality. Moving beyond the canonical terrain of abstract art, the author demonstrates how artists from around the world have used abstract imagery to express social, cultural, and spiritual experience. Karmel builds this fresh approach to abstract art around five inclusive themes: body, landscape, cosmology, architecture, and man-made signs and patterns. In the process, this history develops a series of narratives that go far beyond the established figures and movements traditionally associated with abstract art. Each narrative is complemented by a number of featured abstract works, arranged in thought-provoking pairings with accompanying extended captions that provide an in-depth analysis. This wide-ranging examination incorporates work from Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America, as well as Europe and North America, through artists ranging from Wu Guanzhong, Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, to Hilma af Klint, and Odili Donald Odita. Breaking new ground, Karmel has forged a new history of this key art movement.




How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art


Book Description

"A provocative interpretation of the political and cultural history of the early cold war years. . . . By insisting that art, even art of the avant-garde, is part of the general culture, not autonomous or above it, he forces us to think differently not only about art and art history but about society itself."—New York Times Book Review




Abstract Expressionism


Book Description

Abstract Expressionist works on paper from the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art are presented in this volume, which documents the wealth of the Museum's holdings in that area. Many of them are published here for the first time, and several are recent additions to the collection. All are illustrated in full-page color reproductions that show the nuances of each work in great detail. The Abstract Expressionists are best known for their paintings and sculptures, and virtually all of the many publications about these artists concentrate on those large-scale works. This unique catalogue deals exclusively with their smaller, more intimate works on paper, providing many new insights about the routes that led to the Abstract Expressionists' innovative artistic accomplishments. The nineteen artists included are William Baziotes, James Brooks, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Gerome Kamrowski, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodore Roszak, Mark Rothko, Anne Ryan, David Smith, Theodoros Stamos, and Mark Tobey. Each of them is discussed in a separate essay, which encompasses information about the artist's background and development, commentary about the importance of drawing in his or her oeuvre, and an analysis of each work in the selection. Also included in the essays is technical information about a number of the individual works that enhances understanding of the variety and originality of these artists' media and techniques.




Abstract Expressionism For Beginners


Book Description

Abstract Expressionism was the defining movement in American art during the years following World War II, making New York City the center of the international art scene. But what the heck did it mean! The drips, the spills, the splashes, the blotches of color, the wild spontaneous energy—signifying what? Abstract Expressionism For Beginners will not only help you understand, but also appreciate the art of some of the most iconic figures in modern art—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and others. Explore their lives and artistic roots, the heady world of Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s, the influence of jazz, the voices of critics, and the enduring legacy of a uniquely inspired group of artists.




Meanings of Abstract Art


Book Description

"This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature. Traditional picturing and sculpture are based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation "of". Abstract works, in contrast, adopt alternative modes of visual representation, or break down and reconfigure the mimetic conventions of pictorial art and sculpture. Obviously this means that abstract art takes many different forms. However, this diversity should not mask some key structural features; these center on two basic relations to nature (understanding nature in the broadest sense to comprise the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs). The first involves abstracting from nature, to give selected aspects of it a new and extremely unfamiliar appearance. The second involves abstract art as the affirmation of a relatively unconstrained natural creativity that issues in new, autonomous forms that are not constrained by mimetic conventions. (Such creativity is often attributed to the power of the unconscious.)The book contains three categories of essays: 1) those on classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction), 2) those on post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments), and 3) those of a broader art historical and philosophical scope"--Provided by publisher.




Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925


Book Description

This book explores the development of abstraction from the moment of its declaration around 1912 to its establishment as the foundation of avant-garde practice in the mid-1920s. The book brings together many of the most influential works in abstractions early history to draw a cross-media portrait of this watershed moment in which traditional art was reinvented in a wholesale way. Works are presented in groups that serve as case studies, each engaging a key topic in abstractions first years: an artist, a movement, an exhibition or thematic concern. Key focal points include Vasily Kandinskys ambitious Compositions V, VI and VII; a selection of Piet Mondrians work that offers a distilled narrative of his trajectory to Neo-plasticism; and all the extant Suprematist pictures that Kazimir Malevich showed in the landmark 0.10 exhibition in 1915.0Exhibition: MoMA, New York, USA (23.12.2012-15.4.2013).