Callum Innes is one of the few artists working in abstraction to include watercolour as a major part of his practice. As with many painters, his explorations in this medium form a parallel body of work, an activity taken on as a kind of 'break' from his other painting, with different circumstances, conditions and intentions. Innes has been making watercolours for more than 25 years. He began to explore the medium when he was asked to do a show at the Kunsthaus, in Zurich. He says: "I blithely said yes to an exhibition without ever having made a watercolour before. It caused a lot of stress at the time, but I gradually developed a way of working with paper and pigment. I am still making watercolours, although they have changed over the years, and now I realise that they inform the oil paintings more and more. When you place two pigments together, either opposite or complementary, and then dissolve them in water you achieve a completely new colour which only reveals itself on the paper. I am often surprised and disappointed in the same hour. "It has been a couple of years since I last spent time with watercolours. When lockdown occurred, in March 2020, I was setting up a new studio, overlooking a fjord in Oslo. It was unfamiliar, and I had no reference to earlier works as I do in Edinburgh. I started to work on a new watercolour series, focusing on them for a week at a time, always starting the day with a black and white one, just to get my hand in ... the black and white ones are the most elusive. "This new body of 50 watercolours feels stronger and more luminous than previous ones. I have kept them sequential in the book, to show how each work informs the next and so on."

I carry my landscapes around with me focuses on American abstract artist Joan Mitchell's large-scale multipanel works from the 1960s through the 1990s. Mitchell's exploration of the possibilities afforded by combining two to five large canvases allowed her to simultaneously create continuity and rupture, while opening up a panoramic expanse referencing landscapes or the memory of landscapes. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career. Her inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Art critic John Yau lauded her paintings as "one of the towering achievements of the postwar period." Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner New York in 2019, this book offers a unique opportunity to explore the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative area of Mitchell's extensive body of work. It not only features reproductions of each painting in this selection as a whole, but also numerous details that allow an intimate understanding of the surface texture and brushwork. In the complementing essays, Suzanne Hudson examines boundaries, borders, and edges in Mitchell's multipanel paintings, beginning with her first work of this kind, The Bridge (1956), considering them as both physical and conceptual objects; Robert Slifkin discusses the dynamics of repetition and energy in the artist's paintings, in relation to works by Monet and Willem de Kooning, among others.

The essential introduction to the life and work of Jackson Pollock, the pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter.

Pollock and After: The Critical Debate brings together key writings on debates about Abstract Expressionism and Modernist art history. It is an essential resource for understanding post-war American art and culture. The second edition has been fully revised and updated in response to new critical approaches to post-war American art. It includes nine new articles and a substantial overview essay by Francis Frascina.
Articles are grouped into three parts, each with an introduction by Francis Frascina. Part One includes two foundational articles by the influential Modernist critic, Clement Greenberg, and represents the debate about Greenberg's work, with contributions by T.J. Clark and Michael Fried. Part Two focuses on revisionist writers, who questioned established ideas about Modernist art history, examining the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War.
The third part, which is new to the volume, is devoted to recent developments of revisionist critiques. Contributors explore the work of Greenberg's contemporaries, the relationship between critical and commercial responses to Abstract Expressionism, and perceptions of cultural value in the 1940s and 1950s, and challenge assumptions about ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the construction of the 'post-war American artist'.

This is the most thorough and detailed monograph on the artwork of Raymond Jonson. He is one of many artists of the first half of the twentieth-century who demonstrate the richness and diversity of an under-appreciated period in the history of American art. Visualizing the spiritual was one of the fundamental goals of early abstract painting in the years before and during World War I. Artists turned to alternative spirituality, the occult, and mysticism, believing that the pure use of line, shape, color, light and texture could convey spiritual insight. Jonson was steadfastly dedicated to this goal for most of his career and he always believed that modernist and abstract styles were the most effective and compelling means of achieving it.

Since the early years of the 20th century, Western abstract art has fascinated, outraged and bewildered audiences. Its path to acceptance within the artistic mainstream was slow. Anna Moszynska traces the origins and evolution of abstract art, placing it in broad cultural context. She examines the pioneering work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian alongside the Russian Constructivists, the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus artists, contrasting European geometric abstraction in the 1930s and 40s with the emphasis on personal expression after the Second World War. Op, Kinetic and Minimal art of the postwar period is discussed and illustrated in detail, and new chapters bring the account up to date, exploring the crisis in abstraction of the 1980s and its revival - in paint, fabric, sculpture and installation - in recent decades. The first edition of this book, published in 1990, was acclaimed by reviewers; now in full colour and comprehensively revised, it will serve as the best introduction to abstract art for a new generation.

Cy Twombly's oeuvre featuring paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs displays a highly personal, literary character, but has undergone several profound transformations. The most decisive was the contact with Mediterranean culture caused by Twombly's with drawal from the New York art scene??????he moved to Italy in 1957. Greek gods, the Mediterranean light, Western history, literature and mythology all found their way into his art. In ever larger canvases he presents the drama of humanity as a sensuous and poetic vision of color, drawing and writing. At the occasion of Twombly's 80th birthday in 2008, our four-volume Catalogue Raisonn???? of the Paintings will be supplemented by a fifth volume covering the period 1996??????2006 and thus, among others, his famous Lepanto and Bacchus cycles.

Luigi Pericle (1916-2001) was a rare talent-a self-taught illustrator and painter, a man of letters, mystic, theosophist, and intellectual whose work and legacy eludes any categorization. Under his proper name Pericle Luigi Giovanetti he had great success as an illustrator and cartoonist in the 1950s. His cartoons were published worldwide in daily newspapers, such as the Washington Post or Herald Tribune, as well as in satirical magazines like Punch. His comic strip Max the Marmot, published in newspapers and books, was hugely popular across Europe, the United States, and Japan. In 1958, he turned to explore abstract expression through painting and ink drawing. He quickly gained international recognition as an artist and his paintings were exhibited in gallery and museum shows in Britain and Switzerland during the 1960s. Yet recognition was not what he was looking for, and he disappeared voluntarily from the art world to lead an increasingly secluded life dedicated entirely to his art and writing. His home Casa San Tomaso on the legendary Monte Verita in Ascona, in southern Switzerland, offered ideal surroundings for an artist so strongly drawn to spirituality. Luigi Pericle. Ad Astra, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the MASI Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, offers a fresh look at how the spiritual environment and tradition of Monte Verita influenced Pericle as an artist and how Asian calligraphy and Zen Buddhism were influential to his drawing practice. Moreover, the book investigates Pericle's understanding of abstraction in art and his own syncretism of modern mysticism. Text in English, German and Italian.

Active at the Bauhaus between 1920 and 1931, teaching in the bookbinding, stained glass and mural-painting workshops, Paul Klee (1879-1940) brought his expressive blend of color and line to the school--and, with the second volume in the Bauhausb cher series, beyond its walls. In his legendary Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee presents his theoretical approach to drawing using geometric shapes and lines. Evincing a desire to reunite artistic design and craft, and written in a tone that oscillates between the seeming objectivity of the diagram, the rhetoric of science and mathematics, and an abstract, quasi-mystical intuition, Klee's text expresses key aspects of the Bauhaus' pedagogy and guiding philosophies. And while Klee's method is deeply personal, in the context of the fundamentally multivocal Bauhaus, his individual approach to abstract form is typical in its idiosyncrasy. In the Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee presents his own theories about the relationships between line, form, surface, color, space and time in art in the context of the Bauhaus. The book testifies to Klee's intensive theoretical explorations of art and exemplifies how the Bauhaus masters interconnected the various realms of art and design. In the present volume, the 1953 English translation of Pedagogical Sketchbook by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy is combined with the design and physical qualities of the original German edition from 1925.

With the artist Jana Schroeder, the Kopfermann-Fuhrmann Foundation is opening an exhibition series curated by Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann, which will feature presentations with women painters of the younger generation. The individual artistic positions are each based on an outstanding idea of abstract painting in the 21st century. With regard to her works, Schroeder herself speaks of an "aesthetics of doodling". Her works are characterised by lines that sometimes seem to dissolve, then again condense into tight and finely rhythmic webs. The series of works, always conceived as a series, have a palpable physical reference to space and time, are expressions of individual gestures and movements. The catalogue shows works from the past 10 years and includes an extensive interview with the artist. Text in English and German.

Mark Rothko's iconic paintings are some of the most profound works of twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism. This collection presents fifty large-scale artworks from the American master's colour field period (1949-1970) alongside essays by seminal modern art critic and Rothko biographer Dore Ashton and SFMOMA curator of painting and sculpture Janet Bishop. Featuring illuminating details about Rothko's life, influences, and legacy, and brimming with the emotional power and expressive colour of his groundbreaking canvases, this essential volume brings the renowned artist's luminous work to light for both longtime Rothko fans and those discovering his work for the very first time.

Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized by allegories of emotion and sensation. This radical artistic adventure established new artistic means, as much as narratives. Expression became characterized by shocking juxtapositions of color, light, and line. Artists abandoned the conventions of brush and easel and played with new materials and methods of artistic gesture: commercial paints and housepainter's brushes, working on unstretched and unprimed canvases, moving the canvas to the floor, and applying paint with hands. This essential introduction spans the international breadth, conceptual depth, and seismic impact of abstract art with a thorough survey not only of the big names such as Picasso, Klee, Kline, Rothko, and Pollock, but also lesser-known figures who made equally significant contributions, including Antoni Tapies, K. O. Goetz, Ad Reinhardt, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

One of the world's preeminent Abstract Expressionists, California-born painter Sam Francis (1923-1994) first travelled to Japan in 1957, quickly established studios and residences there, and became active in a circle of avant-garde artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, and composers, including members of the nascent Gutai and Mono-ha movements. This book chronicles those connections, as well as his complex and evolving relationship with East Asian aesthetics from the 1950s through the 1990s. From the very first exhibitions Francis had in Tokyo, critics linked his evocative use of negative space with the Japanese concept of "ma", a symbolically rich interval between objects or ideas. This shared pictorial and philosophical syntax laid the foundation for a feedback loop of mutual influence that spurred frequent collaborations between the artist and his Japanese contemporaries, extending into the realms of printmaking, ceramics, music, poetry, publishing, and performance. Written by art critic and curator Richard Speer, with a foreword by Debra Burchett-Lere, executive director/president of the Sam Francis Foundation, this is the first full-length monograph to explore an important but sometimes overlooked milieu in Post-World War II art-a dialogue between Eastern and Western sensibilities that prefigured our current era of global interconnectedness and cross-cultural exchange. Lavishly illustrated with colour plates and archival images, it is an adjunct publication for the related exhibition "Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021), co-curated by Speer.

Painting and Understanding Abstract Art is a practical book on how to paint abstracts but it also explains how to approach and understand abstract art. It moves the teaching of art from a doing level of painting a certain subject in a particular medium to a thinking level of 'what am I doing when I paint?' and 'what am I trying to say in this painting?' Using practical exercises with explanatory text, John Lowry develops the thinking and doing processes together and leads the reader to a greater understanding and appreciation of this most exciting art genre. Advice on moving from figurative painting towards abstraction Tools to abstraction explained - simplifying and exaggerating; eliminating curves and straights; changing colours, lines and items ; emphasising positive and negative shapes; and using contrast Practical exercises to help develop your own style and understand the techniques of the masters Overview of the lives and times of artists involved in the stage-by-stage evolution from realism to abstraction

In 1926 22 year - old Dutchman Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) travelled to the USA on a British freighter - without papers and hidden in the machine room. The young art student eked out a living by painting houses, signs and facades, before he was able aft er eight years to dedicate himself entirely to painting. In the United States he established contacts with the art scene and forged friendships with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Clifford Still, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Today De Ko oning belongs to the outstanding painters of Abstract Expressionism and together with Jackson Pollock is regarded as a pioneer of Action Painting. This publication vividly examines De Kooning's life, marked by self - doubts, successes, new beginnings, excess es, and scandalous paintings, as well as the evolution of his artistic work. In addition, author Corinna Thierolf opens up exciting perspectives on De Kooning's work by revealing entirely new, surprising relationships with the works of fellow artists such as Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian, or Wassily Kandinsky.

Terry Frost was one of Britain's great abstract painters. His career spanned seven decades, starting with his introduction to art in a prisoner of war camp, and stretching into the twenty-first century. He drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, but most especially from poetry and from the landscapes of Cornwall, Yorkshire, the Greek islands and America. Resolutely abstract, his paintings collages and sculptures are known for their exuberance and strong colour. Joyful and celebratory, his work is also a sensitive and contemplative articulation of the way in which the artist experience the world. In this book Chris Stephens presents Frost's art within a historical context and in relation to the work of his international contemporaries.

"The journey to understand the painting is also the journey to understand Rothko, because the work is so thoroughly suffused with the man."--Christopher Rothko Mark Rothko (1903-1970), world-renowned icon of Abstract Expressionism, is rediscovered in this wholly original examination of his art and life written by his son. Synthesizing rigorous critique with personal anecdotes, Christopher, the younger of the artist's two children, offers a unique perspective on this modern master. Christopher Rothko draws on an intimate knowledge of the artworks to present eighteen essays that look closely at the paintings and explore the ways in which they foster a profound connection between viewer and artist through form, color, and scale. The prominent commissions for the Rothko Chapel in Houston and the Seagram Building murals in New York receive extended treatment, as do many of the lesser-known and underappreciated aspects of Rothko's oeuvre, including reassessments of his late dark canvases and his formidable body of works on paper. The author also discusses the artist's writings of the 1930s and 1940s, the significance of music to the artist, and our enduring struggles with visual abstraction in the contemporary era. Finally, Christopher Rothko writes movingly about his role as the artist's son, his commonalities with his father, and the terms of the relationship they forged during the writer's childhood. Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out is a thoughtful reexamination of the legendary artist, serving as a passionate introduction for readers new to his work and offering a fresh perspective to those who know it well.

In Dragging Away Lex Morgan Lancaster traces the formal and material innovations of contemporary queer and feminist artists, showing how they use abstraction as a queering tactic for social and political ends. Through a process Lancaster theorizes as a drag-dragging past aesthetics into the present and reworking them while pulling their work away from direct representation-these artists reimagine midcentury forms of abstraction and expose the violence of the tendency to reduce abstract form to a bodily sign or biographical symbolism. Lancaster outlines how the geometric enamel objects, grid paintings, vibrant color, and expansive installations of artists ranging from Ulrike Muller, Nancy Brooks Brody, and Lorna Simpson to Linda Besemer, Sheila Pepe, and Shinique Smith offer direct challenges to representational and categorical legibility. In so doing, Lancaster demonstrates that abstraction is not apolitical, neutral, or universal; it is a form of social praxis that actively contributes to queer, feminist, critical race, trans, and crip politics.

Agnes Martin's (1912-2004) celebrated grid paintings are widely acknowledged as a touchstone of postwar American art and have influenced many contemporary artists. Martin's formative years, however, have been largely overlooked. In this revelatory study of Martin's early artistic production, Christina Bryan Rosenberger demonstrates that the rapidly evolving creative processes and pictorial solutions Martin developed between 1940 and 1967 define all her subsequent art. Beginning with Martin's initiation into artistic language at the University of New Mexico and concluding with the reception of her grid paintings in New York in the early 1960s, Rosenberger offers vivid descriptions of the networks of art, artists, and information that moved between New Mexico and the creative centers of New York and California in the postwar period. She also documents Martin's exchanges with artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Georgia O'Keeffe, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, among others. Rosenberger uses original analysis of Martin's art, as well as a rich array of archival materials, to situate Martin's art within the context of a dynamic historical moment. With a lively, innovative approach informed by art history and conservation, this fluidly written book makes a substantial contribution to the history of postwar American art.

Discover the joys of painting abstracts in acrylics with experienced artist and tutor Anita Hoerskens. In this visually exciting, inspirational book, Anita teaches you about the method of abstraction, and the paints, paper and other materials you need to create stunning paintings. Chapters cover the areas of texture, collage, composition, colour, line, shape and pattern, with 55 clear and accessible projects to put your skills and ideas into practice. There are techniques to try such as impasto, using glazes, bronze gilding, linear overlays and monochrome painting. This highly practical book will build confidence in your painting and allow you to express yourself through the visual language and style of abstract painting.

The first biography of Elaine de Kooning, A Generous Vision portrays a woman whose intelligence, droll sense of humor, and generosity of spirit endeared her to friends and gave her a starring role in the close-knit world of New York artists. Her zest for adventure and freewheeling spending were as legendary as her ever-present cigarette. Flamboyant and witty in person, she was an incisive art writer who expressed maverick opinions in a deceptively casual style. As a painter, she melded Abstract Expressionism with a lifelong interest in bodily movement to capture subjects as diverse as President John F. Kennedy, basketball players, and bullfights. In her romantic life, she went her own way, always keen for male attention. But she credited her husband, Willem de Kooning, as her greatest influence; rather than being overshadowed by his fame, she worked "in his light." Nearly two decades after their separation, after finally embracing sobriety herself, she returned to his side to rescue him from severe alcoholism. Based on painstaking research and dozens of interviews, A Generous Vision brings to life a leading figure of twentieth-century art who lived a full and fascinating life on her own terms.

Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies but two particularly prominent sub-categories: action painting, exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and color field painting, made most famous by Rothko. Throughout, Abstract Expressionists strove to convey emotions and ideas through the making of marks, through forms, textures, shades, and the particular quality of brushstrokes. The movement favored large-scale canvases, and embraced the role of accident or chance. With featured works from 20 key Abstract Expressionist artists, this book introduces the movement which shifted the center of art gravity from Paris to New York and remains for many the golden moment of American art. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art History series features: approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions a detailed, illustrated introduction a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a two-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

A book of heroic dimensions, this is the first full-length biography of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century--a man as fascinating, difficult, and compelling as the paintings he produced. Drawing on exclusive access to Mark Rothko's personal papers and over one hundred interviews with artists, patrons, and dealers, James Breslin tells the story of a life in art--the personal costs and professional triumphs, the convergence of genius and ego, the clash of culture and commerce. Breslin offers us not only an enticing look at Rothko as a person, but delivers a lush, in-depth portrait of the New York art scene of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s--the world of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Klein, which would influence artists for generations to come.
"In Breslin, Rothko has the ideal biographer--thorough but never tedious, a good storyteller with an ear for the spoken word, fond but not fawning, and possessed of a most rare ability to comment on non-representational art without sounding preposterous."--Robert Kiely, "Boston Book Review"
"Breslin impressively recreates Mark Rothko's troubled nature, his tormented life, and his disturbing canvases. . . . The artist's paintings become almost tangible within Breslin's pages, and Rothko himself emerges as an alarming physical force."--Robert Warde, "Hungry Mind Review"
"This remains beyond question the finest biography so far devoted to an artist of the New York School."-Arthur C. Danto, "Boston Sunday Globe"
"Clearly written, full of intelligent insights, and thorough."--Hayden Herrera, "Art in America"
"Breslin spent seven years working on this book, and he has definitely done his homework."-Nancy M. Barnes, "Boston Phoenix"
"He's made the tragedy of his subject's life the more poignant."--Eric Gibson, "The New Criterion"
"Mr. Breslin's book is, in my opinion, the best life of an American painter that has yet been written . . . a biographical classic. It is painstakingly researched, fluently written and unfailingly intelligent in tracing the tragic course of its subject's tormented character."--Hilton Kramer, "New York Times Book Review," front page review
James E. B. Breslin (1936-1996) was professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of "From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965" and "William Carlos Williams: An American Artist."