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

The essential five-volume resource on the painting and sculpture of one of the world's foremost contemporary artists For more than 60 years, Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has remained a singular figure in contemporary art. His most widely influential work-depictions of everyday objects and signs such as flags, targets, flashlights, and lightbulbs-helped change the face of the art world in the 1950s by introducing subject matter that stood in contrast to the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism. In subsequent decades, Johns's art has increasingly engaged issues of memory and mortality, often incorporating references to admired artistic predecessors. This definitive 5-volume catalogue raisonne documents the entire body of painting and sculpture made by Johns from 1954 through 2014, encompassing 355 paintings and 86 sculptures. Each work is illustrated with a full-page reproduction, nearly all of which were commissioned expressly for this publication. A decade of research underpins the project, with thorough documentation of each object and an overarching monograph that represents the most comprehensive study of the artist's work to date. All facets of the catalogue reflect the input of the artist, who worked closely with the author at all stages.

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.

A great way to learn about a truly unique artist, Jackson Pollock. The Jackson Pollock Artist Box is designed to introduce you to Pollock the person and Pollock the artist, and to provide projects that will put you in touch with his creative process. Using his techniques, you can invent your own images and arrive at your own statement.

An alternative genealogy of abstract art, featuring the crucial role of 19th-century German literature in shaping it aesthetically, culturally, and socially. Once upon a time (or more specifically, in 1911!) there was an artist named Wassily Kandinsky who created the world's first abstract artwork and forever altered the course of art history - or so the traditional story goes. A good story, but not the full story. The Myth of Abstraction reveals that abstract art was envisioned long before Kandinsky, in the pages of nineteenth-century German literature. It originated from the written word, described by German writers who portrayed in language what did not yet exist as art. Yet if writers were already writing about abstract art, why were painters not painting it? To solve the riddle, this book features the work of three canonical nineteenth-century authors - Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Gottfried Keller - who imagine, theorize, and describe abstract art in their literary writing, sometimes warning about the revolution it will cause not just in art, but in all aspects of social life. Through close readings of their textual images and visual analyses of actual paintings, Andrea Meyertholen shows how these writers anticipated the twentieth-century birth of abstract art by establishing the necessary conditions for its production, reception, and consumption. The first study to bring these early descriptions of abstraction together and investigate their significance, The Myth of Abstraction writes an alternative genealogy featuring the crucial role of literature in shaping abstract art in aesthetic, cultural, and social terms.

Following World War II, Western painting went in completely new directions. A young generation of artists turned their backs on the dominant styles of the interwar period: Instead of figurative representation or geometric abstraction, painters in the orbit of Abstract Expressionism in the US and Art Informel in Western Europe pursued a radically impulsive approach to form, color, and material. As an expression of individual freedom, the spontaneous artistic gesture gained symbolic significance. Large-scale color-field compositions created a meditative space for ruminating the fundamental questions of human existence. The exhibition and catalogue examine the two sister movements against the background of a vibrant transatlantic exchange, from the 1940s through to the end of the Cold War. This lavishly illustrated volume brings together works by more than 50 artists, amongst them Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Helen Frankenthaler, K. O. Goetz, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Georges Mathieu, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Judit Reigl, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, and Jack Tworkov.

"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.

"I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom," - Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970) said of his paintings. "If you are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point." Throughout his career, Rothko was concerned with what other people experienced when they looked at his canvases. As his work shifted from figurative imagery to luminous fields of colour, his concern expanded to the setting in which his paintings were exhibited. In a series of analytic, personal, and even poetic essays by contemporary scholars, this volume explains how Rothko's most compelling creations elicit such profound and varied responses. This volume also reproduces, for the first time, Rothko's "Scribble Book," in which he jotted down his ideas on teaching art to children, and a sketchbook, both dating to the early years of the artist's career. "Seeing Rothko" includes essays by David Antin, Dore Ashton, Thomas Crow, John Elderfield, Briony Fer, Charles Harrison, Miguel Lopez-Remiro, Sarah Rich, and Jeffrey Weiss, an introduction by Glenn Phillips, and a bibliography of Rothko's own writings.

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator a greater role than ever before in the realization of the artwork. The first book to explore this phenomenon on an international scale, Abstraction in Reverse traces the movement as it evolved across South America and parts of Europe. Alexander Alberro demonstrates that artists such as Tomas Maldonado, Jesus Soto, Julio Le Parc, and Lygia Clark, in breaking with the core tenets of the form of abstract art known as Concrete art, redefined the role of both the artist and the spectator. Instead of manufacturing autonomous artworks prior to the act of viewing, these artists presented a range of projects that required the spectator in order to be complete. Importantly, as Alberro shows, these artists set aside regionalist art in favor of a modernist approach that transcended the traditions of any nation-state. Along the way, the artists fundamentally altered the concept of the subject and of how art should address its audience, a revolutionary development with parallels in the greater art world.

This publication is the first to focus solely on the abstract strategies and processes contained in Gerhard Richter's body of work. In the early 1960s, the artist began to call painting into question, an exploration that continues to occupy him to this day. In the 1970s, he responded to the rejection of painting by creating a series of monochrome works in gray. Moreover, he viewed the colour gray as a means of addressing political themes without depicting them in an idealized manner. In his Inpainting series of the 1970s, Richter made brushstrokes and the application of paint his subject. In other works, he photographed small details from his palette and transferred them onto large canvases in a photorealistic manner. In his colour charts, he subjected painting to an objective process by leaving the arrangement of the colours to chance. Since 1976, Richter has created a series of abstract works by applying paint with a brush, scraper, and palette knife, alternating between conscious decision-making and random processes.

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

Bonalumi has overcome the two-dimensionality of painting through the technique of 'extroflexion', which transformed the canvas into a sculpture. The volume accompanies the first great anthological exhibition dedicated to Agostino Bonalumi (1935-2013) in the city of Milan, a few years after his death. From the beginnings with Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, through the sixties in contact with major European groups until the recent international rediscovery, the volume documents the multi-faceted and at the same time rigorous activity of one of the greatest interpreters of abstractionism in the world, who managed to overcome the two-dimensionality of painting through works on canvas that are transformed into sculpture, thanks to the technique of 'extroflexion'. The volume, with texts by Marco Meneguzzo and Philip Rylands, is complete with an anthology of writings about the artist and bio-bibliographical sections.

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.

Arthur Dove, often credited as America's first abstract painter, created dynamic and evocative images inspired by his surroundings, from the farmland of upstate New York to the north shore of Long Island. But his interests did not stop with nature. Challenging earlier accounts that view him as simply a landscape painter, Arthur Dove: Always Connect reveals for the first time the artist's intense engagement with language, the nature of social interaction, and scientific and technological advances. Rachael Z. DeLue rejects the traditional assumption that Dove can only be understood in terms of his nature paintings and association with photographer and gallery director Alfred Stieglitz and his circle. Instead, she uncovers deep and complex connections between Dove's work and his world, including avant-garde literature, popular music, machine culture, meteorology, mathematics, aviation, and World War II, just to name a few. Arthur Dove also offers the first sustained account of Dove's Dadaesque multimedia projects and the first explorations of his animal imagery and the role of humor in his art. Beautifully illustrated with works from all periods of Dove's career, this book presents an unprecedented vision of one of America's most innovative and captivating artists-and reimagines how the story of modern art in the United States might be told.

This is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of a post-war masterpiece and its restoration. In many ways, Mural, Jackson Pollock's (1912-1956) first large-scale painting represents the birth of his legend. The controversial artist's creation of this painting has been recounted in dozens of books and dramatized in the Oscar-winning Pollock. Rumours about its creation abound - such as it being painted in one alcohol-fuelled night and at first didn't fit the intended space. But never in doubt was that it was pivotal, not only for Pollock but for the Abstract Expressionists who would follow his radical conception of art - "no limits, just edges." Mural, painted in 1943, was Pollock's first major commission. It was made for the entrance hall of the Manhattan duplex of Peggy Guggenheim who donated it to the University of Iowa in the 1950s where it stayed until its 2012 arrival for conservation and study at the Getty Center. This book unveils the findings of that examination providing a more complete picture of Pollock's process than ever before and includes an essay by eminent Pollock scholar Ellen Landau and an introduction by comedian Steve Martin.

Lightstream represents Nigel Grierson's most recent foray into photographic abstraction as he makes long exposures of figures beside the light of the ocean. Taking the maxim from Dieter Appelt "A snapshot steals life that it cannot return. A long exposure (creates) a form that never existed", Grierson makes beautiful images, which on the surface might appear to owe as much to the medium of painting as they do to photography. However, it is important to him that these are un-manipulated images straight from the camera: "From the outset, my work has been largely about 'photographic seeing' as I'm fascinated by what Garry Winogrand so simply described as 'how something looks when photographed'. Hence, a sense of discovery within the work itself is very important to me; finding something new that I didn't already know. There's a huge element of 'chance, and the embrace of the happy accident within this approach, which is a sort of photographic equivalent of action painting. I'm often more interested in what something suggests rather than what it actually is, each image becoming a starting point for our imagination as it edges towards abstraction". Yet what is unique about photography is that it always keeps something of the original subject. So there's a dynamic duality, a dramatic to and fro in the viewer's mind, between what it is and what it suggests. The marks and traces created by the moving light, at times have a simplicity like a child's drawings. On occasion, the residue of a human figure might be reduced to little more than their posture or demeanor, which then seems more significant than ever, a sort of essence, whether that be elusive or illusive.

"Marialuisa Tadei succeeds in giving the mystery of life abstract form, implying that it trascends the nature in which it ordinarily manifests itself suggesting that it is unwordly - beyond space and time - like God's creative wisdom." - Donald Kuspit Tadei's sculptures encourage the awareness of a vital and universal spirituality, leaving the mind free to find its sense of immortality. This monograph dedicated to the artist showcases her works, characterised by her bold use of colour and materials, including mosaic, glass, bronze and feathers, and by the lyrical and spiritual qualities of her artistic language.

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.

With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the attention of the international art world turned from Paris to New York. Dore Ashton captures the vitality of the cultural milieu in which the New York School artists worked and argued and critiqued each other's work from the 1930s to the 1950s. Working from unsifted archives, from contemporary newspapers and books, and from extensive conversations with the men and women who participated in the rise of the New York School, Ashton provides a rich cultural and intellectual history of this period. In examining the complex sources of this important movement--from the WPA program of the 1930s and the influx of European ideas to the recognition in the 1950s of American painting on an international scale--she conveys the concerns of an extraordinary group of artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and many others. Rare documentary photographs illustrate Ashton's classic appraisal of the New York School scene.

Toward the middle of the 1950s, abstract art became a dominant trend in the Latin American cultural scene. Many artists incorporated elements of abstraction into their rigorous artistic vocabularies, while at the same time, the representation of geometric lines and structures filtered into everyday life, appearing in textiles, posters, murals, and landscapes. The translation of a field-changing Spanish-language book, Abstract Crossings analyzes the relationship between, on the one hand, the emergence of abstract proposals in avant-garde groups and, on the other, the institutionalization and newfound hegemony of abstract poetics as part of Latin America's imaginary of modernization. A profusion of mid-century artistic institutional exchanges between Argentina and Brazil makes a study of the trajectories of abstraction in these two countries particularly valuable. Examining the work of artists such as Max Bill, Lygia Clark, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Tomas Maldonado, author Maria Amalia Garcia rewrites the artistic history of the period and proposes a novel reading of the cultural dialogue between Argentina and Brazil. This is the first book in the new Studies on Latin American Art series, supported by a gift from the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

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.

A compelling look at Jackson Pollock's vibrant, quintessentially American art and the turbulent life that gave rise to it Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) not only put American art on the map with his famous "drip paintings," he also served as an inspiration for the character of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire-the role that made Marlon Brando famous. Like Brando, Pollock became an icon of rebellion in 1950s America, and the brooding, defiant persona captured in photographs of the artist contributed to his celebrity almost as much as his notorious paintings did. In the years since his death in a drunken car crash, Pollock's hold on the public imagination has only increased. He has become an enduring symbol of the tormented artist-our American van Gogh. In this highly engaging book, Evelyn Toynton examines Pollock's itinerant and poverty-stricken childhood in the West, his encounters with contemporary art in Depression-era New York, and his years in the run-down Long Island fishing village that, ironically, was transformed into a fashionable resort by his presence. Placing the artist in the context of his time, Toynton also illuminates the fierce controversies that swirled around his work and that continue to do so. Pollock's paintings captured the sense of freedom and infinite possibility unique to the American experience, and his life was both an American rags-to-riches story and a darker tale of the price paid for celebrity, American style.

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.