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.

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.

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).

Often referred to as the last Surrealist and first Abstract Expressionist, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) appears as an interstice within art history's linear progression. Gorky embraced dream imagery in the tradition of the Surrealists, used all-over patterning before Jackson Pollock, promoted disembodied color before Mark Rothko, exploited the physicality of paint before Willem de Kooning, and anticipated stain painting. His life--he escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and struggled as an immigrant artist in New York in the 1930s and 1940s--and his tumultuous personal relationships have cast the artist as a tragic figure and often overshadowed the genius of his art.

Rethinking Arshile Gorky is an examination of the artist and his work based on themes of displacement, self-fashioning, trauma, and memory. By applying a multitude of techniques, including psychoanalytic, semiotic, and constructivist analyses, to explain and demythologize the artist, Kim Theriault offers a contemporary critique of both the way we construct the idea of the "artist" in modern society and the manner in which Arshile Gorky and his art have historically been addressed.

Thorvald Hellesen (1888-1937) was a Norwegian avant-garde artist who lived and worked in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. He and his wife, the French artist Helene Perdriat, were part of a circle of artists that included Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and many others. In his short yet intense life, Thorvald Hellesen created an impressive unique oeuvre, oriented on Modernism, consisting of oil paintings, watercolours, gouaches, drawings, design projects, and textiles. Nevertheless, even in Norway he is only known to a few. With this publication the authors Dag Blakkisrud, Matthew Drutt, and Hilde Morch have created a written portrait of Hellesen. In addition to classifying him within the history of art, they try to find explanations as to why his artistic practice is only now being considered important and interesting for Norwegian and international art history. Text in Norwegian.

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.

When Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was exhibited in 1945, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) instantly became the most controversial painter in the country. By the end of his life, his status as one of the giants of modern art was established, as was his reputation for hard drinking, heavy gambling and sado-masochistic homosexuality. Andrew Brighton casts fresh light on Bacon's formation as an artist in gay and aristocratic bohemian London circles. He locates Bacon at the core of contesting ideas and values, while firmly grounding his reading of Bacon's work in an understanding of his working methods and technique. Penetrating the seeming horror of Bacon's painting, this book reveals the ideas, the beliefs and the life that formed one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century.

In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity-a new experience and idea of self. In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping "primitive" and unconscious components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors-including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness-that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated. According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity, a feature that helps to account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions alike.

Hans Hofmann, a representative of Abstract Expressionism and American Modernism during the 20th century with European roots, had a fundamental influence as a teacher on the development of modern art in America. His brightly coloured paintings, watercolours and drawings can now be discovered in a European retrospective. From 1904 until 1914, the painter Hans Hofmann (1880 - 1966), who was a friend of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, the Fauves and Robert and Sonia Delaunay, witnessed and absorbed the new art in Paris, the centre of European art. In his art school, founded in Munich in 1915, he became a mediator of French modernism and achieved international fame as an art teacher. In 1932 he emigrated to the United States and two years later opened the Han s Hofmann School of Fine Arts in New York. He influenced a new generation of American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler and Barnett Newman.

Otto Fried was born in Koblenz in 1922. Due to the emerging anti-Semitism in Germany, his family sent him to the United States, where he arrived in Portland, Oregon, United States in 1936. In 1943 he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was deployed to various theatres of war in India, China and Burma. Upon his return, he enrolled in the Art and Architecture Department at the University of Oregon in 1947. At the end of 1949 he travelled to France to work with Fernand Leger, in whose studio he worked for two years. In 1951 he received his first solo exhibition in the American Library in Paris. Works by him were shown in New York as early as 1952. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, bought a monotype for the permanent collection in 1960. The exhibition catalogue offers an overview on Otto Fried's career: works from the early days (1950s), which are presented with a few oil paintings and almost cubist-like drawings, form the foundation of an almost exclusively abstract visual language that the artist developed later. Compositions based primarily on cosmic disks and circles, of which Fried formulates numerous variations that are very lively in colour. This creates interweaving of depth and space, of a mostly melodic sound, which he concentrates in the center of the picture and allows it to subside towards the edges. Some sculptures expand the view of his work, which is multifaceted and varied to the present day. Text in English and German.

"Robert Motherwell was not just a great painter, he was a brilliant thinker. As the founding editor of "The Documents of Twentieth-Century of Art," he decisively shaped our understanding of modernism. This new and expanded selection of Motherwell's criticism provides an essential guide to the art of the high modern period, both American and European."--Pepe Karmel, author of "Picasso and the Invention of Cubism"
"In the past two decades Abstract Expressionism has become one of the most dynamic subjects in art history; sometimes the reading is so dense it is like swimming through peanut butter. But, cutting through to the essential questions that generated the movement, the writings of Robert Motherwell are a treasure. Written at the same time he was painting, Motherwell's texts make me feel like a witness to the philosophical curiosity that generated one of the most powerful art movements of the twentieth century."--Michael Auping, author of "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments"
"This book is essential reading for anyone thinking about the uneasy clash of modernism and postmodernism in postwar America; Motherwell's writing played a decisive role and this volume is an admirably full account of it."--Jonathan Fineberg, author of "When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child"

The crumpled sculptures by American artist John Chamberlain, welded together from deformed car body parts, revolutionised the art world back in the 1950s. Through the unusual use of industrially prefabricated materials and their completely free repurposing, he released new processes of artistic forms and a consumer-oriented aesthetic. At first assigned to Nouveau Realisme, his work at the same time evinces relationships with Abstract Realism and Minimal Art, but ultimately asserts a great measure of autonomy in its form of expression. As early as the mid-1950s, he turned to the industrial scrap from cars, which he squashed, pressed into shape and welded together. Just as important as the form is the interplay of colours which make his works dazzle and sometimes bring them into a certain proximity with colour-happy Pop Art. In addition to his internationally renowned sculptural work, Chamberlain occupied himself intensively with photography, a theme extensively addressed in this book. Sculpture and photography interact directly with each other. Unlike the sculptures, which are positioned in their materiality, Chamberlain's photographs are marked by great blurring and fleetingness. At the same time, they absorb the element of movement in space. Chamberlain himself put it in terms of 'bending space'. One may think of them, even more readily than of his sculptures, as the spontaneous gestural structures of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Text in English and German.

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was an acclaimed Abstract Expressionist and one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century. While his paintings have been the subject of many exhibitions and publications, his works on paper are comparatively little known, despite how central they were to his artistic practice and to the evolution of his style and technique. This is the first full-length book devoted to Hofmann's works on paper, presenting a valuable new perspective from which to appreciate the achievements of this giant of postwar art. More than fifty examples from across his long career and from many genres-including self-portraits, figural studies, interiors, landscapes, and abstractions-are all attractively illustrated in color. In addition, works in different stages of finish, from rough sketches to polished pieces, offer an intimate glimpse into Hofmann's methods and creative process. Distributed for MOCA Jacksonville Exhibition Schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL (01/28/17-05/14/17) Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (06/16/17-09/10/17)

Jack Whitten's alluring and inventive paintings are part of the collections of some of the world's most prominent museums and galleries-but this profoundly inventive artist worked primarily under the radar for most of his life. This book, conceived with Whitten's collaboration shortly before his death in 2018, brings his work into focus, highlighting in particular the themes of history, politics, and music. As a young man in Alabama, Whitten was angered by the racism he experienced. When he moved to New York City, he was inspired by the Abstract Expressionists dominating the art scene there. This book examines Whitten's influences and alliances-including his relationship to his mentors Norman Lewis and Willem de Kooning-to trace how the artist never stopped experimenting and innovating. His riotously colorful oils gave way to massive acrylic "Slab" paintings. These were followed by kaleidoscopic mosaic paintings that capture and redirect light; the "Black Monoliths" series, memorializing Whitten's personal heroes; and his later works, which embrace technology and the digital age.

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.

Yafeng Duan (*1973) was born in Hebei in northern China, in the shadow of the Great Wall. For the artist - now based in Berlin - nature is the mirror of the soul, and the source from which she draws is a spiritual one. Artistic creativity is a vehicle for approaching and exploring reality and transferring it through painting into non-spaces. Her pictures testify to her notion of a breath of energy, which spreads out into a great void and, thanks to the constitutive factors of yin and yang, solidifies into all manifestations of existence, only to pass away again. Text in English, Chinese and German.

Remains-Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction offers a thought-provoking perspective on the dynamic field of contemporary abstraction in Latin America. It proposes abstraction as an expanded field of reality in direct dialogue with life and as a strategy for critically examining the social, political, and cultural arenas. Highlighting 280 artists, the book explores different manifestations of post 90s Latin American abstraction, underlining its relationships to and differences from modern abstraction, and examines how it may relate to issues such as gender, interculturality, contextual specificity, popular culture, and the everyday. The book is structured by theme; it includes essays by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and a historical essay by Juan Ledezma, as well as 28 short texts by participating artists. The publication contains biographies and over 700 illustrations. Remains-Tomorrow is an Abstraction in Action initiative of the Sammy Sayago Collection.

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.

Honore Sharrer (1920-2009) was a major art world figure in 1940s America, celebrated for exquisitely detailed paintings conveying subtly subversive critiques of the political and artistic climate of her time. This book offers the first critical reassessment of the artist: a leftist, female painter committed to figuration in an era when anti-Communist sentiment and masculine Abstract Expressionism dominated American culture. Her brightly colored, humorous, and distinctly feminine paintings combine elements of social realism and surrealism to seductive and disquieting effect. This publication is a timely reevaluation of an artist who pushed the boundaries of figurative painting with playfulness and biting wit. Distributed for the Columbus Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Columbus Museum of Art (02/10/17-05/21/17) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (06/30/17-09/03/17) Smith College Museum of Art, Northamton, MA (09/21/17-01/07/18)