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).

An extraordinary selection of works and a lavish set of illustrations reconstruct in an intimate and thorough way the brief but dazzling trajectory, between creative output and unbridled emotion, followed by Tancredi Parmeggiani, a great exponent of postwar Italian art. From his academic debut to the lyrical colorism of the early days, and from the experimentation typical of nonrepresentational spatialism to his period of gestural abstractionism, culminating in the visionary aesthetics of the sixties and characterised by uneasy and tormented figurations, this book reconstructs all the phases of his career.

This landmark book reflects on almost 70 years of works by Bridget Riley (b.1931), from some of her earliest to very recent projects, providing a unique record of the work of an artist still very much at the height of her powers. Essays from leading scholars and commentators on Riley's work will make this title the authority on Riley's practice. In the last decade, Riley has continued to push her practice considerably, producing several large-scale site-specific wall paintings as well as continuing to develop new paintings. This book will explore these recent developments. It will also examine the notable influence that other artists such as Georges Seurat and Piet Mondrian have had on Riley's work.

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.

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.

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.

When Kasimir Malevich's Black Square was produced in 1915, no-one had ever seen anything like it before. And yet it does have precedents. In fact, over the previous 500 years, several painters, writers, philosophers, scientists and censors - each working independently towards an absolute statement of their own - alighted on the form of the black square or rectangle, as if for the first time. This book explores the resonances between Malevich's Black Square and its precursors, showing how a 'genealogical' thread binds them together into an intriguing, and sometimes quirky, sequence of modulations. Andrew Spira's book explores how each predecessor both 'foreshadows' Malevich's work and, paradoxically, throws light on it, revealing layers of meaning that are often overlooked but which are as relevant today as ever.

"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"

Alberto Giacometti's 1934 Cube stands apart for many as a typical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality. With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist's sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional - a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist's surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti's aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait - or what Didi-Huberman terms "abstract anthropomorphism." Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others whom Giacometti counted as influences, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti's art with a new approach to transitional work.

Fran att tidigare ha betraktats som en konstnarernas konstnar har Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944), efter den foersta retrospektiva utstallningen pa Moderna Museet i Stockholm 2013 och den foeljande utstallningsturnen som sags av en miljonpublik, numera en etablerad plats i den abstrakta konstens historia. Centralt i hennes maleri ar aven fragan om andlighet. Hilma af Klint var en klassiskt skolad konstnar och ett medium som foervandlade andliga meddelanden till abstrakta och fargrika bilder. Ur en rad perspektiv undersoeks i den har katalogen hur denna banbrytande abstrakta konstnar kopplade sin konstnarliga praktik till ett hoegre medvetande. I essaer av konsthistoriker, en kvantfysiker, en larare i andlighet, en historiker i teosofi och esoterism, men flera, ges insikter om en varld bortom det synliga som fascinerar, nu kanske mer an nagonsin. Katalogen har producerats i samband med utstallningen med samma namn pa Moderna Museet i Malmoe, sommaren 2020. Once considered an outsider artist, after her show at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half-a-mil-lion visitors, Hilma af Klint firmly established her place in art history. She has also been the subject of documenta-ry films and biographies. In 2013, Iris Muller-Westermann organized the first institutional exhibition of af Klint's work. Now she presents us with the latest information and research in an extensive survey show at the Moder-na Museet in Malmoe. Of crucial importance is the issue of spirituality in af Klint's painting-how she managed to translate both the material and the immaterial world into a pictorial vision. The accompanying exhibition catalogue is the first to investigate, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by leading historians of theosophy and a quantum physicist, among others, provide enlightening insight into a world in which both the visualization of atoms and spiritual seances alike became artistic material-a world that fascinates us even more than ever.

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.

Deborah Solomon's biography sets Jackson Pollock in his time and portrays him as a shy, often withdrawn person, full of insecurities and self-doubts, and frequently unable to express himself about his art or its meaning. Solomon interviewed two hundred people who knew Pollock and his work and she has drawn extensively on Pollock's own writings and other personal papers. She examines the artist's relationships with his family; his wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner; art patron Peggy Guggenheim; the painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and many more.

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.

Many of Krasner's male colleagues - including her husband, Jackson Pollock - developed a unique "signature" style that identified them throughout their careers. Krasner, however, experimented with one style after another, from her early geometric abstractions (created while she was one of Hans Hofmann's most talented students), through her large-scale organic images of mid-career, to the hard-edge compositions of her late years. Certain elements recur throughout - most notably, her distinctive sense of colour, her affinity for swelling forms inspired by nature, and her fearlessness in experimenting with new techniques. Krasner's unwillingness to stick to one style, her readiness to put her career aside to focus on Pollock's, and her feuds with some of the period's most powerful critics all reduced her visibility in the art world. She has been the subject of exhibition catalogs, but this is the first monograph devoted to her work, and it brings to light all the intriguing complexities of her approach to making art. Dr. Robert Hobbs skillfully explores the twists and turns of her career, offering new information and insight about one of the most intriguing painters of the postwar era. About the Modern Masters series: With informative, enjoyable texts and over 100 illustrations - approximately 48 in full colour - this innovative series offers a fresh look at the most creative and influential artists of the postwar era. The authors are highly respected art historians and critics chosen for their ability to think clearly and write well. Each handsomely designed volume presents a thorough survey of the artist's life and work, as well as statements by the artist, an illustrated chapter on technique, a chronology, lists of exhibitions and public collections, an annotated bibliography, and an index. Every art lover, from the casual museumgoer to the serious student, teacher, critic, or curator, will be eager to collect these Modern Masters. And with such a low price, they can afford to collect them all.

Charmion von Wiegand started painting figuratively in 1926, when she received encouragement from her friend and painter, Joseph Stella. After being hired as an American reporter based in Soviet Moscow from 1929 to 1932, von Wiegand established herself as a preeminent art critic who embraced progressive ideas. She moved back to New York City in 1932 and became immersed in the avant-garde movement. Von Wiegand developed a close circle of friends including Hans Richter, Carl Holty, and John Graham. In 1941, when she met and befriended Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, she changed her painting style completely and was finally considered an artist in her own right. Highly influenced by his work, von Wiegand became interested in combining abstraction, Theosophy, and Eastern religions including her adoptive religion, Buddhism. The result was modern geometric abstract paintings that were imbued with Eastern imagery. This comprehensive volume on von Wiegand showcases gloriously illustrated works from all phases of her career. It also contains insightful essays and an array of previously unpublished material from the artist's archives, including correspondence with Mondrian.

The catalogue to accompany a major solo presentation of the work of the influential New York-based artist Mary Heilmann, her first in a public institution in the UK in 15 years. Born in California in 1940, Heilmann studied ceramics and poetry before moving to New York in 1968 and taking up painting. A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from craft traditions and popular culture (especially rock music and California's beach culture), Heilmann is one of the most important yet still underrecognised artists working today. This publication explores Heilmann's approach to abstraction from two distinct but interrelated perspectives: the formal and the personal. The personal is reflected in the title Looking at Pictures, named after a section in the artist's memoir The All Night Movie (1999), in which she writes, `Each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker', clearly represented here through works that relate to moments in the artist's friendships, memories of places where she has lived or spent time and her love of music and film. The juxtaposing formal aspect of her work is also explored, most evidently in her early paintings of grids and squares rendered in primary colours and in works that are based on architectural or interior planes, such as doors and mirrors. As well as new essays by Lydia Yee (Chief Curator, Whitechapel Gallery) and Briony Fer (Professor of History of Art, University College London), and writings by the artist on key works, the publication will feature 100 beautiful full-colour illustrations of paintings, works on paper, furniture and ceramics from Heilmann's five-decade career.

A fresh and new overview of this treasured West Coast artist, with hundreds of his paintings, drawings, and prints covering five decades of his illustrious career. The book surveys the extraordinary achievements of Diebenkorn, who successfully explored both abstract and figurative painting. Produced in a slipcase box, this is the ultimate source for art enthusiasts, from his early work of the mid-1940s to his Berkeley and Ocean Park series. The book includes not only his iconic paintings of the California landscape and interior figures but also many of his less-well-known and rarely published works. Art historian Sasha Nicholas discusses Diebenkorn s place in postwar American painting and his independence from the art-world trends. Steven Nash conducts an interview with close friend Wayne Thiebaud, giving an artist s point of view. The two artists shared the inspiration of California and experimented with perspective to capture their surroundings.

An in-depth exploration of Malevich's pivotal painting, its context and its significance Kazimir Malevich's painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich's contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art-which he called Suprematism-and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde. Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square. To this day, many circumstances and events of the origins of Suprematism have remained obscure and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries synchronous to the events described has allowed this author to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting.

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.

Tracing the relationship between Abstract Expressionist artists and contemporary intellectuals, particularly the French existentialists, Nancy Jachec here offers a new interpretation of the success of America's first internationally recognized avant-garde art form. She argues that Abstract Expressionism was promoted by the United States government because of its radical character, which was considered to appeal to a Western European populace perceived by the State Department as inclined toward Socialism.

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.

This volume presents the first scholarly consideration of Morris Davidson (1898- 1979), an influential painter and educator whose work has been neglected in the art history of mid- twentieth- century American painting. Davidson studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, with painters in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and eventually in Paris. He became a leader in the cause of abstract painting through his teaching in New York City and Provincetown, his influential books- Understanding Modern Art (1931) and An Approach to Modern Painting (1948)- and his own widely exhibited work. Two essays address Davidson's place in New York and in Province- town, a memoir of his Cape Cod art school and studio captures his private world, and a catalog of twenty- five exemplary works illuminates his varied production.