First published to accompany the exhibition, John Golding: Pure Colour Sensation at Piano Nobile gallery, this fully colour illustrated catalogue showcases fifteen years of exceptional paintings by John Golding. Although an acclaimed art historian, Golding considered himself, first and foremost, a painter. His work features in prominent institutions such as the Tate, MoMA, the Scottish National Gallery, the British Council, and the Yale Center for British Art. Golding had numerous one-man shows in the UK and abroad, and also participated in many group exhibitions, including international shows with his close friend Bridget Riley. He was appointed a CBE in 1992 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. The publication presents a survey of works from the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from large scale canvases to both small and large pastels. Golding's work, although abstract, repeatedly returns to the human body. The monumental canvases and the tactile handling of paint through expressive layering of pigment demand a visceral physical reaction from the viewer. Speaking in an interview for Artists' Lives, Golding recollected that his turn to abstraction was in "recognition of what was happening in America in the 1950s...the most important thing going on in painting [of the day]". In his abstract paintings, both intimate and large in scale, Golding sought unadulterated formal brilliance, letting colour and composition take prominence, "so that there is nothing getting between you and the pure colour sensation." Dr David Anfam's introductory essay explores the roots of Golding's abstract work in the early figurative painting he produced whilst living in Mexico. Analysing the influence of the great Mexican muralists during Golding's formative years, Anfam charts the progression of Golding's vision that culminated in the exceptionally accomplished and joyful body of the work produced in the 1970s and 1980s and reproduced in this publication.

Abstract Expressionism is the most important art movement since the Second World War. Although it is often considered a revolution in painting alone - for the images created by such leading figures as Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko remain altogether extraordinary - its radical spirit extended further, encompassing the sculpture of David Smith and Aaron Siskind's photography. Along with other key artists such as Barnett Newman and Franz Kline, these artists formed a nucleus united not just against the tensions of American society from the 1930s onwards, but also in their aim to forge diverse new visual languages. David Anfam explores the movement in terms of its political implications and rich cultural contexts, bringing many fresh insights to the works themselves. Taking into account a wealth of scholarship, this new edition also has nearly one hundred works reproduced in colour.

In the decade before his death in 2011, John Hoyland began to reckon with mortality. Confronting his own demise, he painted elegies to departed artist friends and tributes to illustrious artistic forebears. Imagery of the void looms large, but it is a void faced with defiance and vitality, less a rumination on the end than a celebration of life. This publication explores the paintings Hoyland made in this decade, including his final series, the Mysteries. Essays by Natalie Adamson, David Anfam, Matthew Collings and Mel Gooding offer a rich and multifaceted account of a complex body of work. Hoyland’s veneration of Vincent van Gogh, his connections to J.M.W. Turner, the use of black as a colour, his deployment of risk and attempts to subvert his own taste, and his development of the cosmic visual language of the Abstract Expressionists are all discussed. Richly illustrated, the book extends our understanding of Hoyland’s late work within the story of modern painting as a whole.

Larry Poons (b. 1937) shot to fame while still in his twenties, on the strength of his “dot paintings,” in which dots or ellipses were meticulously arranged on brightly coloured fields, creating a rhythmic, pulsating effect. But within a few years, Poons first loosened the hard-edged precision of the dot paintings and then abandoned them entirely for an organic mode of abstraction based on vertical drips of flung paint. This marked the beginning of an uncompromising five-decade evolution that has finally led the artist back to a more intimate mode of painting with brushes — and his own hands. At every stage, Poons's career has compelled the attention of critics and, in particular, other artists. This handsome volume, the first full-length biocritical monograph on Poons, reproduces more than 140 of his most important works in full colour, some as spectacular gatefolds. The incisive text — a collaboration between four leading critics and historians — traces the development of the artist’s extraordinary career. Larry Poons is a necessary addition to the library of anyone with an interest in American art.

The abandoned and forgotten landscapes of rural southwestern towns are the favoured subjects of Rod Penner's paintings. The artist's keen eye combines photojournalism and photorealism to create images of small-town America. His deft use of contrasts in his images - despondency and hope, isolation and nostalgia - evokes memories of The Last Picture Show and elicits complex responses from viewers. "I'm interested in the look of things and the quality of being there," he says. "A moment that is completely frozen with all the variety of textures; rust on poles, crumbling asphalt, light hitting the grass." Penner's works are based on his photographs, digital video stills, and his experience of the rural landscapes of Texas and New Mexico. He depicts desolate, often deserted locations, the character of old houses and abandoned buildings, weather, and unique geography. His chosen scenes are infused with a cinematic quality that is the result of the exquisite light that he captures with his meticulous process. "The finished paintings should evoke contrasting responses of melancholy and warmth, desolation and serenity," he says.

Clyfford Still (1904-1980) is a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. This revelatory book, accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition, investigates Clyfford Still s late work, both in painting and in drawing, made after his move to rural Maryland in 1961. This marks a particularly fertile period for Still; he made over 375 works on canvas and a staggering 1,100 works on paper in Maryland before his death in 1980 at the age of 75. Given Still s especially reclusive posture later in life and the fact that none of the artworks in Still s estate were exhibited or made available to anyone before the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum in 2011, a full-scale presentation of these forty paintings and thirty works on paper is especially meaningful. In addition to essays by Dean Sobel and David Anfam, the artists Alex Katz and Dorothea Rockburne contribute texts on the notion of late work.

This extraordinary book is the first volume of the definitive catalogue raisonne of the work of Mark Rothko, one of the greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century. It documents Rothko's entire output of paintings on canvas and panel, reproducing all the works in color. An introductory text also investigates every essential feature of Rothko's art.

David Anfam explores the underestimated variety as well as the amazing continuity of Rothko's pictures. These include the images for which Rothko is famous -- the large, hypnotic, and poignant fields of color -- along with almost 400 further pictures that reveal a far less well known figure who was attuned by turns to realism, expressionism, surrealism, and the avantgarde issues of his era. Anfam presents a radical overview of Rothko's achievement, offering an analysis of its sources and themes: these extend from a study of such old masters as Rembrandt and Vermeer to his eventual groundbreaking vision of painting as an environment, expressed in the mural cycles and the architectural framework of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Anfam pays special attention to the physical makeup of the paintings, as well as to Rothko's innovative sense of space, color, and surface, his complex technical procedures, and the symbolism of the work. This is combined with an account of Rothko's stylistic evolution and its chronology, tracing its development from figuration to an abstract vision imbued with a profound grasp of how the viewer has an interactive role to play in perceiving the works. The volume also includes the most extensive Rothko bibliography ever published. The fruit of almost a decade of research, this monumental publication is thereference pont for all future studies of Rothko's art.

Accompanying an exhibition at BASTIAN, London, this striking publication presents works by the German-born American artist Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), produced at the end of the Second World War and immediately afterwards. Hofmann's angular abstractions (such as Fury No. 1) personify the insecurities of the period, but this was also the moment that he moved towards the soft ambiguous forms and gesture that would become the hallmark of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Renowned as both an artist and teacher, Hofmann established his first art school in Munich in 1915. Built on the contemporary ideas regarding colour and form of Cezanne, the Cubists and Kandinsky, his work laid the foundations for his reputation as a forward-thinking artist. After relocating to the United States in 1932, he then opened schools in both New York and Provincetown, immersing himself within America's growing avantgarde art scene. His teaching had a significant influence on post-War American artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell - artists who would later lead the Abstract Expressionism movement. The works presented here span from 1942 to 1946. Whilst demonstrating Hofmann's development towards abstraction, the paintings still reveal an identifiably representational quality which nod to his figurative beginnings; linear paintings such as The Virgin (1946) particularly emphasise this artistic trajectory. Primarily known for his expressive use of bold, often primary colours, the palette used in these paintings consists predominantly of vivid, bright colours and contrasting dark tones, epitomizing the conflicted post-War feeling. Hofmann's work during the 1940s also saw him garner the support of several key figures in the artistic scene, including the renowned gallerists and dealers Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons, and Samuel M. Kootz. A particularly important moment in his career - aged 64 at the time - was his first solo exhibition in New York in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery Art of This Century, considered 'a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism' by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg.

Jackson Pollock’s Mural , created early in his career in 1943, is a vast panorama spanning a 6-metre-long canvas – the largest painting he ever made. Mural marked a watershed for Pollock: a presentiment of the epic scale, complexity, energy and ambition of the work ahead. David Anfam considers the manifold influences on Pollock that led to this landmark achievement – including the context of the American West, his hitherto little-known relationship with Clyfford Still and the importance of wartime action photography. He also traces the explosive magnetism Mural exerted over the emergent Abstract Expressionists and its legacy for painters and sculptors as diverse as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, David Smith, Richard Serra and Brice Marden. Indeed, the work’s wider impact on post-war American art is comparable to that of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon on European modernism in the first half of the twentieth century