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.

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art - from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice - as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

"Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth". (Stephen De Staebler). Over the course of a fifty-year career, Stephen De Staebler (1933-2011) created powerful, elegiac figurative sculptures in clay and bronze. Extending and assimilating an artistic lineage that includes Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, and Alberto Giacometti as well as the art of the ancient Americas, Egypt, and Greece, De Staebler developed a sculptural vocabulary uniquely his own. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area since the late 1950s, De Staebler was among the first students of the legendary Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley. In conjunction with the Bay Area Figurative movement, De Staebler helped to infuse the existentialist agenda of Abstract Expressionism with a profound humanism. Illuminating the significance of De Staebler's practice as never before, curator Timothy Anglin Burgard analyzes the artist's major pieces. Poet and critic Rick Newby sketches a biographical portrait of the sculptor, and renowned art historian Dore Ashton offers a moving tribute to the artist, with whom she was a lifelong friend. Produced in collaboration with the artist and his estate, this authoritative volume - published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco - offers an unprecedented glimpse into the sculptor's studio and process.

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art - from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice - as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

"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"