Tag abstract art

March 22: Agnes Martin’s Birthday

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Agnes Martin, Yale University Press would like to share Agnes Martin, a collection of essays edited by Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly. Agnes Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004), a Canadian-born American abstract painter, referred to as a minimalist

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En Vanguard

Born in 1886, John Graham was a progressive promoter of surrealism, cubism, and abstraction, as well as a mentor and confidant to the likes of Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning (the four artists collectively called themselves the Four Musketeers in the ‘30s). Last week, an exhibition entitled

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Notes from a Native New Yorker: Jackson Pollock, Naturally

Michelle Stein— As a New Yorker considering nature and the environment this month, I wanted to look beyond the enclaves of nature in New York City parks to the representations of nature—both realistic and abstract—found in the museums and galleries of New York.  For one perspective I turn to Evelyn

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Rebel With an Abstract Cause

Evelyn Toynton’s forthcoming Icons of America biography, Jackson Pollock, explores how Pollock’s tortured and conflicted character transformed popular culture. Against a backdrop of criticism that found American art inferior to its European counterpart (Marcel Duchamp wrote that “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”), Pollock’s controversial, even rebellious, work was provocative for generations old and new.

David Smith: Master of Two Art Forms

One could say David Smith “invented” sculpture, or put more clearly, he invented sculpture’s place in modern American art. He legitimized the art form to the extent that it could be just as prestigious as painting. Convincing the postwar American public of sculpture’s accessibility arose from Smith’s own belief that

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