Painting Beyond Pollock

Painting Beyond Pollock is a captivating account of the history of European and American painting from the mid‐20th century onwards. Art historian and critic Morgan Falconer presents an extensively researched piece of writing that explains why painting has surged in popularity since Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists began painting in the late 1940s–early 1950s. Drawing on both original sources and contemporary scholarship, this bold and richly designed book lavishly illustrates the most important works made beginning in the Post War era. In addition to well‐known artists such as Willem de Kooning, Agnes Martin, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter and Brice Marden, Falconer explores the work of contemporary stars such as Cecily Brown, Mark Grotjahn, Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin, Neo Rauch and Mark Bradford as well as up‐and‐coming artists such as Blink Palermo and Sigmar Polke. Topics include: Things must be pulverized – Abstract Expressionism Wounded Painting – Informel in Europe and Beyond Against Gesture – Geometric Abstraction Witnesses – Post‐war Figurative Painting Anti&hyephn;Tradition – Pop Painting Post&hypen;Painting Part I – After Pollock A transcendental, high art – Neo‐Expressionism and its Discontents Post‐Painting Part II – After Pop New Figuration – Pop Romantics

"This concise study of Jackson Pollock provides a reliable survey of his life and work and an understanding of his paintings--their origins, meanings, and influence. Unlike other books on Pollock that deal extensively with his life or with formal analysis of his works, Cernuschi's is broadly interpretive, discussing and explaining concerns and meanings crucial to an understanding of Pollock's paintings." "The first part of the book surveys Pollock's life and work with particular attention to the artist's intentions and the interpretation of abstraction. The second part deals with the issues raised by Pollock's art above and beyond his intentions and how these issues intersect with the work of his contemporaries and with other intellectual currents. The final chapter discusses Pollock's influence and the importance of criticism in shaping this influence. It also deals with the problems of defining modernism and postmodernism." "Thoughtful and accessible, Cernuschi's study explains the complexity and meaning of Pollock's art for anyone interested in twentieth-century art and the pivotal position of Jackson Pollock in art since 1945. There are notes, a selected bibliography, and an index."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York “The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.” ―Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew―and left her mark on―the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions. Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments--from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg―comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world. Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.

Published to accompany the exhibition Jackson Pollock held the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1 November 1998 to 2 February 1999.

An illuminating exploration of the meaning of abstract art by acclaimed art historian Kirk Varnedoe "What is abstract art good for? What's the use—for us as individuals, or for any society—of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the past five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction—showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Art today may be global, Robert Linsley argues in this book, but it is the same everywhere you go: full of intentional meaning, statements, and even branded images that insist on a particular message. That is to say, art everywhere is conceptual. In this first critique of global conceptual art, Linsley looks back at an older genre, abstract art, to reclaim some of its lost value--not as an empty commodity to be traded by the wealthy but as a way for us to find perspective amid chaos. Linsley shows how abstraction is a response to the world we live in, one that deliberately avoids moralizing, explanation, or overt polemic. He champions the work of lesser-known but important artists from India, China, and Latin and Central America, such as Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Ding Yi and Gunther Gerzso as well as the more familiar names from history, such as Lucio Fontana, Frank Stella and Gerhard Richter, treating their work with equal seriousness. He also looks toward abstract art's future, showing that it still has plenty of life and purpose as a genre that helps us find a clear space to make sense of the times we live in. Ultimately, Linsley demonstrates the unique, rich, and full experience that abstract art can give us. Richly illustrated, this book is a must-read for art historians and art lovers.

Presents letters written by the American painter and his brothers and parents from the late 1920s to the late 1940s.