Explore the vast range of titles available.

Abstract art might seem hard to define. But, by introducing readers to the major artists of the style, they'll have a good idea of the general characteristics of an abstract piece. In addition to biographical information about Henri Matisse, Jasper Johns, Paul Klee, and more important abstract artists, readers learn about each masters most famous pieces and ways they were able to achieve the look of the work. Fun, colorful projects accompany each artists spreads, showing readers how they, too, can make cool abstract art.

Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door examines the thirty-eight-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (born in Knoxville, 1901; died in Paris, 1979) and writer James Baldwin (born in New York, 1924; died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1987) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped each other’s creative output and worldview. This full-color publication documents the groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and is drawn from the KMA’s extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney. This book seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a complex, lifelong relationship with a selection of Delaney’s works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life. While no other figure in Beauford Delaney’s extensive social orbit approaches James Baldwin in the extent and duration of influence, none of the major exhibitions of Delaney’s work has explored in any depth the creative exchange between the two. The volume also includes essays by Mary Campbell, whose research currently focuses on James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney within the context of the civil rights movement; Glenn Ligon, an internationally acclaimed New York-based artist with intimate knowledge of Baldwin’s writings, Delaney’s art, and American history and society; Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who did his doctoral research at University College London on Delaney’s portraits of James Baldwin; and Stephen Wicks, the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator, who has guided the KMA’s curatorial department for over 25 years and was instrumental in building the world’s largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney’s art at the KMA. Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door examines the thirty-eight-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (born in Knoxville, 1901; died in Paris, 1979) and writer James Baldwin (born in New York, 1924; died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1987) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped each other’s creative output and worldview. This full-color publication documents the groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and is drawn from the KMA’s extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney. This book seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a complex, lifelong relationship with a selection of Delaney’s works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life. While no other figure in Beauford Delaney’s extensive social orbit approaches James Baldwin in the extent and duration of influence, none of the major exhibitions of Delaney’s work has explored in any depth the creative exchange between the two. The volume also includes essays by Mary Campbell, whose research currently focuses on James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney within the context of the civil rights movement; Glenn Ligon, an internationally acclaimed New York-based artist with intimate knowledge of Baldwin’s writings, Delaney’s art, and American history and society; Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who did his doctoral research at University College London on Delaney’s portraits of James Baldwin; and Stephen Wicks, the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator, who has guided the KMA’s curatorial department for over 25 years and was instrumental in building the world’s largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney’s art at the KMA.

Presents major members of the New York School.

Jasper Johns zwischen 1955 und 58, zwischen Modernismus und Neo-Avantgarde: die irreduzible Zweideutigkeit einer kunsthistorischen Schwellensituation ist Ausgangspunkt einer neuen Deutung der Malerei des amerikanischen Künstlers.

Years ago, a well-known expressionist painter named Jim Stegner shot a man in a bar. The man lived, Jim served his time, and he has learned to live with the dark impulses that sometimes overtake him. Jim enjoys a quiet life in the valleys of Colorado. He works with a lovely model, he doesn't drink, he goes fly fishing in the evenings. His paintings fetch excellent prices at a posh gallery in Santa Fe. He is--if he can admit it--almost happy. One day, driving down a dirt road, Jim sees a man beating a small horse. Jim leaps out of the truck, tackles the man, and bloodies his nose. The man is Dell, a cruel hunting outfitter notorious among locals. Jim cannot shake his rage over the little horse. The next night, under a full moon, telling himself he is just going night fishing, he returns to the creek where Dell has his camp and kills him. As Jim tries to come to terms with what he has done, he must evade the police, navigate his own conscience, and escape the members of Dell's clan set on revenge. And he paints the whole time; trying to make sense of his actions.

A replica (simulacrum?) of Central Park, in one context, the florescent barge was also a tiny Manhattan, pars par toto, part for whole, in the best tradition of art that gives us the large world in a more manageable form. Mayor's Bloomberg's arts commissioner told the assembled art world worthies that New York City needed such projects to maintain its cultural edge as the world's greatest city. Spokespeople for the public arts foundation, Minetta Spring, and the Whitney Museum told of the great spirit of collaboration that made such fulfillment possible. A sort of apotheosis of Smithson's esthetic was taking place, with a work of art that was at once a site, an object, a concept, and a public event.

Overview: Published in conjunction with the first large-scale, multi-medium, posthumous retrospective of Willem de Kooning's career, this publication offers an unparalleled opportunity to appreciate the development of the artist's work as it unfolded over nearly seven decades, beginning with his early academic works, made in Holland before he moved to the United States in 1926, and concluding with his final, sparely abstract paintings of the late 1980s. The volume presents approximately 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, covering the full diversity of de Kooning's art and placing his many masterpieces in the context of a complex and fascinating pictorial practice. An introductory essay by John Elderfield, MoMA's Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, provides an in-depth exploration of de Kooning's development, context and sources, theory of art and working methods. Sections devoted to particular areas of the artist's oeuvre provide an illustrated chronology of the period and a brief introduction, as well as detailed entries on groups of works. With lavish, full-color documentation, this landmark publication is the most complete account of de Kooning's artistic career to date.

Critics have frequently employed strict binary schemes to explain Expressionism’s singular contributions to art history: the victory of abstraction over figuration, avant-garde over kitsch, pure art over anecdotal illustration, action over premeditation, or escapist detachment over direct political engagement. Taking Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday as a case study, this paper will question the efficacy of such dyadic explanations to encapsulate the diversity of New York School practice. Easter Monday includes both figural and abstract elements, some that parade the work’s impulsive and spontaneous character and others that were created by a photo-mechanical process. Some celebrate the artist’s personal and idiosyncratic touch, others the impersonality of popular forms of advertising. In contradistinction, the semiotic terminology of C.S. Pierce reveals not only multiple points of intersection with de Kooning’s work; it also effectively identifies and differentiates the plurality of elements the artist conjoined in a single visual field, some of which qualify as iconic, indexical, symbolic, or even as hybrid combinations of the above. These more elastic descriptors, it will be argued, are well-suited to address de Kooning’s variegated surfaces: they can address his accommodation of diverse techniques, as well as the multiple ways the artist constructed meaning and responded to popular culture.

In the late 1970s, after the artist's explosive Pop Art beginnings and a period of abstraction, representational objects made their way back into Jasper Johns' work. Supported by the artist's words and previous scholarship, this is the first comprehensive study of his later paintings and works on paper. Fiona Donovan helps contextualize images that have personal significance for Johns and explain a broader humanist discourse. Readers learn of his absorption with the appropriation and abstraction of images taken from Cezanne, Grunewald, Picasso, and others, and discover the inspiration Johns finds in his immediate surroundings. Progressing through several key phases and turning points in the artist's career, Donovan brings to light not only this subtext of inspirations and influences but also Johns' circle of contemporaries, collaborators, and personal perceptions and obsessions. Johns' compelling and enduring curiosity is omnipresent and reflected in his stylistic changes, but the shifting themes, motifs, and moods of his work are all underpinned by his exceptional skill.

The link between creativity and serious mental illness (SMI) is widely discussed. Jackson Pollock is one example of a giant in the field of art who was both highly creative and experiencing an SMI. Pollock created a new genre of art known as abstract expressionism (“action painting”) defined as showing the frenetic actions of painting. The question arises whether his SMI played any role in the way he created his drip paintings, especially when he was overactive and manic. Furthermore, did visual hallucinations or enhanced visual perception associated with mania or psychosis facilitate Pollock in embedding and camouflaging images under layers of thrown paint? Seeing images in Pollocks drip paintings has been a controversy ever since these paintings were created. Some experts attribute this to pareidolia—perceiving specific images out of random or ambiguous visual patterns—a phenomenon known to be enhanced by fractal fuzzy edges such as seen in Rorschach ink blots as well as in Pollock drip paintings. So, are Pollock’s drip paintings merely giant Rorschach images, or did Pollock insert polloglyphs—images that are encrypted that tell a story about Pollock’s inner being—into his paintings and then disguise them with drippings? Here, we explore answers to these questions and discuss images that Pollock included in his earliest sketches and used repeatedly in his abstract paintings and later in his drip paintings to argue that these images are not accidental.