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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.

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is drawn from the KMA’s extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney.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.

This publication contains a survey of female abstract expressionist artists, revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work and the movement as a whole as well as highlighting the lack of critical attention they have received to date.

Harold Cohen: AARON, the show recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art is perhaps the first posthumous show of new work. It featured the artist's famous drawing robot AARON working tirelessly and creating new work in front of a live audience. With the present explosion of AI technology, the Whitney's show had both contemporary relevance as well as historical significance. Harold Cohen (1928 -2016), the British-born artist, built AARON'S hardware and wrote its software in the late 1960s at the University of California, San Diego. The Whitney's exhibit brings AARON to New York about sixty years after its debut and eight years after its creator's death. The show includes AARON'S output from its first attempts at abstract expressionism, wiggly lines on paper, to the complexities of representational art, figures in landscapes. The show gives viewers a glimpse not only of the machine's output throughout the years but of the changing nature of the relationship between the artist and his creation.

\"'Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s' investigates the development of abstraction in West Asia and North Africa via paintings, sculpture, and drawings made during a period of rapid industrialization, several wars and mass migrations, new state formations, and the rise and fall of Arab nationalism(s). Examining how a diverse group of artists mined the region's rich artistic heritage as well as the expressive capacities of line, color, and texture, this book highlights various abstract practices that arose in the Arab world and its diaspora in the mid-20th century. Alongside vibrant images of nearly ninety works--all drawn from the remarkable collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates--'Taking Shape' featuers nine essays by leading scholars who are rethinking art-historical canons and expanding discourses around global modernism.\" --publisher's description, lower cover.

In the traditional narrative, male artists dominated Abstract Expressionism during its formative period in the US. Over the last half century, feminist art historians have provided key correctives, detailing the contributions of women artists to the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the decades after World War II. Among the early efforts to promote Abstract Expressionists during the late 1950s and early 1960s outside the major US art centers, one exhibition stands out: The Women: Tops in Art, presented by Fitz in Amarillo. Although this group exhibition was one of the earliest attempts to call public attention to the women Abstract Expressionists, the story of the show has been all but lost to historical memory.

Through a consideration of the exchanges between John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist painters at Black Mountain College and The Club in the early 1950s, this article suggests a new reading of Abstract Expressionism that jettisons stylistic designations and typical postwar divisions to reveal the artists’ deep social concerns and critique of Cold War ideology. A shared interest in vitalism and Zen, evident in weekly discussions at The Club and in Harold Rosenberg’s definition of Action Painting, reveals the artists’ commitment to breaking down the barriers between art and life, a defining condition of postwar radicality more typically signaled by the work of Cage and Robert Rauschenberg.

Reproduces a selection of more than one hundred paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures from the Museum's extensive collection of abstract expressionist works.

Born in San Juan, Olga Albizu (1924–2005) ranks among the important women of American abstract expressionism and may be considered the movement’s outstanding representative from Puerto Rico. A student of Esteban Vicente and Hans Hofmann, she developed her practice of painting betwixt and between the gendered, generational, and nationalist discourses of abstract expressionism and Latin American art over the 1950s and 1960s. Working within the conceptual borderlands of Puerto Rican New York and the New York School, Albizu turned the vocabularies of gestural painting into a postnational medium of self-expression, articulated here as a critical border practice. Albizu’s border practice challenged cultural tropes of American exceptionalism and Puerto Rican independence, and her mature paintings—most tellingly, her self-portraits—disclose a richly intrasubjective and multiplex American identity.