Magazine

Minimalism in Abstract Art: A Journey Through History and Contemporary Expressions

Minimalism has captivated the art world with its clarity, simplicity, and focus on the essentials. Emerging as a reaction against the expressive intensity of earlier movements like Abstract Expres...

Notes and Reflections on Rothko in Paris­ by Dana Gordon

Paris was cold. But it still had its satisfying allure, beauty all around. The grand Mark Rothko exhibition is in a new museum in the snowy Bois de Boulogne, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a flashy ...

Mark Rothko: The Master of Color in Search of The Human Drama

A key protagonist of Abstract Expressionism and color field painting, Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) was one of the most influential 20th-century painters whose works deeply spoke, and still do, to the...

Illuminating the Canvas: Anna Eva Bergman's Luminous Journey through Artistic Landscapes

Born in 1909 to Swedish and Norwegian parents, Anna Eva Bergman demonstrated an early knack for drawing. She later honed her talent at Oslo's School of Applied Arts and Vienna’s School of Applied ...

From Painting to Drawing: Richter's Creative Evolution in the Pandemic Era

A buzz percolates around a recent exhibition in New York claiming Gerhard Richter completed his last paintings between 2016 and 2017. Since 2017, the legend of his own brand of abstraction and uni...

Girls Rule Contemporary Abstraction

The quest to find emerging female abstract painters at galleries, museums and fairs can be daunting. Many girl painters are drawn to figuration and a narrative. Recently, passing WINDOW on Walker ...

Sterling Ruby: The TURBINE Trailblazer

Sterling Ruby looks like the kind of Los Angeles artist you would expect; Dutch American surfer good looks with a Kurt Cobain grunge edge. He’s that super cool dude/artist you love to hate and hat...

Monet - Mitchell. Toward an Abstract Impressionism.

Much more than a visual comparison between pictorial languages: in the fall of 2022, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris places Impressionist master Claude Monet (1840-1926) and American abstrac...

Simon Hantaï. Between Invisibility and the Persistence of Vision

Simon Hantaï is the painter of absence, invisibility, and withdrawal. The essence of his art can be captured in the empty spaces between one color and another, in his pictorial and conceptual inte...

The Exuberant Abstraction of Shirley Jaffe

This spring, the Centre Pompidou is honoring the remarkable abstract painter Shirley Jaffe with the retrospective exhibition aptly named An American Woman in Paris. For Shirley, a New Jersey nativ...

Carmen Herrera - A Flourishing Long Overdue

Carmen Herrera (May 30, 1915-February 12, 2022) was a Cuban-American artist, renowned for her abstract minimalist compositions and geometric application of color. Her recent death has brought abou...

Pink Abstraction

The color pink is all around us: in the sensual curves of a mouth; in the innocence of a valentine; in the leaves of the sacred Sakura; in a glass of rosé at a Roman cafe. Pink is essential to the...

Joseph Beuys - An Artistic Healer For The Generations

Sculptor, teacher, mentor, pioneering environmentalist, political activist, self-styled shaman, and an alleged charlatan of questionable character - Joseph Beuys was most certainly a man who wore ...

Action Painting or a Glimpse into the Emotions

The term “Action Painting” was coined by art critic Harold Rosenberg in his 1952 essay “The American Action Painters.” Rather than discussing paintings in terms of their “objectness,” or in terms ...

Women in American Abstraction, 1930-1950

American abstract artists faced many hurdles throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Entering a discipline still dominated by realism and ruled by powerful art critics and institutions, abstract artists h...

Picasso’s Daughter is Donating 9 Artworks to The Musée Picasso

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso was a pioneer of the Cubism art movement — a kind of abstraction that utilizes geometric shapes to portray a subject. Examples of his famous works include The Weeping ...

8 Contemporary Abstract Artists To Watch in 2021

2020 was truly apocalyptic, in the original sense of the word: meaning it was a year of revelation about who and what we are. Moving forward, I am curious to know who else, and what else, we might...

The Art of Displaying Multiple Perspectives

When a painting consists of two panels, it can be considered a diptych. The term comes from the late Greek words diptukha (two writing tablets) or diptukhos (folded in half). The tradition of dipt...

Sophie Taeuber-Arp - A Major Female Force of Dadaism and Concrete art

Bold and dynamic, Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943), née Taeuber, was a major female force in the European avant-garde movements of Dadaism and Concrete art. Her career spanned two world wars and ush...

How Painters Eleven Members Brought Abstract Art to Canada

Active between 1953 and 1960, Painters Eleven (P11) was a short-lived but hugely influential group of eleven Canadian abstract artists who took a leading role in Canada’s post-war art world. While...

A Look at Vasudeo S. Gaitonde's Burgeoning Art Market

Indian artist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde has appeared in the art media repeatedly over the past decade, always in the context of auction records. Paintings by Gaitonde routinely sell for millions of d...

A Kandinsky Masterpiece To Be Sold at Sotheby's After Half a Century

In 1964, Sotheby’s made news by auctioning 50 Wassily Kandinsky paintings from the collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim. The American businessman and founder of both the Solomon R. Guggenheim Found...

In the Dark

In visual art, darkness is the result of many factors: the interplay of hue and tint; the reflective qualities of a medium or a surface; the way light interacts with texture. But is darkness only ...

Following The Curves of Tony Cragg's Sculpture

Works by renowned British abstract artist Tony Cragg are on view this summer at Houghton Hall, a lavish British country estate currently occupied by David George Philip, the 7th Marquess of Cholmo...

How to Take Up Abstract Painting in Your Older Years

No matter who you are, you probably wanted to take up art at some point in your life but couldn’t because you didn’t have the time or resources to dedicate yourself to it properly. But now you’re ...

How Drawing Revitalized Post-War America - at MoMA

With COVID restrictions in New York lifting, several museum shows whose runs were extended during the pandemic shutdown are beckoning. Among the best for fans of abstraction is Degree Zero: Drawin...

Zaha Hadid, The Visual Artist

Most people know Zaha Hadid as an architect. When she died in 2016, at the young age of 65, Hadid was one of the most sought-after architects in the world. She was renowned both for her extraordin...

Elles Font l’Abstraction - An Interview with Pompidou Chief Curator Christine Macel

Centre Pompidou will write history this summer with Elles font l’abstraction - the most comprehensive elucidation ever of the contribution of female artists to the development of abstract art. Pom...

How Two Chinese Abstract Masters Dominated Sotheby's Hong Kong Auctions 2021

The 2021 Sotheby’s Hong Kong auctions are in full swing even as most of the world is still reeling from new lockdowns caused by the latest surge in COVID-19 infections. The pandemic has revealed a...

The Fervent Abstraction of Olivier Debré

One of the most intriguing exhibitions coming to London this summer is Olivier Debré: Fervent Abstraction, opening in late June at The Estorick Collection. My interest in the exhibition is in part...

World's Largest Painting is Now Worth $62 Million!

Sacha Jafri made headlines this month when his painting “The Journey of Humanity” became the fourth most expensive artwork (and the most expensive abstract artwork) ever sold by a living artist. M...

Can NFTs Benefit Digital Abstract Artists?

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) may be just another artistic medium, but as intangible instruments of questionable cultural and economic value, their embrace by mainstream culture could transform the w...

The Architecture of Abstraction - An Interview with Artist Robert Baribeau

Oregon-born, New York-based abstract artist Robert Baribeau has weathered innumerable aesthetic trends throughout his 47-year exhibition history. When his first New York show opened in 1979, at Al...

How Toko Shinoda Made Gems of Abstract Expressionism

Japanese artist Toko Shinoda has died at age 107. For more than 70 years, Shinoda has been celebrated for the abstract drawings and paintings she created using the ancient method of sumi-e, which ...

The Seminal American Painting: The Eighties Exhibition, Revisited

In 2018, I declared Who RU2 Day: Mass Media and the Fine Art Print, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the most important exhibition in America. Today, I again believe the most important American exh...

The Artist Who Could See Sound - Kandinsky on Google Arts and Culture

Wassily Kandinsky endeavored to achieve visually what musicians achieve with sound: the communication of complex feeling and emotion, without using narrative content. Kandinsky was not just curiou...

Quilting Histories - The Quilts of Gee's Bend

Two exhibitions of Gee’s Bend quilts - currently postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic - highlight the distinctive vision of an isolated group of artists descended from African American slaves. The G...

How Space Stands Still in Paul Feeley's Art

The art of Paul Feeley reminds me of the similarities great abstract art shares with great music. Just as one might hear the Gymnopédies of Erik Satie performed over and over again by different mu...

Ten Latinx Abstract Artists To Know Right Now

Reflecting the cultural diversity of its surroundings has been central to the mission of BRIC (formerly Brooklyn Information & Culture) since it was founded in 1979. Their latest exhibition, L...

The Art of Lines

A line is said to connect two points. It is a one-dimensional visual element. But what else can a line be? When does a line become a plane? When does a line become a shape? When does a line obtain...

Dusti Bongé, A Force of Abstract Expressionism

If you are like me, the first thing you thought when you saw the title of this article is, “Who is Dusti Bongé?” It is all too often the case that little connection exists between the talent of an...

Emily Mason, Between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting

A pair of exhibitions this winter are drawing fresh attention to the work of Emily Mason, an American colorist painter who died in 2019 at age 87. “She Sweeps with Many-Colored Brooms”: Paintings ...

Waiting (Patiently) for the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection

After five years of watching and waiting, Parisians were told this week that because of ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, they must wait just a bit longer before going inside the much anticipated Bou...

Jim Hodges Turns New York's Grand Central Into an Abstract Installation

Jim Hodges is one of those rare abstract artists whose work manages to express the most troubled aspects of the spirit of our time while simultaneously expressing its beauty. A new installation by...

6 Most Expensive Abstract Artworks of 2020

Works by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Gerhard Richter and Brice Marden were among the most expensive abstract artworks to sell at auction in 2020. But before we get to ...

Young-Il Ahn, Korean American Painter of Light and Surface, Dies at 86

Young-Il Ahn, an under appreciated master of abstract painting, whose work explored relationships be-tween color, reflected light, and human perception, died this month in Los Angeles at age 86. A...

The Nevelson Chapel, An Oasis of Silence

Rushing past the shops and office towers surrounding 54th and Lexington in Midtown Manhattan, it would easy not to notice you are in the presence of a meditative masterpiece of mid-century art. Th...

Jackie Saccoccio's Abstract Art on a Grand Scale

The beloved American abstract artist Jackie Saccoccio has died at age 56. According to a statement released by Van Doren Waxter, her longtime gallerist, Saccoccio had been battling cancer for the ...