Magazine

Nicolete Gray's Subtle Contribution to Abstraction

Nicolete Gray was not an artist; she was an expert in typography. And yet her understanding of the semantics of visual languages led her to make a distinctive contribution to the history of abstra...

Divisionism and Its Influence on Color in Art

Divisionism was one of the most influential aesthetic developments of the 19th Century. It emerged out of the Post-Impressionist period, and is essentially a method of painting a picture in which ...

Charlotte Posenenske, a (Forgotten) Minimalist Master

Dia Art Foundation recently announced the acquisition of 155 sculptural elements by German Minimalist Charlotte Posenenske (1930 – 1985). Posenenske voluntarily left the art world at the height of...

Behind Joan Snyder’s Transcending Practice

Joan Snyder has accomplished something few artists do: she has become an icon. Usually in order to be considered iconic, an artist must focus on a single style, a single technique, or a single sig...

Why The Irascibles Rebelled Against the Art Establishment

The Irascibles, or The Irascible 18, was a group of American abstract artists who signed an open letter of protest addressed to Roland L. Redmond, then President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,...

The Monumental Art of Louise Nevelson

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Louise Nevelson, an artist who profoundly influenced 20th Century art and whose legacy still reverberates today. Nevelson is most widely known ...

Alfonso Ossorio and his Congregations of Found Objects

Alfonso Ossorio is almost a forgotten name today. And yet Ossorio was a key figure in the development of Post War Modernist Art. Born into a wealthy family, Ossorio was an avid art collector whose...

The Story of Hedda Sterne, Between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism

Hedda Sterne was a versatile and imaginative artist who experimented with dozens of distinct styles over the course of her long career. Yet her legacy has somehow become attached to a single style...

How Alexander Bogomazov Created the Cubo-Futurism

Alexander Bogomazov is an underappreciated hero of Modern Art. He was born in 1880 in a small village near the city of Kiev, Ukraine, when it was still part of the Russian Empire. Despite growing ...

The Abstract Figuration of Franz Marc

Franz Marc died at 36, but it is difficult to feel sorry for him. In his brief life he created a body of paintings that were so powerful that they are considered the height of German Expressionism...

The Glorious Austerity of Ben Nicholson

When Ben Nicholson died in 1982 at the age of 88, he left behind a troubled legacy in his homeland of England. On one hand, his abstract reliefs are considered by most British scholars to represen...

Jackson Pollock’s Convergence – A Masterpiece

“Convergence” by Jackson Pollock is an underappreciated masterpiece. Pollock painted it in 1952, the same year he finished “Blue Poles,” which became one of the most famous paintings of his career...

Arthur Dove, One of America’s Greatest Painters

The name Arthur Dove may not be as well known today as the name Georgia O’Keeffe, but the two painters and their oeuvres share a great deal in common. Both were on the forefront of early 20th Cent...

Why Harold Rosenberg Was Seminal for Abstract Expressionism

Harold Rosenberg (1906 – 1978) is the art critic most often credited with helping Abstract Expressionism gain a foothold as a mainstream American art movement. But it could also be said that Abstr...

Marsden Hartley, The Painter of Maine

The American painter Marsden Hartley (1877 – 1943) is referred to today as “The Painter of Maine.” He wasn’t given that title by critics or his fans, but rather Hartley gave himself that moniker l...

What is Rayonism?

Rayonism was a Russian avant-garde art movement founded by the painters Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov around 1911. The movement was based on the concept that material objects are really ...

Examining Theo van Doesburg’s Counter Compositions

When people think of the Dutch art movement De Stijl, they tend to think of its most famous representative: Piet Mondrian. Yet Mondrian was by no means its only founder. Theo van Doesburg was equa...

The Power of Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow

Piet Mondrian painted “Composition with Red Blue and Yellow” in 1930. It marks a subtle turning point in the evolution of his distinctive, singular style of painting, which he called Neo-Plasticis...

Why Naum Gabo Was Instrumental for 20th Century Sculpture

Naum Gabo was one of the quintessential “important artists” of the 20th Century. He was shaped by his time, and he developed an artistic position that shaped his time, and ours, in return. What ma...

Achieving Luminescence - Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow

Mark Rothko may be the most misunderstood 20th Century artist. His work is almost exclusively discussed in terms of its formal qualities, like color and shape, yet Rothko insisted his paintings we...

The Rhythm of Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie

“Broadway Boogie Woogie” (1943) was one of the final paintings Piet Mondrian created before he died. Austere in some ways, chaotic in others, the painting is simultaneously an image of movement an...

How the 9th Street Art Exhibition Stepped Out of the New York Art Canons in 1951

Some people say the 9th Street Art Exhibition was a radical act of culture jamming. Others say it was an act of desperation initiated by a bunch of starving artists who had nowhere else to show th...

On Abstraction and Empathy, Wilhelm Worringer’s Fundamental Work

For anyone interested in understanding how spirituality came to be associated with abstract art, “Abstraction and Empathy: Essay in the Psychology of Style” (1907), by Wilhelm Worringer, is an ess...

Why Was Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square Painting So Seminal?

For the past several generations, art historians have been telling people that the painting “Black Square” (1915), by Kazimir Malevich, was the most important, most seminal painting of the 20th Ce...

Mary Weatherford’s Art Journey from the West to the East Coast

The word that comes to my mind when looking at the neon paintings Mary Weatherford has been making recently is, “Eureka.” They have that inexpressible something—a sense of wonderment, a shock of l...

How Paul Klee’s Paintings inspired American Artists

It is often said that Abstract Expressionism was the first purely American art movement. It allegedly represented the first time American artists, exemplified by members of the New York School, br...

James McNabb - Seeing Cityscapes in Wood

James McNabb is either living out the ultimate fantasy or the ultimate nightmare of every young artist in the world. Several years back, McNabb created a collection of sculptural pieces out of rec...

The Abstract Realities of Photographer J Henry Fair

Our natural environment appears to be changing at a horrifying clip. And few people on this planet are more aware of exactly what the appearance of a rapidly changing world looks like than J. Henr...

Futurism - Art of the Future Past

Abstraction demands imagination, and imagination demands freedom. Beautiful freedom, that which makes honest self-expression possible. Terrible freedom, that which says anything goes. Freedom was ...

Abstraction and Nature in Ellsworth Kelly Paintings

When an artist becomes famous for making a particular type of work, prime examples of that type of work tend to become the most valuable pieces in the artist’s oeuvre. Perhaps that’s why so many o...

The Beauty Found in Cubist Portraits

In 1878 Margaret Wolfe Hamilton, in her novel Molly Bawn, coined one of humanity’s most beloved sentiments: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Three years later Picasso was born. Though Hamil...

The Psychology of Colors - Why Certain Colors Appeal?

Colour is able to influence our state of well-being, how we feel and how we enjoy life. Although much of the appreciation and perception of colours may of course be dependent on personal experienc...