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In Abstract Art Against Autonomy, Mark Cheetham provides a revolutionary account of abstraction in the visual arts since the decline of the formalist paradigms in the 1960s. He claims that abstract work remains a vital contributor to contemporary visual culture, but that it performs in a way that is different from its predecessors of the early and mid-twentieth century and cannot adequately be assessed without new models of understanding. Cheetham posits that abstraction has reacted to paradigms of purity with practices of impurity. By examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance, and cure, Cheetham provides an opportunity to rethink paradigmatic genres - the monochrome and the mirror - and to link in new ways the work of artists whose work extends and complicates the tradition of abstract art, including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley. General Idea, and Taras Polataiko. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

no title
A very small slim volume of some text and 24 pictures of oils.Written about the middle of the 50s, I suspect the colors have faded.Most I had never heard of, but Pollack is included and so is de Kooning, when surely they were not famous yet. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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This issue of "Art and Design" aims to explore a visual language that evokes the abstract concept, yet remains erotic. It includes: invited "love letters" from many writers, including Kathy Acker, Peter Ackroyd, Fiona Pitt-Kethley and Susan Sontag; work by artists including Janie Antoine, Matthew Barney, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Gary Hill and Rebecca Horn; and writings by Thomas McEvilley, among others. ... Read more

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Rarely is an artist so closely associated with a single work as is Jay DeFeo with her monumental painting The Rose. Begun in the late 1950s, when DeFeo, a central figure of the Beat generation of San Francisco, was just starting to garner widespread national recognition, the visionary work occupied the artist for eight years. Massive in scale, layered with nearly two thousand pounds of paint, the overpowering painting was already famous before its first exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum. It was next exhibited in San Francisco, then stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it languished for twenty-five years before a historic conservation restored it to public view. The Rose now resides in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This volume is the first major study of The Rose in particular and of Jay DeFeo in general. In the collection, eleven distinguished art and cultural historians--Bill Berkson, Niccolo Caldararo, Richard Candida Smith, Walter Hopps, Lucy R. Lippard, Greil Marcus, Sandra S. Phillips, Marla Prather, Carter Ratcliff, David A. Ross, and Martha Sherrill--unfold the story of the creation, as well as the tricky and painstaking rescue, of DeFeo's radiant masterpiece. While providing new material on The Rose and exposing many myths surrounding both the artist and her great work, these essays also place Jay DeFeo in relation to artists of her time, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, and Eva Hesse. The book, which adds significantly to the scholarship of postwar American art, includes nearly eighty halftones, thirteen color plates, and Judith Dunham's detailed Rose-related chronology.

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Customer Reviews (1)

Jay DeFeo Lives
Jay DeFeo spent many years of her life painting one picture, first called DEATHROSE, then just plain THE ROSE, and it grew so heavy with paint that it had to be hauled out of her studio on Fillmore Street in San Francisco on a crane.The proceedings were filmed by the artist Bruce Conner, a longtime friend of DeFeo's, and assembled by him into a film called THE WHITE ROSE: JAY DEFEO's PAINTING REMOVED BY ANGELIC HOSTS (actually Bekins movers).

After a few showings, the painting was stored at the San Francisco Art Institute and eventually plastered over to stabilize its shifting masses of paint and also to protect it from student graffiti.For many years it hid behind this plaster and its absence became a giant statement.DeFeo herself began to think of Conner's film as a kind of displaced substitute for her work, and Jane Green and Leah Levy, the editors of the present volume, are astute enough to let this fact speak for itself.In a great act of showmanship, Lisa Phillips, a Whitney curator, not only restored the painting but bought it for the Whitney where it can be viewed today (sometimes).

This book contains many essays by people who were close to DeFeo, as well as some by those who never met her.Bill Berkson's essay imagines the 1960 "Sixteen Americans" show by Dorothy Miller (which featured DeFeo, as well as her husband Wally Hedrick, in addition to giving national exposure to the likes of Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg), but was missing THE ROSE, which DeFeo did not send saying it was not yet finished.Lucy Lippard's essay considers similarities between DeFeo's production and that of her contemporaries Eva Hesse and the Lees--Lee Bontecue and Lee Lozano, relating her depressing years of inactivity (1966-1970) to the nascent women's art movement.It is provocative to say the least.The University of California Press has printed many fine photos to go with the book, including some color images which I had never seen. ... Read more

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A free-spirited wave of creative energy swept through the San Francisco art community after World War II. Challenging accepted modes of painting, Abstract Expressionists produced highly experimental works that jolted the public out of its postwar complacency. Susan Landauer's comprehensive examination of this dynamic movement provides the first clear picture of the artists and influences that came together in San Francisco's invigorating world of Abstract Expressionism.
Landauer argues that Abstract Expressionism resulted from a broad collective impulse rather than the inspiration of a small band of New York artists. Documenting the interchanges between the East and West Coasts, she cites areas of mutual influence and shows the impact of San Francisco on the New York School, including artists such as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt. San Francisco's Beat poets, Dixieland jazz musicians, and the area's stunning vistas were essential parts of Abstract Expressionism, as were artistic and spiritual contacts with Asia.
Under Douglas MacAgy and Clyfford Still, the California School of Fine Arts became the undisputed center of vanguard abstraction on the West Coast. Artists such as Edward Corbett, Jay DeFeo, James Budd Dixon, Frank Lobdell, and Hassel Smith produced gritty, provocative images whose impact extended well beyond California. Landauer also notes the importance of Grace L. McCann Morley, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who opened the museum to major Abstract Expressionist figures, and Jermayne MacAgy, who brought local and international artists together.
Enlivened by oral histories, Landauer's book is a rewarding exploration of a vital period in modern art. Richly illustrated with 96 color plates, it celebrates the energy and lasting impact of a special time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Best in field
Well done, gave me a full understanding of the subject, very well written, great book to quote. ... Read more

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Abstraction has not only been an important 20th-century art form, it has also given rise to one of the most significant and influential schools of criticism. This work seeks to offer different interpretations of abstraction. Texts by important current philosophers and critics, including Jean-Francois Lyotard, Stan Allen, John Rajchman, Andrew Benjamin, Maia Damianovic, John Lechte, Nick Millett and David Moos accompany features on work by some of the leading artists working currently in the field of abstraction, including Albert Ayme, Lydia Dona, David Reed, Fabian Marcaccio, Therese Oulton and Jessica Stockholder. ... Read more

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The ancient art of the Andes achieved its most sophisticated expression in weaving and painted pottery, as well as stone sculpture. Yet these objects have long been dismissed as "craft" items by observers for whom "art" means paintings on canvas and other manifestations of the European art tradition. In this major, paradigm-shifting book, first published in Buenos Aires in 1989 as Piedra abstracta, César Paternosto offers the first comprehensive analysis of ancient Andean art in its own terms. Drawing all manifestations of Andean art--textiles, pottery, stone sculpture, carved rock outcrops, and the famous lines in the Nazca desert--into one coherent whole, he persuasively argues that these were the art media that fulfilled the symbol-making needs of a society that made no distinction between "art" and "craft." Challenging the notion that abstraction is a development of the modern West, Paternosto reveals its deep roots as an indigenous American tradition and shows how that tradition reverberates in the work of twentieth-century artists such as Joaquín Torres García, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Josef Albers. This section of the book, significantly expanded from the Spanish original, adds an important new chapter to the art history of the Americas. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, The Stone and the Thread unveils the masterpieces of ancient Andean art that have been long secluded in anthropological and natural history museums. It will open up new ways of seeing indigenous American art for a wide readership. A resident of New York City, César Paternosto is a leading abstract artist who has exhibited widely in the Americas, Europe, and Japan. ... Read more

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Sean Scully has made the motif of stripes his own, offering through them a sustained exploration of the nature of human relationships. We learn to read his stripes and colored shapes as meditations on, for example, union and disunion, dependence and independence, or harmony and disharmony. But because his images are not figurative, they can seek a universal appeal, color and form being understood by all cultures. This book by Brian Kennedy, Director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, includes interviews with the artist about his career and, in particular, his preoccupation with stripes, as well as essays on the stripe in Western abstract painting and in Sean Scully's work of the past four decades. Scully, described as "the modern-day savior of abstract art" by the Wall Street Journal, is one of the most esteemed abstract painters working today, and the stripe is the key motif in his works. Scully is known for painting bold patterns of vertical, horizontal, and occasionally diagonal stripes in blocks of layered color as a means of exploring the nature of human relationships. He is inspired by aspects of everyday life, from the constructed grids of skyscrapers, strung-out suburbs, railway lines, motorways, and telephone lines to airplane routes, walls, and garage doors. Scully's pursuit of multiple variations on the theme of the painted stripe, bar, and block is consistent with his assertion that "the stripe is a signifier of modernism." In earlier centuries stripes were used to separate outsiders from the rest of society. In the nineteenth century, artists began to adopt the stripe as a symbol of their status as bohemians, and in the early twentieth century, stripes became a mode of expression for many artists, including especially Piet Mondrian, Robert Motherwell, and Frank Stella. Today, the stripe is ubiquitous in society. Sean Scully has made stripes his own, developing through them a visual language based on a sustained examination of classical painting traditions. Art critic Arthur Danto comments on Scully's stripes, "His edges have a tactile beauty. These stripes have a living quality." ... Read more

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Offers a profile of the German artist, shows examples of his paintings and photographs, and discusses his approach to art. ... Read more

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Over fifty years have passed since Abstract Expressionism burst onto the New York City art scene, quickly attaining singular prominence as the first school in American painting to declare its independence from European styles. New assessments of its impact and importance continue to emerge. Yet, while much has been written about the movement’s broad range of stylistic diversity, its sociological and psychological dimensions, and its cultural significance in the United States, little attention has been paid to the interaction of its artists on the international scene. Abstract Expressionism: The International Context fills this gap by providing an in-depth exploration of this truly global art movement.

Bringing together fifteen original and path-breaking essays by world-class authorities on Abstract Expressionism as well as by younger scholars, this anthology looks beyond the canonical painters to explore the broader connections among abstract artists of the post–World War II era.Moving from the margins to the center, the essays recognize the contributions of artists working far beyond New York City. Topics include Jackson Pollock’s contact with Mexican muralists and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism for leftist artists in Latin America, the relevance of Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett as sources of philosophical thought, the significance of northern European CoBrA painters such as Asger Jorn, the impact of Japanese Gutai artists, and connections with the revolutionary art of Italy, Belgium, and France. Abstract Expressionism is also described as a model for contemporaneous developments in the former Soviet Union.

As the first book to consider the movement in relation to post–World War II abstraction on four continents, this book brings a fresh perspective to this widely studied school of painting. Scholars and students alike will find this anthology essential reading in creating a more complete and nuanced understanding of Abstract Expressionism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Informative, yet a bit of a disappointment
As an artist,primarily an abstract artist,it is always frustrating to me that art books contain so many black and white pictures.
I understand that it is due to the cost,but what is an abstract painting without color?
Any painting is more enlightening, educational and pleasing with the use of color.
This book ,in spite of the black and white pictures is a good reference book.

super book!
This is an excellent summation of the dynamic worldwide influence of abstact expressionism. It is well written and carefully edited. I would recommend it for collectors as well as academics and art professionals. ... Read more