Art & design styles: Abstract Expressionism – The Bell Bookshop

Surrealists in New York

Emma — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An absorbing group biography revealing how exiles from war-torn France brought Surrealism to America, helping to shift the centre of the art world from Paris to New York and spark the movement that became Abstract Expressionism.

In 1957 the American artist Robert Motherwell made an unexpected claim: ‘I have only known two painting milieus well ? the Parisian Surrealists, with whom I began painting seriously in New York in 1940, and the native movement that has come to be known as “abstract expressionism”, but which genetically would have been more properly called “abstract surrealism”.’

Motherwell’s bold assertion, that Abstract Expressionism was neither new nor local, but born of a brief liaison between America and France, verged on the controversial. Surrealists in New York tells the story of this ‘liaison’ and the European exiles who bought Surrealism with them – an artistic exchange between the Old World and the New – centring on taciturn printmaker Stanley William Hayter and the legendary Atelier 17 print studio he founded. Here artists’ experiments literally pushed the boundaries of modern art. It was in Hayter’s studio that Jackson Pollock found the balance of freedom and control that would culminate in his distinctive drip paintings.

The impact of Max Ernst, André Masson, Louise Bourgeois and other noted émigrés on the work of Motherwell, Pollock, Mark Rothko and the American avant-garde has for too long been quietly written out of art history. Drawing on first-hand documents, interviews and archive materials, Charles Darwent brings to life the events and personalities from this crucial encounter. In so doing, he reveals a fascinating new perspective on the history of the art of the twentieth century.

I Paint What I Want to See

Emma — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Illuminating reflections on painting and drawing from one of the most revered artists of the twentieth century

‘Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light’

How does a painter see the world? Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Touching on work from across his career as well as that of his fellow artists and Renaissance heroes, this selection of his writings, talks and interviews draws together some of his most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and, above all, the nature of painting and drawing.

‘Among the most important, powerful and influential American painters of the last 100 years … he’s an art world hero’ Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine

‘Guston’s paintings make us think hard’ Aindrea Emelife, Guardian

Abstract Art

Emma — Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Since the early years of the 20th century, Western abstract art has fascinated, outraged and bewildered audiences. Its path to acceptance within the artistic mainstream was slow. Anna Moszynska traces the origins and evolution of abstract art, placing it in broad cultural context. She examines the pioneering work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian alongside the Russian Constructivists, the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus artists, contrasting European geometric abstraction in the 1930s and 40s with the emphasis on personal expression after the Second World War. Op, Kinetic and Minimal art of the postwar period is discussed and illustrated in detail, and new chapters bring the account up to date, exploring the crisis in abstraction of the 1980s and its revival – in paint, fabric, sculpture and installation – in recent decades. The first edition of this book, published in 1990, was acclaimed by reviewers; now in full colour and comprehensively revised, it will serve as the best introduction to abstract art for a new generation.

Sorcerers Apprentice

Emma — Thu, 07 Sep 2000 00:00:00 +0000

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by John Richardson, author of A Life of Picasso, is a richly entertaining memoir of life with the brilliant but controversial art expert, Douglas Cooper – a fiendish, colourful, Evelyn Waugh-like figure who single-handedly assembled the world’s most important private collection of Cubist paintings.John Richardson tells the story of their ill-fated but comical association, which began in London in 1949 and moved on to the Chateau de Castille, a colonnaded folly in Provence filled with masterpieces by Picasso, Braque, Leger and Juna Gris. Richardson unfurls an adventure lasting twelve years, encompassing artists and writers, collectors and the famous – Francis Bacon, Jean Cocteau, Dora Maar, Peggy Guggenheim and Anthony Blunt to name but a few. Central to the book is Richardson’s close friendship with Picasso, which coincided with the emergence of the artist’s new mistress, Jacqueline Roque, and which gave Richardson an inside view of the repercussions she would have on Picasso’s life and work.

With an extraordinary eye for detail and ear for scandal, Richardson has written a unique saga from behind the scenes of one of the richest periods in European art.

20000902