Women of Abstract Expressionism

Women of Abstract Expressionism
Author: Joan Marter
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300208421

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.

Abstract Expressionist Women Painters

Abstract Expressionist Women Painters
Author: Françoise S. Puniello
Publisher:
Total Pages: 384
Release: 1996
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The first in-depth resource on the American artists Elaine de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Ethel Schwabacher.

Ninth Street Women

Ninth Street Women
Author: Mary Gabriel
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 944
Release: 2018-09-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 031622619X

Five women revolutionize the modern art world in postwar America in this "gratifying, generous, and lush" true story from a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist (Jennifer Szalai, New York Times). Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless others to come. Gutsy and indomitable, Lee Krasner was a hell-raising leader among artists long before she became part of the modern art world's first celebrity couple by marrying Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning, whose brilliant mind and peerless charm made her the emotional center of the New York School, used her work and words to build a bridge between the avant-garde and a public that scorned abstract art as a hoax. Grace Hartigan fearlessly abandoned life as a New Jersey housewife and mother to achieve stardom as one of the boldest painters of her generation. Joan Mitchell, whose notoriously tough exterior shielded a vulnerable artist within, escaped a privileged but emotionally damaging Chicago childhood to translate her fierce vision into magnificent canvases. And Helen Frankenthaler, the beautiful daughter of a prominent New York family, chose the difficult path of the creative life. Her gamble paid off: At twenty-three she created a work so original it launched a new school of painting. These women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In Ninth Street Women, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping not just postwar America but the future.

Fierce Poise

Fierce Poise
Author: Alexander Nemerov
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0525560203

A National Book Critics Circle finalist • One of Vogue's Best Books of the Year A dazzling biography of one of the twentieth century's most respected painters, Helen Frankenthaler, as she came of age as an artist in postwar New York “The magic of Alexander Nemerov's portrait of Helen Frankenthaler in Fierce Poise is that it reads like one of Helen's paintings. His poetic descriptions of her work and his rich insights into the years when Helen made her first artistic breakthroughs are both light and lush, seemingly easy and yet profound. His book is an ode to a truly great artist who, some seventy years after this story begins, we are only now beginning to understand.” ―Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew―and left her mark on―the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions. Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments--from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg―comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the painter herself. Inspired by Pollock and the other male titans of abstract expressionism but committed to charting her own course, Frankenthaler was an artist whose talent was matched only by her unapologetic determination to distinguish herself in a man's world. Fierce Poise is an exhilarating ride through New York's 1950s art scene and a brilliant portrait of a young artist through the moments that shaped her.

Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner
Author: Eleanor Nairne
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 050009408X

A richly illustrated monograph on the life and work of Lee Krasner, one of the twentieth century’s most inspiring women artists and a pioneer of abstract expressionism. In 1984, Lee Krasner (1908–1984) became one of the few women artists to have been given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She quipped about her belated recognition: “I was a woman, Jewish, a widow, a damn good painter, thank you, and a little too independent.” One of the original pioneers of abstract expressionism, Krasner has for too long been eclipsed by her husband, Jackson Pollock. In fact, his death in 1956 marked her renaissance as an artist. Coinciding with a major exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery, Lee Krasner features an outstanding selection of her most important paintings, collages, and works on paper, contextualized by photography from the postwar period, an illustrated chronology, and an unpublished interview with her biographer Gail Levin. This richly illustrated monograph is a comprehensive survey of the work of one of the twentieth century’s most dynamic artists.

Three Women Artists

Three Women Artists
Author: Amy Von Lintel
Publisher: American Wests, Sponsored by W
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2022
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781648430152

Offering a fresh perspective on the influence of the American southwest--and particularly West Texas--on the New York art world of the 1950s, Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West aims to establish the significance of itinerant teaching and western travel as a strategic choice for women artists associated with traditional centers of artistic authority and population in the eastern United States. The book is focused on three artists: Elaine de Kooning, Jeanne Reynal, and Louise Nevelson. In their travels to and work in the High Plains, they were inspired to innovate their abstract styles and introduce new critical dialogues through their work. These women traveled west for the same reason artists often travel to new places: they found paid work, markets, patrons, and friends. This Middle American context offers us a "decentered" modernism--demanding that we look beyond our received truths about Abstract Expressionism. Authors Amy Von Lintel and Bonnie Roos demonstrate that these women's New York avant-garde, abstract styles were attractive to Panhandle-area ranchers, bankers, and aspiring art students. Perhaps as importantly, they show that these artists' aesthetics evolved in light of their regional experiences. Offering their work as a supplement and corrective to the frameworks of patriarchal, East Coast ethnocentrism, Von Lintel and Roos make the case for Texas as influential in the national art scene of the latter half of the twentieth century.

The Paintings of Joan Mitchell

The Paintings of Joan Mitchell
Author: Jane Livingston
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2002
Genre: Abstract expressionism
ISBN: 0520235703

This exquisitely illustrated volume and the exhibition that it accompanies restore Joan Mitchell to her rightful place in the history of American artists--one of the few women among the first-rank Abstract Expressionist painters. 145 illustrations, 85 in color.

Willem de Kooning Nonstop

Willem de Kooning Nonstop
Author: Rosalind E. Krauss
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022626744X

This image-rich essay offers a radical rethinking of the ab-ex painter Willem de Kooning by one of the greatest American art critics. Many have written about de Kooning s startling canvases of monstrous women, but none have approached them this way. In prose as energetic as her subject, Rosalind Krauss demonstrates how de Kooning could never stop reworking the same subject. Deploying one telling image after another, she shows that, from the early days of his career, de Kooning nearly always (1) worked with a tripartite vertical structure, (2) projected his own figure and point of view as the (male) artist into the painting, and (3) was compelled to produce the female figure, legs splayed obscenely or knees projected into the viewer s space in practically everything he made. Hidden in plain sight even in paintings of highways, boats, and landscapes, Woman is always there. How could we have missed this?"

Anni Albers

Anni Albers
Author: Ann Coxon
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300237251

A long-overdue reassessment of one of the most important and influential woman artists working at midcentury Anni Albers (1899–1994) was a German textile designer, weaver, and printmaker, and among the leading pioneers of 20th-century modernism. Although she has heavily influenced generations of artists and designers, her contribution to modernist art history has been comparatively overlooked, especially in relation to that of her husband, Josef. In this groundbreaking and beautifully illustrated volume, Albers’s most important works are examined to fully explore and redefine her contribution to 20th-century art and design and highlight her significance as an artist in her own right. Featured works—from her early activity at the Bauhaus as well as from her time at Black Mountain College, and spanning her entire fruitful career—include wall hangings, designs for commercial use, drawings and studies, jewelry, and prints. Essays by international experts focus on key works and themes, relate aspects of Albers’s practice to her seminal texts On Designing and On Weaving, and identify broader contextual material, including examples of the Andean textiles that Albers collected and in which she found inspiration for her understanding of woven thread as a form of language. Illuminating Albers’s skill as a weaver, her material awareness, and her deep understanding of art and design, this publication celebrates an artist of enormous importance and showcases the timeless nature of her creativity.