Word: abstract
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...sunk all his money into one Thoroughbred," says assistant managing editor Christopher Porterfield, who oversaw the project. Happily for us, Hughes never pulled up lame. His insight and his vigorous prose perfectly frame the lavish illustrations, which range from a 17th century Puritan headstone to Jackson Pollock's energetic Abstract Expressionism...
...godly plainness, the desire for which was embedded so deep in early American identity, runs through much folk art. It is in the fiercely conservative center-square and diamond-in-the-square Lancaster Amish quilts, with their magnificent sobriety of color--a soft, swaddling minimalism, America's first major abstract art. And then, of course, there are the Shakers, who reached America in 1774 but whose celebrated furniture attained its apogee of design between 1820 and 1850. "Hands to work," said a Shaker motto, "hearts to God." Work was prayer, and nothing "worldly," meaning ostentatious or decorative, was allowed, beyond...
...Abstract Expressionism, the movement that set American art on the world map after World War II, was to a large extent the product of this deeply implanted instinct for the spiritual and the visionary. Sometimes it was drenched in a yearning for nature as a source of metaphor, as in the pantheistic paintings of Arshile Gorky; sometimes its sources lay hidden in the unconscious, as with Pollock. Except for de Kooning and Franz Kline, most of the Abexers--Gorky, Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still--saw the socially grounded activist...
...most radical departure in postwar American art was undoubtedly Jackson Pollock's drip painting--those skeins and lashes of pigment falling on the canvas with uncanny grace and energy. But his fellow Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning (1904-97) brought into painting a new sense of the contradictions of American culture and made erotic poetry out of them. De Kooning, the "slipping glimpser," as he called himself, was open to a constant stream of momentary impressions: smiles from Camel ads, shoulders from Ingres, pinups and Raphael--high and low, everywhere. In this way he became a bridge to a younger...
After Pop and side by side with it came impersonality--Minimalism, conceptual art and a vanguardist belief in the death of painting. But the artist who did most to break the mold of late-Modernist formalism in the '70s was a former Abstract Expressionist, Philip Guston (1913-80). His work over that decade redefined the terms of painting for a whole generation of young Americans, opening up the possibilities of the painted figure once more. In their time, Guston's paintings seemed like a kind of treason to the high-minded refusals of late Modernism, but therein lay their newness...