In his preface to Abstract Art: A Global History—arriving this month from Thames & Hudson—Joseph Low (“Pepe”) Karmel, a professor of art history at New York University, writes that the goal of the ...

Abstract art often gets an undeserved bad rap. Many people famously dismissed Jackson Pollock‘s signature drip paintings in the 1950s, for instance, as being something that a trained chimpanzee could ...

It is hard to tell if abstract painting actually got worse [after the 1960s], if it merely stagnated, or if it simply looked bad in comparison to the hopes its own accomplishments had raised. —Frank ...

The primary authors of this post are Dirk B. Walther (University of Toronto) and Claudia Damiano (KU Leuven) Have you ever stood before an abstract painting, feeling a surge of emotion but struggling ...

Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and ...

FOR half a century art critics have undertaken to address not a sophisticated minority like the readers of literary magazines, but the mass of unbelievers to whom twentieth-century art is a mystery or ...