Full Description
Burst! Abstract Painting After 1945 looks at the close, but previously unexplored relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. Through texts and close to 100 illustrations, the book describes a vital creative exchange across the Atlantic that would entirely redefine painting. Big, expansive, paint-splattered surfaces; spontaneous actions captured on canvas; new ideas of freedom. A story of post-war recovery and Transatlantic dialogue. On both sides of the ocean, society was reacting to the horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the coming of the atom bomb. The book shows how artists searched for new ways to deal with these shattering events. With works by Jean Dubuffet, Natalia Dumitresco, Helen Frankenthaler, Asger Jorn, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, Hedda Sterne and Clyfford Still, and more.
About the Author
Mary Gabriel is the author of Ninth Street Women. Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art (2018), which won the 2022 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize for narrative nonfiction. Gabriel’s previous book, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull (1998) and The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (2002). Her latest book, Madonna: A Rebel Life, will be published in October 2023. Gabriel worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and now lives in Ireland. Karen Kurczynski is Professor of modern and contemporary History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (Rout-ledge, 2014) and Reanimating Art: The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe (Routledge, 2020), and curator of the exhibitions Human Animals: The Art of Cobra (UMASS University Museum of Contemporary Art and NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 2016) and Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival (co-curated with Karen Friis Herbsleb, Museum Jorn, 2014). Kurczynski has published widely on Asger Jorn, the European Cobra movement, the Situationist International, and contemporary art. Her current research focuses on drawing as an inter-media practice in relation to politics, race, feminism, and decoloniality in art since the 1990s. Jeremy Lewison is an independent curator. He was previously Director of Collections at Tate, London. He has published extensively on Abstract Expressionism and 20th-century American and British art and was the London curator of the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1999. At the Tate he was also the curator of surveys of work by Sol LeWitt (1986), Anish Kapoor (1991), Brice Marden (1992), and Ben Nicholson (1993). Since 2002 he has organized major exhibitions in Europe and the USA including Alice Neel: Painted Truths (2010), Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings (2011), and Alice Neel: Painter of Modern Life (2016). He was the consultant to the Estate of Alice Neel from 2002 to 2020. He is currently working on a book about the British painter Paul Huxley. Daniel Zamani received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2017, with an AHRC-funded thesis on the interplay of occult and medieval themes in André Breton’s work. He was appointed curator at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam in 2018, where he manages its extensive collection of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Exhibitions he has curated or co-curated include the shows Matisse—Bonnard: Long Live Painting! (2017), Color and Light: The Neo-Impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross (2019), Monet: Places (2020), The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945 (2022), and Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (2022). Zamani has also published widely in the field of 19th and 20th-century painting, especially on Surrealism.
