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 ...

Note the sarcasm of a New Yorker magazine cartoon from the early 1950s: Two seemingly well-to-do gentlemen are viewing an abstract painting when one says snobbishly to the other, “His spatter is ...

Thomas Downing, “Center Grid” (ca. 1960), detail (Image by the author for Hyperallergic) WASHINGTON, DC — The magazine selection in the visitors’ waiting room at the George Bush Center for ...

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 ...

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 ...

Some artists — young and old alike — just don’t like realistic drawing. The task of portraying something exactly as it appears in real life can be daunting, and many find the process frustrating. For ...

From shoes to New Yorker covers, the power of a strong visual aesthetic is at the center of this beautiful documentary series. Despite its title, “Abstract” is relatively easy to grasp. The upcoming ...