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 ...

“You can talk about light, scale, depth, beauty, color, shape, form, perspective,” the great mid-century abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler once said, “but it’s no formula of those things that make ...

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 ...

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 ...

Earlier this year, “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” at the Brooklyn Museum dropped like a bomb. Mining a seam of engaged, truth-telling art by black women from the Civil Rights ...

“We must not be afraid of this word ‘abstract.’ All art is primarily abstract.” Korean art historian Kim Boggi quoted British art historian and philosopher Herbert Read (1893-1968) in the introduction ...

Abstract art has its roots in early human civilisation. Cultures across the globe have used non-figurative, but highly symbolic, decoration for centuries. While abstract art became the dominant art ...

František Kupka “Plans by Color (Woman in Triangles)” (1911) oil on canvas, 109 x 99,5 cm, collection Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne achat ...

Abstract art often poses a challenge for many viewers due to its lack of connection to the physical world. Like other modernist art forms, it raises questions about how we understand and appreciate ...

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 ...