Portrait and a Dream

~~Before his defection to Düsseldorf, West Germany, in 1961, Gerhard Richter appeared to be a committed Socialist Realist wall painter in Dresden, East Germany. He had completed works that helped mythologize the state and its repressive policies, and he...

Despite continuing references in the scholarly and the popular press to the lasting artistic and cultural relevance of Abstract Expressionism, no comprehensive collection of essays related to this movement has been published since David and Cecile Shapiro’s Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record and Clifford Ross’s Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics appeared in 1990...

If he wasn’t exactly an “action painter” like Jackson Pollock, was Robert Motherwell a “mythmaker” in the sense of his other colleagues Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, all of whom reinvestigated archetypes and ancient motivations in their initial...

Although several of the New York School painters took pains to make it clear, at certain stages of their careers, that their art engaged “the unconscious,” none pursued this engagement more insistently than Jackson Pollock. As his friend and colleague James Brooks put it, Pollock’s “break into the irrational was the most violent of any of the artists’, and his exploration of the unconscious, the most daring and persistent.” Although persistent, Pollock’s engagement with the unconscious was by no …