Abstract Expressionism

Movements in Modern Art

by Debra Bricker Balken

In this incisive study, the curator and writer Debra Bricker Balken examines the work of the leading artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. At the same time she examines the myths surrounding the movement, the variation in the motivation and practice of artists grouped by art historians under the same heading, and the role played by critics in the movement's reception, both at the time and up to the present day.
Of equal value to the general reader and the art historical scholar alike, Balken's text is a valuable addition to the literature on one of the most influential of all twentieth-century art movements.

Genres: Art

80 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2005

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A so-so overview of this initially confusing assemblage of semi-related artists. I started reading about the Abstract Expressionists because of my interest in Morton Feldman, who described their processes as having greater influence on his music than most composers past or present. To that end, I have a better sense of the ways the two art forms interacted. However, even as a slim, bare-bones overview, the book was pretty confusing. Admittedly, I don't read a lot of art books, but a source of minor difficulty in reading was the author's tendency to rattle off long lists of artists being compared to the artist currently being discussed. Many of the artists in said lists hadn't yet been described, and contained no visual examples. For example, a paragraph might say, "Like Rothko, Motherwell, Kline, and Mitchell, de Kooning believed..." though we hadn't seen or heard anything about Kline or Mitchell yet. Also, due to the book's layout (which couldn't have been done any better, admittedly [EDIT: see David Anfam's overview for a better method of tagging pictures]), example illustrations often found themselves two and three pages ahead of the point in the text at which they were being described. I expect these are largely unalterable issues, however, so my complaints are not pointed. Stil, for a slim 75 page book, the text did not exactly race by, and I found myself reading passages again and again, trying to connect this large list of primary characters logically in my mind. If this is meant as a truly remedial-level introduction to the Abstract Expressionists, perhaps a one-page "profile" of each of the major players (with one representative illustration) at the beginning or end would have been helpful.