Joan Mitchell (1926-1992) was one of the few women among the first-rank Abstract Expressionist painters. She outpaced all but a handful of her male mentors and counterparts, while only Lee Krasner stands as a possible rival among her female counterparts. Although well regarded by critics, fellow artists, and the general public, Mitchell's achievement has never received full recognition; her work has not been shown in New York for more than twenty-five years. This exquisitely illustrated volume and the exhibition that it accompanies restore the artist to her rightful place in the history of American painting. Spanning Mitchell's entire career, from early works of 1951 until the year of her death, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell includes a wealth of breathtaking paintings, both intimate and grand in scale, that reveal Mitchell's fierce dedication to her art and reflect both the struggles and the artistic triumphs she achieved with her distinctive vision of Abstract Expressionism.Jane Livingston draws on the artist's personal papers, including her journals and extensive correspondence, to provide an illuminating interpretation of the artist and her work. Linda Nochlin, who was a friend of Mitchell, discusses the artist's experience working in a field dominated by men. A third text by Whitney Curator Yvette Lee explores a distinctive and little-known suite of paintings entitled La Grande Vallée, created in 1983-84. Mounted with the full cooperation of the estate of Joan Mitchell, the exhibition contains many paintings rarely seen before--and in some cases never publicly exhibited. This book includes an exhibition history; an extensive artist bibliography of related monographs, reviews, and filmed interviews; and color plates and listing of all the works appearing in the exhibition.

A specifically German artistic revolution In six chapters - The Brücke Group of Artists, Northern German Expressionism, The Blaue Reiter, Rhenish Expressionism, The City and Expressionism in Vienna - this publication deals with a specifically German artistic revolution, a phenomenon that has quite accurately been described as "the most significant German contribution to 20th century European art". Beside a number of famous names - Beckmann, Heckel, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, Macke, Marc, Mueller, Nolde, Schiele and Schmidt-Rottluff - the author also introduces several lesser-known artists, such as Campendonk, Felixmüller, Meidner, Morgner, Münter and von Werefkin, with some representative works.

This magnificent volume is the first comprehensive study of the influence of Abstract Expressionism on printmaking.

The first comprehensive presentation of Emily Mason's work, this volume brings long-overdue attention to the nearly fifty-year career of this contemporary American artist.Grounded in the early influence of late 1940s and 1950s Abstract Expressionism, Mason's ongoing exploration of the expressive possibilities of abstraction has produced paintings of a broad emotional range. The artist's work is driven, above all, by color. Her combinations of raucous, vibrant hues and her masterful tonal calibrations imbue her canvases with mysterious luminosity. Also carefully calibrated are Mason's compositions—structures that delicately balance spontaneity and control, impulse and restraint. To achieve such harmonies of color and composition, Mason relies on an intuitive approach. She comes to each canvas free from intention and open to chance, allowing the process of painting to guide the evolution of each painting.Emily Mason: The Fifth Element includes eighty reproductions of the artist's oil paintings, along with a selection of prints, chosen to show the span of her impressive career and to highlight her most significant works. David Ebony's text brings Mason's life and work into focus, showing how her unique painterly vocabulary has proven that the expressive possibilities of abstract art are indeed boundless. 86 color illustrations.

During the 1920s and '30s and until the end of World War II, a distinctly American form of Expressionism evolved. Most of the artists in this movement, children of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, African-Americans and other outsiders to American mainstream culture, grew up in the urban ghettoes of the East Coast or Chicago. Their art was sympathetic to the disposessed and reflected a deep concern with the lives of working people. Providing a look at this art - and the beginnings of a new movement, Abstract Expressionism, which followed it - cultural historian Bram Dijkstra offers insights into the roots of painting in modern America. Dijkstra examines the emphasis these socially conscious artists brought to the pursuit of the American ideals of equality dignity and justice for all. Provocatively he suggests that Abstract Expressionism came to be used as part of a backlash, deliberately fostered by conservative political and corporate interests, against the socially conscious Expressionist paintings and the WPA projects supported by the Roosevelt administration.

The 13 essays in this sophisticated book, the catalog of an exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, in Venice, cover extensive historical and philosophical ground: expressionism in war and revolution, expressionist architecture, expressionist manifestoes and critical writing, and more. Although the text is trapped in eyestrain-size type and printed in dense blocks, it's worth getting out the magnifying glass and reading it anyway, flipping back and forth to the many finely reproduced color plates for more immediate rewards. The sections on expressionist architecture are especially good, with plates showing Rudolf Steiner's Goetheanum in sketches and at completion. The various connections among Antonio Gaudi, Peter Behrens, Erich Mendelssohn, and others are thoughtfully delineated.

Brus, Muehl, Nitsch, Schwarzkogler: four artists who, during the Sixties, became notorious for pushing the definition of art to an extreme which has yet to be surpassed. Variously fined, gaoled, and forced into exile, they were ignored by the art establishment of the day, only to be hailed in recent years as one of the most outstanding and unique contibutions to post-war art in Europe. Exaggeration and myth still obscure their activities, however, and their actual motives for an art centred on the examination of taboos, the "hidden" secrets of the body, the aesthetics of destruction and the possibilities of regeneration have remained elusive. Subsequent generations of artists have claimed them as their forefathers or unscrupulously borrowed their ideas (but without approaching the intensity of their actions), and while international exhibitions have reclaimed their work for the visual arts, their writings have remained largely unpublished since they first appeared! in small mimeographed editions, or are long since out of print. This anthology of photo-documentation and writings — which includes manifestos, theoretical texts, action scores, even police and psychiatric reports — has been assembled in collaboration with the three surviving artists. It provides the first comprehensive survey of their work, and for the first time illuminates their differing intentions. These texts employ humour and vitriol to elaborate a position in total opposition to contemporary social, political and aesthetic mores. A lucid narrative emerges of a determined exploration of these conditioning factors, by means of an art that used life itself as material.

Edvard Munch is Norway's most important painter and graphic artist and the only one to exercise a decisive influence on European art. A forerunner of Expressionism, his works were influenced by an early life tortured by sickness, insanity, rejection and guilt and he worked through his neuroses in his paintings. With the greatest consistency throughout his life, Munch created a life's work which would not only enable the deepest problems of the century to live on into our time, but also says something about human existence, which couldn't be put into words. Right up to the last days of his life, Munch shed light on anxiety as an existential problem. This beautifully produced survey of the painter from the Curators at the Munch Museum in Oslo is a rich exploration of his life, his paintings and his graphic works. Both famous and lesser-known paintings are analysed and put into context as well as the extraordinary woodcuts, which so cleverly exploit the grain of the wood and are some of the most accomplished and confident things he did.