The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism

Sandler, Irving

New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970. Hardcover. Brown cloth boards with gilt lettering on spine, white dust jacket with color illustration and black lettering, 301 pp. Profusely illustrated with bw and color illustrations. Good (foxing on upper block edges, corners bumped, wear to dust jacket, previous owner's inscription on front page). Item #176323

"The Abstract Expressionist movement, which accomplished the radical overthrow of the American realist tradition in painting, marks the debut of American art on the international scene. Irving Sandler's historical survey and critical appraisal of this vital and important movement begins with a description of the sociopolotical, economic, and cultural milieu of the Depression years, including the Federal Art Project administered by the Works Progress Administration. An account of the 1940s, when Cubist and Surrealist trends predominated in America as well as on the Continent, is followed by a detailed analysis of the flowering of Abstract Expressionism among the artists of the New York School in the 1950s. The author considers the style in its two primary manifestations - gesture painting, in which spontaneous linear patterns dominate the canvas, as in the dynamic 'drip' canvases of Jackson Pollock and in works by Willem de Kooning and Hans Hofmann, and color-field painting, in which the primary concern is to create serene and harmonious juxtapositions of vast color areas, as in the paintings of Clyfford Still, Mark Rthko, and Barnett Newman." - dust jacker description.