Comprised of nearly fifty paintings, sculptures and works on paper, The Abstract Impulse highlights artists in such critical movements as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Op Art. Artists who are included are such canonical figures as Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Mangold among others. This publication, together with its coinciding exhibition, seeks to unveil the pluralistic ways in which abstraction developed after 1950, which will be revealed by the grouping of the works stylistically and thematically into three general sections: gesture, geometry, and introspection.

As the title suggests, this book concerns the art and life of the world's only "American Linear Impressionist", Lilian Westcott Hale. Born in Connecticut in 1881, Hale was educated primarily at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and lived for many years in nearby Dedham, moving to Charlottesville, Virginia after the death of her beloved educator, art critic, author, and painter husband, Philip Leslie Hale. A woman, Hale far outpaced the success of many men, including her husband. During her early decades of activity, Hale garnered innumerable naational awards, accolades, and prizes, and international acclaim for her oil portraits of children, women in interiors, and charcoal sketches of snowy landscpes, all created in an Impressionist style utilizing only vertical strokes. Hale was the originator and sole practitioner of a technique which paradoxically used line in an Impressionist manner. While her classic art fell out of favor during the Modernist 1940s and later, it is now once again very much in vogue. My relationship with the artist's only child, her daughter, Nancy, was of immeasurable assistance in the production of this book. Diane Elizabeth Kelleher Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, 2013.