This publication contains a survey of female abstract expressionist artists, revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work and the movement as a whole as well as highlighting the lack of critical attention they have received to date.

"This well written, fully researched, and handsomely illustrated volume gives potent new life to artists and ideas nearly lost to American art history. Susan Landauer's enlightening book will play an important role in redefining the post-World War II avant-garde as a national rather than an East Coast phenomenon."--Henry T. Hopkins, University of California, Los Angeles "This book ranks as one of the more important recent contributions to the history of postwar American art."--Caroline Jones, Boston University

This first volume in the Tate Gallery Liverpool Critical Forum series is derived from a conference held in conjunction with the display of Abstract Expressionist Painting from the USA, which was mounted at Tate Gallery Liverpool from March 1992 to January 1993. The display comprised 21 paintings by 13 artists, including Ad Reinhardt, Norman Lewis, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The objectives of the conference, involving speakers from the international community of scholarship in the field, were: to elicit new observations, critical judgments and proposals from the knowledge base of abstract expressionism and perhaps to challenge some of its prevailing conventions; and to debate the role of the Tate Gallery Liverpool as a modifier of this field of knowledge.

In 1946 the art critic Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker, first used the term 'Abstract Expressionism'. The two words combine the emotional intensity of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European Abstract schools. Although they were being painted by then little-known artists working in low-rent studio space, works of Abstract Expressionist art now dominate the walls of major museums. The last major collective Abstract Expressionism exhibition to have taken place in the UK occurred in 1959. This important publication, and the exhibition it accompanies, seek to redress the balance and re-evaluate the movement, recognising its complex and fluid reality, and branching further into multimedia. As such, this book encompasses sculptors such as David Smith and photographers such as Aaron Siskind as well as some of the most famous painters of the twentieth century, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still. AUTHOR: David Anfam is the author of the now-standard textbook Abstract Expressionism (1990). Susan Davidson is Senior Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, at the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Edith Devaney is Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Royal Academy of Arts. Jeremy Lewison is former Director of Collections at Tate. Carter Ratcliff wrote Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (1996). Christian Wurst was researcher on The Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings of Jasper Johns (forthcoming). SELLING POINTS: * Accompanies the first major exhibition of Abstract Expressionism in the UK since 1959 * Works of Abstract Expressionist art dominate the walls of major museums around the world * Features an impressive range of experts who discuss some of the signature paintings of the movement 300 colour

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2010-Apr. 25, 2011.

Reissue. Originally published: Ithaca, N.Y. : Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1978.

Seitz's aim, as he describes it, is to search out the fundamental premises--technical, aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical--through which Abstract Expressionism developed.