Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell

Featuring twenty-seven paintings created between 1950 and 1990 by some of the most important artists of the mid- to late 20th century, including Karel Appel, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Jack Goldstein, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella, this book provides a window onto a moment of remarkable creative ferment, when the nature of abstract painting was being hotly contested. For the artists featured here, the debate around abstraction occurred largely at the level of technique, and to this end, they developed radically new ways to make marks that alternately emphasized or suppressed traces of the artist’s touch. Beautiful reproductions are accompanied by insightful essays that examine how the works communicate the changing priorities of abstract art after World War II.

Kelly Baum is Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Hal Foster is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology and co-director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Susan Stewart is Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, professor of English, and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. Eleanor Stoltzfus is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland.