ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST PAINTING IN AMERICA

SEITZ, William C.

ISBN 10: 0674002156 / ISBN 13: 9780674002159

Published by Cambridge, MA Published for the National Gallery of Art, Washington by Harvard University Press 1983, 1983

About this Item

FIRST EDITION Small 4to. grey cloth hardback in unclipped dust jacket. 490pp., Indexed, profusely illustrated in colour and b/w. A clean copy with no markings or inscriptions. A VERY GOOD COPY in VERY GOOD DUST JACKET. (Shelf 26) ISBN: 0674002156 PLEASE NOTE: Very Heavy Book (2.1 kg+) Postage rates vary according to destination, weight and speed. For an accurate overseas quote PLEASE either call or email us before ordering. [AbeBooks shipping quote is based on items weighing up to 1 kilo only]. Buyer is responsible for any additional duties, taxes, or fees required by recipient's country.** Pictures available upon request.** Visit our homepage for our shop opening hours. Over 20,000 books in stock - come and browse. PayPal, credit and most debit cards welcome. Books posted worldwide. For any queries please contact us direct.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST PAINTING IN AMERICA
• Publisher: Cambridge, MA Published for the National Gallery of Art, Washington by Harvard University Press 1983
• Publication Date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674002156
• ISBN 13: 9780674002159
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

William Seitz was a creative witness to one of the most exciting artistic upheavals of our time. His analysis of American Abstract Expressionism is the unique testament of one who was there at the Cedar Bar and at The Club in the early 1950s, sharing the milieu of the painters about whom he writes-Gorky, de Kooning, Hofmann, Motherwell, Rothko, and Tobey. Seitz was finely tuned to their idiosyncratic development, able to document at first hand the influences entering their discourse, whether Suzuki or Empson, Klee or the French existentialists. Beyond this, the uncertainty and verbal confusion of the time, Seitz takes the reader directly to the works of art, probing not what the artists were saying, but what they were painting.

A painter himself, he could explore the passions and methods of Abstract Expressionism with the insight and technical precision of one who had labored in the studio. Seitz maintains a profound respect for the mysterious power of the individual talent, for the artist as an intellectual, and for painting as a form of knowledge. His work, confined to the "underground" of microfilm after it was completed in 1955, stands alone in conveying the anxiety, exhilaration, and richness of a movement racing ahead while its criteria were still being formed. Lavishly illustrated with over 300 paintings, many in full color, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America is a book that Motherwell describes in his foreword as "unsurpassed...in the literature of Abstract Expressionism, but also sui generis in the scholarship of Modernism."