Have you ever looked at an abstract painting and wondered what the artist was thinking? A splash of color on a canvas can ...

A brilliant colorist, he hung his canvases from ceilings in great curves and loops, or pinned them, gathered, to walls, taking his medium into three dimensions. By Roberta Smith Sam Gilliam, a ...

Diane Burko, "Unprecedented" (2021), mixed media, 8 x 15 feet (all images courtesy the artist) WASHINGTON, DC — At the heart of Diane Burko’s retrospective exhibition at the American University Museum ...

Thomas Downing, “Center Grid” (ca. 1960), detail (Image by the author for Hyperallergic) WASHINGTON, DC — The magazine selection in the visitors’ waiting room at the George Bush Center for ...

Farah Atassi is not entirely comfortable with you feeling comfortable about her artwork. But when walking into the first room of her current exhibition at the Musée Picasso, the urge to take a deep, ...

The primary authors of this post are Dirk B. Walther (University of Toronto) and Claudia Damiano (KU Leuven) Have you ever stood before an abstract painting, feeling a surge of emotion but struggling ...

It is hard to tell if abstract painting actually got worse [after the 1960s], if it merely stagnated, or if it simply looked bad in comparison to the hopes its own accomplishments had raised. —Frank ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Hashtags have become a standard in ...

Abstract art often gets an undeserved bad rap. Many people famously dismissed Jackson Pollock‘s signature drip paintings in the 1950s, for instance, as being something that a trained chimpanzee could ...

FOR half a century art critics have undertaken to address not a sophisticated minority like the readers of literary magazines, but the mass of unbelievers to whom twentieth-century art is a mystery or ...