Paintings; Oil paintings; Abstract paintings; Abstract works
"By 1947 - even earlier in drawings - the artist had begun to experiment with all-over painting, a labyrinthine network of lines, splatters, and paint drips from which emerged the great 'poured' paintings of the next few years. These...
"By the turn of the 1950s Rothko had arrived at the pictorial format which was to serve him for the rest of his career; horizontal lozenges of soft-edged color hovering in a large vertically oriented field. These clouds of color were seen by...
"In de Kooning's black canvases the elimination of color was conditioned as much by financial constraints as by the need to simplify pictorial problems in the spirit of Analytic Cubism. The deliberately artless use of shiny enamel housepaints...
"In the year before Pollock's premature death, Krasner made powerful collages, possibly drawing on the huge semi-abstract 'paper-cuts' that the veteran French Modernist Henri Matisse was producing around this time. In one of these collages she...
"Johns used letters or numbers as a means of reintroducing the signifiers of a collective sign system into a Modernist 'field' previously answerable to subjective judgments of taste. The textures in his drawings in particular are subtly...
"The assertive flatness of the implacable field of red is emphasized by the linear vertical 'zips'. Rather than functioning as 'drawing' within space, these reinforce and delimit the space as a whole. White 'zips' in Newman's works also evoke...
"This painting deliberately combines a host of allusions to Spanish culture such as the stark black/white contrasts of Goya, Velasquez, and Picasso, the Spanish poet Lorca's lament to a dead bullfighter, 'Llanto por Ignacio Jánchez mejías',...
"Whilst clearly representing a critique of free expression, Lichtenstein's 'brushstrokes', like most of his other Pop works, had an exact comic-book source. They initially derived from a strip entitled 'The Painting' published in Charlton...
