by Lauren Kroiz (Contributor), KatherineBourgignon (Author), Leo Mazow (Contributor), Lauren Kroiz (Contributor), Katherine Bourgignon (Author), Leo Mazow (Contributor), Essays by Leo Mazow and Lauren Kroiz (Author), Katherine Bourgignon (Author)
As some American artists began to eliminate people and remove extraneous details from their compositions, they often employed neat, orderly brushwork or close-up, unemotional photography. Artists as diverse as Patrick Henry Bruce, John Covert, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand and Arthur Dove navigated European and American avant-garde circles, picking and choosing new ideas and methods. Inspiration ranged from cubism and machine parts to new technologies, and they found ways to bring order to the modern world through extreme simplification. For them, abstraction involved absence and presence - the evacuation of human beings but also the desire to depict something that would not otherwise be visible or to render visible unseen natural processes like the passage of time, sound waves, or weather patterns. Their artworks provide a new context for the precisionist works in the subsequent sections and point to modern ideas about what art could be. How does a crisp painting technique relate to an aesthetic of absence?
Format: Illustrated
Pages: 184
Edition: 1
Publisher: Ashmolean Museum Publications
Published: 20 Mar 2018
ISBN 10: 1910807214
ISBN 13: 9781910807217
Book Overview: Publication accompanies a major exhibition to be held at The Ashmolean Museum from March until June, 2018