Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting

Christa Noel Robbins provides the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th-century abstract painting in the US, examining how artists and critics used the medium to advance their claims about the role of authorship in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of art objects.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 29 June 2021
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Christa Noel Robbins provides the first extended study of authorship in mid-20th-century abstract painting in the US. Taking a close look at this influential period of art history, Robbins describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role that they believed authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Robbins tracks the subject across two definitive periods: the "New York School" as it was consolidated in the 1950s and "Post Painterly Abstraction" in the 1960s. Through many deep dives into key artist archives, Robbins brings to the page the minds and voices of painters Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin along with those of critics such as Harold Rosenberg and Rosalind Krauss. While these are all important characters in the polemical histories of American modernism, this is the first time they are placed together in a single study and treated with equal measure, as peers participating in the shared late modernist moment.

Weight: 866g
Dimension: 262 x 187 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226752952