The pioneers of abstraction—the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists—emerged from firm and identifiable aesthetic roots and developed their own philosophies. In the competitive ...

Once the canon of great artists is established, altering it is next to impossible. Case in point: the introspective, quietly breathtaking art of John McLaughlin (1898-1976). His geometric abstract ...

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 ...

Note the sarcasm of a New Yorker magazine cartoon from the early 1950s: Two seemingly well-to-do gentlemen are viewing an abstract painting when one says snobbishly to the other, “His spatter is ...