Telling Good Abstract Artwork From Bad

A Visit to the CIA’s Secret” Abstract Art Assortment. The CIA frames its motivation for buying these particular paintings as fairly simple”: The Wonderful Arts Commission wished to have art work that was contemporary to the architecture of the Previous Headquarters Building, which accomplished development in 1961, and to focus the collection on the one artwork movement to come back out of the Washington, DC area,” said Toni Hiley, director of the CIA Museum, in a phone interview with Hyperallergic.

Last year, MoMA opened Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 ”; the Guggenheim offered Artwork of Another Sort ,” comparing American and European abstraction of the Fifties; Destroy the Picture ,” on the Museum of Contemporary Artwork, Los Angeles, explored the fascination with dirty, distressed materials amongst artists of the same era; the Musée d’artwork contemporain de Montréal traced the impressive history of Canadian abstraction since 1939 ; the Hunter College/Instances Sq. Gallery introduced Conceptual Abstraction,” a survey (which I curated with Joachim Pissarro) of 20 summary painters who came to prominence in New York in the Eighties; and MUDAM (the Musée d’Art Moderne) in Luxembourg gathered 23 modern European artists in Les Détours de l’abstraction.

At another degree, the exhibition aims to allow us to see precisely what complexities lie behind the over-simple phrases ‘world art’ or art in a ‘globalised world’ and to see how even what appears to be the universal language of summary artwork is marked, shaped by its articulation in numerous cultures.

Op art (Sixties): Seen as a subdivision of submit-painterly abstraction this model of laborious-edged geometric abstraction reacted to the more gestural types of summary expressionism by only using monochromatic fields of unpolluted-edged colour which reinforced the flatness of the image floor.

The poetic, Lyrical Abstraction and the sensuous use of colour seen in the work of painters as various as Robert Motherwell , Patrick Heron , Kenneth Noland , Sam Francis , Cy Twombly , Richard Diebenkorn , Helen Frankenthaler , Joan Mitchell , amongst others.…