Have a Ball (or Cube!) with Abstract Artists

Dear Joan of Art: I am a small-time collector, but big-time admirer of the work of the American abstract artists of the 1930s and 40s. Can you suggest resources for learning about the period?

Dear Visitor,

To answer your question, I have included excerpts from an article on American Abstract Artists and a bibliography.

American Abstract Artists

American group of painters and sculptors formed in 1936 in New York. Their aim was to promote American abstract art. Similar to the Abstraction-Création group in Europe, this association introduced the public to American abstraction through annual exhibitions, publications and lectures. It also acted as a forum for abstract artists to share ideas.

The group, whose first exhibition was held in April 1937 at the Squibb Galleries in New York, insisted that art should be divorced from political or social issues. Its aesthetics were usually identified with synthetic Cubism, and the majority of its members worked in a geometric Cubist-derived idiom of hard-edged forms, applying flat, strong colours.

The first president was Balcomb Greene (b 1904). Among the early members were Ilya Bolotowsky, Willem De Kooning, Burgoyne Diller, A. E. Gallatin, Carl Holty (1900–73), Harry Holtzman (b 1912), Lee Krasner, Ibram Lassaw, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith and Albert Swinden (1901–61). The group also included a number of European artists living in the United States, among them Josef Albers, Jean Hélion, László Moholy-Nagy and Piet Mondrian.

Bibliography

American Abstract Artists, Three Yearbooks (1938, 1939, 1946) (New York, 1969).

G. McNeil. "American Abstractionists Venerable at Twenty," Art News, lv/3 (1956), pp. 34–5, 64–6.

S. C. Larsen. The American Abstract Artists Group: A History and Evaluation of its Impact upon American Art (dissertation, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University, 1975).

J.R. Lane and S.C. Larsen, eds. Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America 1927–1944. (exhibition catalog, Pittsburgh, Penn.: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1983).

—Ilene Susan Fort

Source: Grove Dictionary of Art Online at http://www.groveart.com.

Pictured: Albert Eugene Gallatin, 1881–1952, Composition, 1937, oil, 12 5/16 x 10 3/16 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost.