If you wander through New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll eventually come across Painting Number 2 by Franz Kline, a set of thick, unruly black lines on a white canvas. Elsewhere, you will find ...

Abstract art often gets an undeserved bad rap. Many people famously dismissed Jackson Pollock‘s signature drip paintings in the 1950s, for instance, as being something that a trained chimpanzee could ...

It is hard to tell if abstract painting actually got worse [after the 1960s], if it merely stagnated, or if it simply looked bad in comparison to the hopes its own accomplishments had raised. —Frank ...

The primary authors of this post are Dirk B. Walther (University of Toronto) and Claudia Damiano (KU Leuven) Have you ever stood before an abstract painting, feeling a surge of emotion but struggling ...

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 ...

Researchers studying people's brain activity when looking at abstract art have revealed why we interpret blobs of paint on canvas so differently. When you look at an abstract painting, study it in a ...

“At first glance the irregular shapes and geometric patterns of abstract art could appear difficult for the human brain to interpret. Art exhibitions like this one at the Saatchi Gallery in London, ...

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 ...

In the 1960s, abstract painting was a controversial style for Black artists, overshadowed by social realist works. Now, it’s claimed its place as a vital form of expression. Howardena Pindell, a ...

The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results. Gallery-goers attend ...