After attending Wake Forest University on an athletic scholarship, J. Donald Nichols played professional baseball with the Baltimore Orioles. From there he went into the real estate development business. He has built more than 175 shopping centers throughout the country, and his company, JDN Realty, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Nichols first began collecting American Impressionist paintings in the 1970s, buying one painting as his personal reward for each shopping center he built. After ten years, he began looking for a new area in which to collect. The J. Donald Nichols Collection is now recognized as perhaps the finest collection of American abstract art of the 1930s and 1940s ever assembled.

The Complete Volume, at close to 600 pages, will be the definitive book on the whole current of new painting. No such reference exists in the art world. It includes the most influential European figures, new painters from Eastern Europe and the U.S.

Ad Reinhardt is probably best known for his black paintings, which aroused as much controversy as admiration in the American art world when they were first exhibited in the 1950s. Although his ideas about art and life were often at odds with those of his contemporaries, they prefigured the ascendance of minimalism. Reinhardt's interest in the Orient and in religion, his strong convictions about the value of abstraction, and his disgust with the commercialism of the art world are as fresh and valid today as they were when he first expressed them.

From James Rosenquist, one of our most iconic pop artists—along with Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein—comes this candid and fascinating memoir. Unlike these artists, Rosenquist often works in three-dimensional forms, with highly dramatic shifts in scale and a far more complex palette, including grisaille and Day-Glo colors. A skilled traditional painter, he avoided the stencils and silk screens of Warhol and Lichtenstein. His vast canvases full of brilliant, surreally juxtaposed images would influence both many of his contemporaries and younger generations, as well as revolutionize twentieth-century painting. Ronsequist writes about growing up in a tight-knit community of Scandinavian farmers in North Dakota and Minnesota in the late 1930s and early 1940s; about his mother, who was not only an amateur painter but, along with his father, a passionate aviator; and about leaving that flat midwestern landscape in 1955 for New York, where he had won a scholarship to the Art Students League. George Grosz, Edwin Dickinson, and Robert Beverly Hale were among his teachers, but his early life was a struggle until he discovered sign painting. He describes days suspended on scaffolding high over Broadway, painting movie or theater billboards, and nights at the Cedar Tavern with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and the poet LeRoi Jones. His first major studio, on Coenties Slip, was in the thick of the new art world. Among his neighbors were Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, and Jack Youngerman, and his mentors Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Rosenquist writes about his shows with the dealers Richard Bellamy, Ileana Sonnabend, and Leo Castelli, and about colorful collectors like Robert and Ethel Scull. We learn about the 1971 car crash that left his wife and son in a coma and his own life and work in shambles, his lobbying—along with Rauschenberg—for artists’ rights in Washington D.C., and how he got his work back on track. With his distinct voice, Roseqnuist writes about the ideas behind some of his major paintings, from the startling revelation that led to his first pop painting, Zone, to his masterpiece, F-III, a stunning critique of war and consumerism, to the cosmic reverie of Star Thief. This is James Rosenquist’s story in his own words—captivating and unexpected, a unique look inside the contemporary art world in the company of one of its most important painters.

expressionism.

Thaw Collection is located in the Southwest Room.

In April 1937, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted an exhibition that served as a catalyst for the appropriation of prehistoric rock art in postwar abstract painting. With the title "Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa", it displayed a range of copies from the influential collection of the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. Largely disregarded in modern American art history up until now, this book highlights the importance of this exhibition to artists such as Josef Albers, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, and The American Abstract Artists group, who sought inspiration from the prehistoric images' primordial creativity. With a transnational scope, this book reveals new facts about the connections between Paris and New York, and the importance of communication and collaboration between them for these artists. In doing so, Seibert shows that this debate was about more than just legitimizing abstract art forms from the past, but about recognizing an autonomous American abstract art. Presenting unseen archival material, letters, and exhibition documentation, Prehistoric Pictures and American Modernism offers a new reading of the development of modern American abstraction, and will hold an important place in the historiography of the movement, its global traditions, and its legacy.

A major revisionist study of Abstract Expressionism.

This publication contains a survey of female abstract expressionist artists, revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work and the movement as a whole as well as highlighting the lack of critical attention they have received to date.

One girl, one painting a day...can she do it? Linda Patricia Cleary decided to challenge herself with a year long project starting on January 1, 2014. Choose an artist a day and create a piece in tribute to them. It was a fun, challenging, stressful and psychological experience. She learned about technique, art history, different materials and embracing failure. Here are all 365 pieces. Enjoy!