David Anfam – författare

Larry Poons (b. 1937) shot to fame while still in his twenties, on the strength of his “dot paintings,” in which dots or ellipses were meticulously arranged on brightly coloured fields, creating a rhythmic, pulsating effect. But within a few years, Poons first loosened the hard-edged precision of the dot paintings and then abandoned them entirely for an organic mode of abstraction based on vertical drips of flung paint. This marked the beginning of an uncompromising five-decade evolution that has finally led the artist back to a more intimate mode of painting with brushes — and his own hands. At every stage, Poons's career has compelled the attention of critics and, in particular, other artists.This handsome volume, the first full-length biocritical monograph on Poons, reproduces more than 140 of his most important works in full colour, some as spectacular gatefolds. The incisive text — a collaboration between four leading critics and historians — traces the development of the artist’s extraordinary career. Larry Poons is a necessary addition to the library of anyone with an interest in American art.

The German-born American artist Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) relocated to the United States in 1932 right before the outbreak of World War II. In the midst of wartime insecurity, he opened schools in both New York and Provincetown, immersing himself in America's growing avantgarde art scene. The works Hofmann created at the end of WWII and immediately afterward show angular abstractions and personify the uncertainties of the period. At the same time, this was also the moment that he moved toward the soft, ambiguous forms and gestures that would become the hallmark of the Abstract Expressionist movement—a movement that Hofmann presaged.  Hans Hofmann: FURY presents Hofmann's work from 1942 to 1946. While demonstrating Hofmann's development towards abstraction, the paintings featured here still reveal a representational quality that nods to his figurative beginnings. Linear paintings particularly emphasize this artistic trajectory. Primarily known for his expressive use of bold, often primary colors, Hoffmann here uses a palette of vivid, bright colors, and contrasting dark tones, epitomizing the conflicted postwar feeling. Hans Hofmann: FURY gives particular insight into an essential moment in Hofmann's career—his first solo exhibition in New York in 1944 at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, which Clement Greenberg considered "a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism."

During the early 1950s, Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) created one of the most anomalous bodies of work of his career: graphite drawings on undercoats of blue or ocher painted over a titanium white ground. For an artist known for his love of color and impasto, these predominantly white paintings constituted quite a departure. Twenty-five works were shown at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1955, in an exhibition titled Predominantly White; the artist returned to mine this vein in later paintings in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.