Aaron Siskind
(1903–91).Photographer. His bold, graphic, nearly abstract images from the 1940s and 1950s rank as the most important photographic equivalents of abstract expressionism. Although he remained ...
Abraham Rattner
(1895–1978).Painter and printmaker. Known for expressionist figural works and landscapes, he employed a modern vocabulary to address timeless themes of suffering, death, and spiritual joy. Born in ...
Abraham Walkowitz
(1878–1965)American painter, born at Tyumen in Siberia. In 1889 his family emigrated to New York, where he studied at the National Academy of Design. He travelled in Europe in 1906–7, studying at the ...
abstract art
A term which can generally be applied to any non-representational art (most decorative art, for example), but which is more specifically used, from the early 20th century onwards, to describe ...
Abstract Impressionism
A term coined by Elaine de Kooning to describe paintings that resemble certain late Impressionist pictures (notably those of Monet) in their brushwork but have no representative content: ‘Retaining ...
Abstract Sublime
A term coined c.1960 by the American art historian Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006) to characterize the feelings of vastness and solitude suggested by certain Abstract Expressionist paintings, for ...
Action Painting
A technique of painting in which paint is dribbled, splashed, and poured over the canvas. Its most famous exponent was the American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–56). The term was first used in 1952 ...
Ad Reinhardt
(b Buffalo, NY, 24 Dec. 1913; d New York, 30 Aug. 1967).American painter. From the beginning of his career his painting was abstract, but it changed radically in style over the years. During the ...
Adja Yunkers
(b Riga, Latvia, 15 July 1900; d New York, 24 Dec 1983),painter and printmaker of Latvian birth. He enrolled in art school in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) and then ...
Adolph Gottlieb
(b New York, 14 Mar. 1903; d East Hampton, Long Island, NY, 4 Mar. 1974).American painter, one of the leading Abstract Expressionists. His early work was Expressionist and in 1935 he was one of the ...
Afro
(1912–76)Italian painter and stage designer, brother of the sculptors Dino Basaldella and Mirko Basaldella (who like Afro preferred to be known simply by his first name; see Mirko). Afro was born in ...
Agnes Martin
(1912–2004)Canadian-born painter, printmaker, and writer on art who settled in the USA in 1932 and became an American citizen in 1950. She lived mainly in New Mexico, but part of her intermittent ...
Al Held
(1928–2005).Painter and printmaker. Known for monumental abstract paintings, Brooklyn-born Alvin Jacob Held left school at sixteen and the next year enlisted for two years in the U.S. Navy. He then ...
Alan Davie
(b Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, 28 Sept. 1920).British painter, graphic artist, poet, musician, silversmith, and jeweller. After service in the army and a short period as a professional jazz musician ...
Albert Pinkham Ryder
(b New Bedford, Mass., 19 Mar. 1847; d Elmhurst, Long Island, NY, 28 Mar. 1917).American painter of imaginative subjects. He lived and worked most of his life as a solitary and dreamer in New York, ...
Alex Katz
(1927– ).Painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collage artist. A leader in the return to figuration in the early 1960s, he is known for very large, blandly unemotional, flattened images. In their ...
Alexander Calder
(1898–1976)US sculptor and painter, who was one of the first artists to introduce movement into sculpture through his invention of mobiles.Although his grandfather and his father were both sculptors ...
Alexander Liberman
(1912–99).Painter, sculptor, photographer, graphic designer, and editor. For decades, his creative flair was widely, if anonymously, known to millions through Condé Nast publications, as he guided ...
Alfonso Ossorio
(1916–90).Painter, assemblage artist, printmaker, and collector. An idiosyncratic artist with roots in surrealism, he contributed to abstract expressionism in the 1950s. Later, he concentrated on ...
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
(b Detroit, 28 Jan. 1902; d Salisbury, Conn., 15 Aug. 1981).American art historian and museum administrator who played an enormously influential role in establishing an intellectual framework for the ...
