Abstract expressionism was first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 for works by Wassily Kandinsky.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. The museum's current collection includes over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts, and moving into the 21st century. The collection is displayed in 170,000 square feet (16,000 m2) of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art.
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
Roy Rothschild Neuberger was an American financier who contributed money to raise public awareness of modern art through his acquisition of pieces he deemed worthy. He was a co-founder of the investment firm Neuberger Berman. Roy Neuberger served for several decades as Honorary Trustee, Benefactor, and member of the Department of Modern Art's Visiting Committee at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum.
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
Sidney Janis was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. His gallery quickly gained prominence, for he not only exhibited work by the Abstract Expressionists, but also European artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. As the critic Clement Greenberg explained in a 1958 tribute to Janis, the dealer's exhibition practices had helped to establish the legitimacy of the Americans, for his policy "not only implied, it declared, that Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell were to be judged by the same standards as Matisse and Picasso, without condescension, without making allowances." Greenberg observed that in the late 1940s "the real issue was whether ambitious artists could live in this country by what they did ambitiously. Sidney Janis helped as much as anyone to see that it was decided affirmatively."
Barbara Haskell is an American art historian and a museum curator. She is currently a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she has worked since 1975. She has previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Art and Pasadena Museum. She has a BA (1969) from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Theodoros Stamos was a Greek-American painter. He is one of the youngest painters of the original group of abstract expressionist painters, which included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. His later years were negatively affected by his involvement with the Rothko case.
New York Figurative Expressionism is a visual arts movement and a branch of American Figurative Expressionism. Though the movement dates to the 1930s, it was not formally classified as "figurative expressionism" until the term arose as a counter-distinction to the New York–based postwar movement known as Abstract Expressionism.
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, formerly the Stanford University Museum of Art, and commonly known as the Cantor Arts Center, is an art museum on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California. The museum first opened in 1894 and consists of over 130,000 sq ft (12,000 m2) of exhibition space, including sculpture gardens. The Cantor Arts Center houses the largest collection of sculptures by Auguste Rodin outside of Paris and the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City, with 199 works, most in bronze but others in different media. The museum is open to the public and charges no admission.
Henry Heydenryk Jr. (1905–1994) was a Dutch American frame maker, historian, writer and designer. He was the fourth generation descendant of a family-run business, The House of Heydenryk (Heijdenrijk). Founded in Amsterdam in 1845, the company is one of the world’s oldest framing companies. The firm made and supplied reproductions and antiques to the Tate and National Gallery museums in England, the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands and for many other important museums and private collectors including Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and members of the Rothschild family.
Samuel M. Kootz was a New York City art dealer and author whose Kootz Gallery was one of the first to champion Abstract Expressionist Art.
The Irascibles or Irascible 18 were the labels given to a group of American abstract artists who put name to an open letter, written in 1950, to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rejecting the museum's exhibition American Painting Today - 1950 and boycotting the accompanying competition. The subsequent media coverage of the protest and a now iconic group photograph that appeared in Life magazine gave them notoriety, popularized the term Abstract Expressionist and established them as the so-called first generation of the putative movement.
Peter Howard Selz was a German-born American art historian and museum director and curator who specialized in German Expressionism.
Harry W. Anderson, also known as Hunk Anderson, was an American businessman, art collector and philanthropist. He was the co-founder of Saga Foods Co., a food company for college dormitories. With his wife, Mary Margaret Anderson, he donated works of art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and to the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.
