Burst! Abstract Painting After 1945

Burst! Abstract Painting After 1945 looks at the close, but previously unexplored relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. Through texts and close to 100 illustrations, the book describes a vital creative exchange across the Atlantic that would entirely redefine painting. Big, expansive, paint-splattered surfaces; spontaneous actions captured on canvas; new ideas of freedom. A story of post-war recovery and Transatlantic dialogue. On both sides of the ocean, society was reacting to the horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the coming of the atom bomb. The book shows how artists searched for new ways to deal with these shattering events. With works by Jean Dubuffet, Natalia Dumitresco, Helen Frankenthaler, Asger Jorn, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, Hedda Sterne and Clyfford Still, and more. AUTHORS: Mary Gabriel is the author of Ninth Street Women (2018), which won the 2022 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize for narrative nonfiction. Gabriel's previous book, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull (1998) and The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (2002). Her latest book, Madonna: A Rebel Life, will be published in October 2023. Gabriel worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and now lives in Ireland. Karen Kurczynski is Professor of modern and contemporary History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up (Routledge, 2014) and Reanimating Art: The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe (Routledge, 2020), and curator of the exhibitions Human Animals: The Art of Cobra (UMASS University Museum of Contemporary Art and NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 2016) and Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival (co-curated with Karen Friis Herbsleb, Museum Jorn, 2014). Kurczynski has published widely on Asger Jorn, the European Cobra movement, the Situationist International, and contemporary art. Her current research focuses on drawing as an inter-media practice in relation to politics, race, feminism, and decoloniality in art since the 1990s. Daniel Zamani received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2017, with an AHRC-funded thesis on the interplay of occult and medieval themes in Andre Breton's work. He was appointed curator at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam in 2018, where he manages its extensive collection of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Exhibitions he has curated or co-curated include the shows Matisse-Bonnard: Long Live Painting! (2017), Color and Light: The Neo-Impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross (2019), Monet: Places (2020), The Shape of Freedom: International Abstraction after 1945 (2022), and Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (2022). Zamani has also published widely in the field of 19th and 20th-century painting, especially on Surrealism. SELLING POINTS: . Accompanies an exhibition at MUNCH 23 February - 21 May 2023 . Lavishly illustrated with nearly 100 works, all exhibited works included . The book includes a wide range of female artists who are too often overshadowed by their male colleagues . Draw connecting lines between a Europe in the aftermath of war, and America's burgeoning, influential art scene in the same period . Big, expansive, paint-splattered surfaces; spontaneous actions captured on canvas; new ideas of freedom 100 colour, 10 b/w illustrations