Profoundly influenced by the welded sculptures of Julio González and of Picasso, David Smith devoted himself entirely to metal sculptures, constructing compositions from steel and scrap material. Almost single-handedly, Smith changed the nature of sculpture in America, giving it a passion, a seriousness and an identity it did not previously possess.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement and the most influential American painter of the twentieth century. Although he died at the age of 44, he left an unsurpassed body of work.

Son of Fred Klein and Marie Raymond,both painters,Yves Klein took the  European art scene by storm in a brief career that lasted just eight years,from  1954 to 1962.“For color!

Born on the shores of Lake Van (Armenia) and emigrated to the United States  in 1920,Arshile Gorky (c.1902-1948) was one of the greatest American  painters of the twentieth century and a seminal figure in the Abstract  Expressionist movement.

As this book explains Giacometti spent his life, exorcising this existential and formal void through a return to the human figure. The question that dominated his work was how to restore in art the sense of the presence of the being in space. Giacometti sought tirelessly to establish his contingent volume, which became increasingly slender and threadlike, and to seize its finiteness in a reality, however banal it might be. He began to develop heads and nudes modeled in the void, in that experience of nothingness that opposed his quest for the absolute, a metaphor of the human condition.

Dubuffet was one of the most remarkable artists of the 20th century. An enemy of culture and of the art of museums, he was an anarchist and an atheist, and anti military and unpatriotic in his attitudes. As such, he was a rebel who rejected all labels or categories, asserting there is no such thing as abstract art, either that or art is always abstract.

Mieke Bal analysis is focused in the eerie sense of very real and very unreal that the paintings emanate. She considers this the heart of Balthus work. It invites viewers in and repels them at the same time. We get access to a world all his own, but are not told what is there to see.Thus, the works labor against assumptions of representation and appropriation. The means of this labor figuration is indispensable for the effet.Although figurativity is supposedly the royal road to realism, in Balthus s case it is not at all.

Throughout his illustrious career, Robert Rauschenberg has consistently challenged the prevailing ideologies and techniques of the art world. Rauschenberg s seminal works from his comines (urban trash on painted surfaces) to his silk screens. The author also discusses some of the artist s more recent projects, including ROCI, Rauschenberg s own exhibition organization that showcases diverse artists from all over the world. Through beautiful photography and authoritative text, here is a well-rounded overview of one of the word s most pivotal artists.

Footmarks and handprints, sand, wood, earth, rope, words and letters: Tàpies, repertoire is infinite. Miró encouraged him to use forms and materials of every kind, all the more so in an environment devoid of meaning-Spain in the post-war years-in which official reality bore no relation to the situation as it really was. Imperceptibly, true reality asserted its pre-eminence and the expressiveness of increasingly organic materials, endowing his painting with greater materiality than signification.

Installed in France since the forty s of the last century, Zao Wou-Ki has joined, like no other artist, the knowledge of Chinese painting and calligraphy with the individualist and subjective experience of the western abstract art. Impressed by Paul Klee s paintings and impeled by Henry Michaux and Andre Malraux, two of the most active French intellectuals of the second post war, Zao Wou-Ki has kept deepening in his particular introspective journey for over five decades. All his work seems to restore an immense inner landscape, no exempt of dissonances and shadows.