Abstract Expressionism (Royal Academy of Arts)

This important publication, and the exhibition it accompanies, seeks to redress the balance and re-evaluate the movement, recognising its complex and fluid reality, and encompassing sculptors such as David Smith and photographers such as Aaron Siskind as well as some of the most famous painters of the twentieth century, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still.

In 1946 the art critic Robert Coates, writing in The New Yorker, first used the term ‘Abstract Expressionism’. The two words combine the emotional intensity of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European Abstract schools. Although they were being painted by then little-known artists working in low-rent studio space, works of Abstract Expressionist art now dominate the walls of major museums.