In his fresh take on abstract art, noted art historian Pepe Karmel chronicles the movement from a global perspective, while embedding abstraction in a recognizable reality. Moving beyond the canonical terrain of abstract art, the author demonstrates how artists from around the world have used abstract imagery to express social, cultural, and spiritual experience.
Karmel builds this fresh approach to abstract art around five inclusive themes: body, landscape, cosmology, architecture, and man-made signs and patterns. In the process, this history develops a series of narratives that go far beyond the established figures and movements traditionally associated with abstract art. Each narrative is complemented by a number of featured abstract works, arranged in thought-provoking pairings with accompanying extended captions that provide an in-depth analysis. This wide-ranging examination incorporates work from Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America, as well as Europe and North America, through artists ranging from Wu Guanzhong, Joan Miró, Jackson Pollock, to Hilma af Klint, and Odili Donald Odita. Breaking new ground, Karmel has forged a new history of this key art movement.
Reviews
This is a catalogue of the highest order—with global scope, reference-quality images, invaluable metadata, and truly suggestive commentaries. Highly recommended for libraries that support advanced studies in art history and curation.
— ARLIS/NA Reviews
With Abstract Art, Karmel approaches the field not as a steady tunneling toward nothingness, as figures and other discernible objects fell away, but as something more dynamic—and much less white, Western, and male.
— Vogue.com
Brilliantly innovative.
— David Carrier The Brooklyn Rail
Big, beautiful, [and] brimming with scholarship and insight, [Pepe Karmel's] survey is a network of linked fragments, a rhizome, a Wunderkammer—in short, a book for our times.
— Art in America
Karmel’s originality and literary skill are praiseworthy… This book is a godsend.
— Hyperallergic
[An] innovative reevaluation… Brilliantly conceived and handsomely designed, Karmel's fluent and creative history redefines abstraction in terms of its vibrant and evocative range of styles, subjects, and expression.
— Booklist
Abstraction is just as relevant and important today as it was [in the past]… Karmel argues for its durability and broadens its cast by spotlighting earlier figures who have been overlooked and others who are carrying abstraction into the future.
— ARTnews
Contributors
Pepe Karmel
Author
Pepe Karmel is professor at the department of art history, New York University. He is the author of Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, and Looking at Picasso. Karmel has written widely on art for museum catalogs as well as The New York Times, Art in America, and other publications. He has curated and cocurated numerous exhibitions, including Jackson Pollock (MoMA, 1998) and Dialogues with Picasso (Museo Picasso Málaga, 2020). Karmel was the associate curator of Museo Picasso Málaga.
