Pictures Of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. Hardcover. VG (ex-museum copy w/ square black stamps to upper & lower textblocks. black scuff to upper board edge. dustjacket has light wear, small foxing or coffee-like spot to front cover). Grey cloth over boards; White illus. dj.; 297 pp.; approx. 250 color and bw figures. Remains a nice, sharp and bright copy. "48th volume of The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Number XXXV in the Bollingen Series; Includes foreword by Earl A. Powell III and preface by Adam Gopnik; Covers minimialism, post-minimalism, satire, irony, and abstract art, and abstract art in the present day. "With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction -- showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works." (dj).