Sean Scully, "Heart of Darkness" (1982), oil on canvas, 8 x 12 feet. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Society for Contemporary Art (image courtesy the Art Institute ...

Have you ever looked at an abstract painting and wondered what the artist was thinking? A splash of color on a canvas can stir something deep or nothing at all. According to research from Duke ...

It is hard to tell if abstract painting actually got worse [after the 1960s], if it merely stagnated, or if it simply looked bad in comparison to the hopes its own accomplishments had raised. —Frank ...

Years before Jackson Pollock was immortalized in the pages of Life magazine—cigarette dangling from his mouth, flinging paint across a canvas on his studio floor—Janet Sobel created her own unique ...

A woman gazes at two of Hilma af Klint’s abstract works in the Guggenheim’s Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future (all images by author) Her story sounds almost too good to be true. Historians now ...

Abstract Expressionist New York: The Big Picture,” which is currently occupying MoMA’s fourth floor, is composed entirely of art drawn from the museum’s colossal permanent collection (much of which ...

In recent years, abstract and impressionist art has continued to grow and change, with artists using new ideas and techniques to express deep emotions, spirituality, and the mysteries of life.

The mind processes abstract art and figurative art very differently, and the experience of viewing one or the other can change the way you think, a new study shows. Our minds process events and ...

In the 1960s, abstract painting was a controversial style for Black artists, overshadowed by social realist works. Now, it’s claimed its place as a vital form of expression. Howardena Pindell, a ...

One work amid the hundreds in a flabbergasting retrospective, “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” at the Guggenheim Museum, is so good that it knocked my sense of the show momentarily askew.

Abstract art often gets an undeserved bad rap. Many people famously dismissed Jackson Pollock‘s signature drip paintings in the 1950s, for instance, as being something that a trained chimpanzee could ...