"Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin's austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be associated in turn with Minimalist, feminist, and even outsider artists. She moved through some of the liveliest...

The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who later lived in Germany and France, is one of the pioneers of 20th-century art. Nowadays he is regarded as the founder of abstract art and is, moreover, the chief theoretician of this type of painting. Together with Franz Marc and others he founded the group of artists known as the "Blane Reiter" in Munich. His art then freed itself more and more from the object, eventually culminating in the First...

A key figure in the international avant-garde, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was at once an extraordinary painter and art theoretician whose influence is as profound today as it ever was. After coining the term "Neo-plasticism", he pursued painting composed only of the most fundamental aspects of primary color (red, yellow, blue) against a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines and a white base background. Mondrian's vision was that this essential...

"Set amid the most turbulent social and political period of modern times, Ninth Street Women is the impassioned, wild, sometimes tragic, always exhilarating chronicle of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting -- not as muses but as artists. From their cold-water lofts, where they worked, drank, fought, and loved, these pioneers burst open the door to the art world for themselves and countless...

"Artist Philipp Deines traces the story of now world-famous af Klint's unique life and groundbreaking oeuvre through five chapters featuring her development as an artist, her family background, and her relationship to the spiritual. Highlighting how she came to her distinctive paintings, her spiritual quest, and the friends who helped her, this is a story of the strength it took af Klint to continue as an artist against all odds.Beautifully drawn,...

Introducing the concept of realistic abstract painting, this book stimulates the imagination and encourages the reader to develop their own style of painting.