TY  - JOUR
AU  - Galenson, David
TI  - The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13744
PY  - 2008
Y2  - January 2008
DO  - 10.3386/w13744
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13744
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13744.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David Galenson
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL  60637
Tel: 773/702-8258
Fax: 773/702-8490
E-Mail: galenson@uchicago.edu
M1  - published as David W. Galenson. "The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century," in "Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art" Cambridge University Press (2009)

AB  - Non-representational painting was one of the most radical artistic innovations of the twentieth century. Abstract painting was created independently by three great pioneers - the experimental innovators Kandinsky and Mondrian, and the conceptual Malevich - virtually simultaneously, in the years immediately before and after the outbreak of World War I. It became the dominant form of advanced art in the decade after the end of World War II, as Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, and their colleagues developed the experimental forms of Abstract Expressionism. But in the late 1950s and early '60s, Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and a host of other young artists abruptly made a conceptual revolution in advanced art, and in the process reduced abstract painting to a minor role. The pioneers of abstract painting and the Abstract Expressionists had all been committed to abstraction as a vehicle for artistic discovery, and had believed that it would dominate the art of the future, but since the 1960s abstraction has become at most a part-time style for leading painters, and it is often used to mock the seriousness of earlier abstract painters.
ER  -