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(Contains a sections devoted to Arshile Gorky with color illustrations of his work.)
William Seitz was a creative witness to one of the major artistic upheavals of our time. A painter himself, he knew the painters of the New York School and shared their milieu in the vibrant early years of the Abstract Expressionist movement. His pioneering study, written in the early 1950s and circulated only in photocopies, became an underground classic. When Seitz was laying the groundwork for his book, conversing with the artists and studying their canvases. Abstract Expressionist painting, though already beginning to influence artists abroad, was greeted with hostility or bewilderment at home. Seitz had a considerable role, it seems, in educating students and collectors in the nature and objectives of the movement. Later, of course, books surveying and assessing the movement appeared, but none has had the immediacy and freshness of this view from inside by a sensitive observer and interpreter. Seitz's aim, as he describes it, is to search out the fundamental premises — technical, aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical — through which Abstract Expressionism developed. His discussion, organized by topic, proceeds from the specific and particular to the general, from the paintings and comments of individual artists toward group principles, concepts, and values. It draws mainly on the works and words of six painters: Hans Hofmann, Mark Tobey, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell.
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