#modernist-abstraction

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Berlin music
fromwww.theguardian.com
2 weeks ago

Death, power and paranoia: painting that shocked German society finally returns to Berlin

Mors Imperator, a painting by Hermione von Preuschen, symbolizes the transience of power and fame, returning to Berlin after over a century of controversy.
Berlin music
fromwww.theguardian.com
2 weeks ago

Death, power and paranoia: painting that shocked German society finally returns to Berlin

Mors Imperator, a painting by Hermione von Preuschen, symbolizes the transience of power and fame, returning to Berlin after over a century of controversy.
Photography
fromThe New Yorker
7 hours ago

How Robert Rauschenberg Made the Real Realer

Rauschenberg valued stillness as a form of energy, finding inspiration in Newhall's photographs despite their contrasting kinetic nature.
Berlin
fromArtforum
3 days ago

Bettina's Obsessive Geometries: The Search for a Fourth Dimension

Bettina's artistic journey includes innovative photography and sculptures, showcasing organic forms and a retreat from public life as her productivity increased.
Writing
fromThe Nation
5 days ago

The Enigma of Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein's complex writing style and innovative use of language significantly influenced 20th-century literature, despite ongoing ambivalence from readers.
Graphic design
fromMedium
1 week ago

Disruption has a shape. Design history shows us what it is.

AI is causing anxiety in design, echoing past technological disruptions like the printing press and desktop publishing.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 day ago

Required Reading

Calida Rawles' art explores the duality of water as both healing and destructive within the Black diaspora's history.
Typography
fromOpen Culture
1 week ago

An Introduction to Brutalism: The Iconic Postwar Architectural Style That Combined Utopianism and Concrete

Esperanto was created as a universal second language, while Brutalism aimed to rebuild post-war society with raw concrete architecture.
Graphic design
fromMedium
1 week ago

For Craft Sake: On the laws and principles behind good design

Craft is experiencing a resurgence in product design, emphasizing fundamental skills amidst the rise of generative AI and industry confusion.
#contemporary-art
Arts
fromArtforum
3 days ago

How Vision Becomes Ideology: On Wadysaw Strzeminski's Theory of Seeing

Władysław Strzemiński's 'Teoria widzenia' examines the interplay of vision, art, and socio-political conditions from prehistory to modernity.
Web design
fromMedium
3 weeks ago

The color statistic that's been wrong for 80 years

The commonly cited claim that humans can see between 1 million and 10 million colors lacks scientific precision and requires examination of what actually constitutes a distinguishable color.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
2 days ago

Remembering Glen Baxter, Pat Steir, Melvin Edwards

This week honors an absurdist cartoonist, a feminist artist, and a sculptor addressing violence in the US.
Cars
fromLmnt
1 month ago

Have We Forgotten How to Design?

Waymo's partnership with DoorDash to manually close passenger car doors reveals a fundamental oversight in autonomous vehicle design, despite the availability of proven automated door technology.
fromBOOOOOOOM!
3 days ago

"Idling" by Artist Greta Kresse

"These paintings merge the landscape and the intimacy of windows through the framing of the car, bridging the two realms I've typically explored separately. The car becomes a meditation on transition, on existing simultaneously here and elsewhere."
Arts
Design
fromYanko Design - Modern Industrial Design News
3 weeks ago

5 Floating Designs That Look Like Photoshop (But They're Real) - Yanko Design

Floating design lifts architectural elements from the ground to create visual lightness, spatial clarity, and refined interventions that balance engineering precision with aesthetic intent.
fromArtnet News
3 days ago

Lillian Bassman Pushed Fashion Photography to the Edge of Abstraction

Bassman's photographs, in fact, looked more like illustrations. She achieved this effect through darkroom experimentation and manipulation: donning a cardboard mask with a pinhole aperture, she selectively exposed portions of the paper to light, tracing the contours of the garments until they seemed to dissolve into atmosphere.
Arts
fromArchitectural Digest
2 years ago

Brutalist Architecture Is Divisive-Here's Everything You Need to Know About the Style to Determine Your Stance

The style is characterized by raw, exposed concrete and bold geometric forms. You've certainly seen it before in many cultural and civic buildings built between the 1950s and '70s. With countless examples spanning countries and continents, the look has both historical significance and remains popular-particularly in residential design-today.
Miscellaneous
Berlin
fromArchDaily
1 month ago

Ethiopian Modernism: Mid-Century Architecture of Africa's Capital

Architectus won the 2026 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize for conserving Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, highlighting underappreciated Modernist architecture across Africa and Ethiopia's significant twentieth-century architectural heritage.
Los Angeles
fromLos Angeles Times
22 years ago

Avant-garde colony reborn as a 1950s suburb

Winnetka evolved from a 1920s utopian communal experiment founded by Charles Weeks into a family-oriented suburban community with affordable 1950s ranch-style homes attracting diverse residents and investors.
fromArtforum
1 month ago

Field Conditions

Like the chambered nautilus, its shell was a logarithmic spiral. A wall of rough sandstone and aquamarine glass cullet twisted up fifty feet to an oil-drill-stem mast from which a floating roof was hung by the stainless-steel struts of World War II biplanes. You slid in with the humid air from the ravine outside to stroll a terraced garden of pools and plants, over which suspended and carpeted pods for living and sleeping drifted like clouds.
Miscellaneous
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 week ago

A View From the Easel

Creating molds from high-heeled shoes in a shared workspace enhances precision and organization in the artistic process.
Graphic design
fromItsnicethat
4 weeks ago

"A poster is a bit like a song": Jakub Zasada's geometric works are a thing of beauty

Jakub Zasada creates midcentury-inspired digital posters using minimal software functions and scanned materials, prioritizing functional design for public spaces with universal accessibility.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 week ago

Before the "Global South," Indian Modernists Dreamed of Solidarity

Atreyee Gupta's book connects Indian art and anticolonial thought, emphasizing the need to decolonize Western frameworks in understanding Global Modernisms.
#art-history
Graphic design
fromFast Company
4 weeks ago

The architectural sketch is back

The architectural sketch is experiencing a revival in contemporary practice despite decades of digital dominance, as architects recognize the unique value of hand-drawn work in an AI-driven world.
Arts
fromwww.theguardian.com
2 weeks ago

Estonia exports a modernist, Glasgow gets poetic and Leonora Carrington goes wild the week in art

Estonia's modernist painter Konrad Magi is featured in an exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery from March to July.
#artist-studio-practice
Arts
fromwww.theguardian.com
2 weeks ago

Absolutely transformative': Willem de Kooning exhibition uncovers raw intensity of early work

Willem de Kooning's 1948 solo exhibition at Charles Egan Gallery launched his international career, establishing him as a pre-eminent painter by the 1950s through his innovative exploration of figuration and abstraction.
fromwww.theguardian.com
2 months ago

Six great reads: Mondrian's hidden inspiration, the friendship secret and heat for Heated Rivalry

One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea. Trump called me down to the Oval Office,' John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian. He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy Greenland ' The US president's friend Ronald Lauder, heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, is now making deals in the island. Guardian investigations correspondent Tom Burgis explored the reasons behind Trump and Lauder's fixation with Greenland. Read more
US politics
fromThe Art Newspaper - International art news and events
2 months ago

New book offers fresh perspectives on why Cubism came into being

Cubism and Reality is his return to the works by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris that define early Cubism. The book has many strands but turns around a highly informed reconstruction of the processes by which their interactions with reality resulted in physical works of art, what Green terms "material things to be looked at". The revolutionary works discussed remain visually difficult; as he acknowledges, they are "most often only slowly penetrated by looking, imagining, reflecting and looking again".
Books
Arts
fromElite Traveler
3 weeks ago

AI Art: Is It Any Good? The Experts Weigh In

AI art represents a transformative cultural moment comparable to the Renaissance printing press, fundamentally changing artistic creation and expression.
fromBoard Game Quest
1 month ago

Sand Art Review

Sand Art is a game by Kory Jordan and published by 25th Century Games for two to four players ages 10 and up. It takes about an hour to play, and has you collecting resources and then coloring in a bottle, making art in a bottle out of sand, in case the name didn't give away the plot. Gameplay Overview: Sand Art has you gathering and mixing sand, which is used to fill your bottle.
Board games
Arts
fromHyperallergic
3 weeks ago

Haroutiun Galentz: The Form of Colour

A new monograph repositions Armenian-Lebanese painter Haroutiun Galentz as a cosmopolitan modernist whose work transcends national boundaries and demands cross-border interpretation.
fromHyperallergic
3 weeks ago

Embracing Friction in the Art World

On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
Arts
Design
fromOpen Culture
1 month ago

The Untold Story of Bauhaus Women: The Avant-Garde Artists Who Helped Shape Modernism

The Bauhaus advanced many women’s artistic and design careers despite institutional gender limitations, including enrollment caps and restricted opportunities under Walter Gropius.
fromwww.kaltblut-magazine.com
1 month ago

Union of Opposites

Originally from Dallas and now based in New York City, I approach photography as an exercise in atmosphere, trust, and control. Trained in the discipline of film and later in fashion photography, I work with both natural and artificial light to construct images that feel cinematic and psychologically charged. Moving fluidly between studio and location, I transform spaces into environments that heighten mood and presence.
Fashion & style
Photography
fromwww.kaltblut-magazine.com
2 months ago

In A World Where All Silver is Gold

Silver-coated bodies shine as untouchable armour while revealing underlying fragility, questioning uniform perfection and what remains valuable when all surfaces glitter alike.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
3 weeks ago

Mid-Century Modernism Goes Rogue in "Chair-ish"

Artists Alex Chitty and Norman Teague deconstruct and reimagine iconic design furniture pieces, transforming them into experimental sculptural objects that challenge conventional notions of functionality and design heritage.
fromArchDaily
1 month ago

Playful and Ironic: The Legacy of Postmodernist Architecture in the United States

Postmodernism began as a critique of modernism's exhausted promises. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many designers no longer treated modernism as radical or socially redemptive. Urban renewal projects accelerated the demolition of historic neighborhoods, and landmark preservation battles raised urgent questions about what the United States valued and, ultimately, protected. The loss of major civic icons, including New York's Penn Station, sharpened public awareness that progress often arrives through erasure.
Design
Design
fromArchDaily
1 month ago

When Art Came First: Spatial Experiments That Shaped Architecture in Latin America

Artistic practices in mid-20th-century Latin America pioneered spatial concepts later integrated into architecture, emphasizing collective use and bodily experience.
Design
fromSilicon Canals
1 month ago

Minimalism had its moment: now designers say this aesthetic is dominating 2026 - Silicon Canals

Interior design is shifting from minimalist, sparse aesthetics to a colorful, textured maximalist revival emphasizing personality and lived-in warmth.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

Remembering Dora Maurer, Isaiah Zagar, and Peter Stampfli

Multiple artists across diverse disciplines and geographies recently passed away, each leaving significant contributions to visual arts, community engagement, and artistic innovation.
fromArtnet News
1 month ago

'Abstract Expressionists: The Women' Rewrites a Male-Dominated Canon

In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe's first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can't make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.
Arts
Arts
fromThe Nation
2 months ago

Did We Get the History of Modern American Art Wrong?

Surrealism significantly influenced 1960s American art, challenging the dominant narrative that Abstract Expressionism led directly to Pop Art and Minimalism.
Arts
fromSilicon Canals
1 month ago

8 signs you appreciate art, music, and culture on a deeper level than most people - Silicon Canals

Some people experience art deeply, reacting emotionally and perceiving subtle artistic cues that reveal heightened sensitivity and meaningful connections to creative expression.
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

How White Elites Drained Ancient Art of Its Color

In the autumn of 2022, Max and I walked up the iconic steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to visit Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color. As the young son of a professional classicist, and a burgeoning one himself, my museum partner already knew about the ancient history of painted statues when we began to explore the galleries. Max's knowledge seemed the exception rather than the rule.
Arts
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

The Importance of Making "Degenerate" Art

Art can be deliberately non-neutral and ethically engaged, refusing neutrality, civility, and institutional comfort to confront injustice and amplify marginalized voices.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

Does It Have to Mean Something to Be Great?

Joanne Greenbaum combines diverse media and mark-making to create cohesive paintings where individual elements retain distinctiveness, blending stillness with accelerating movement.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
2 months ago

Edward Zutrau Was a Chromatic Rebel

Edward Zutrau fused reductive Abstract Expressionism with Japanese ink-painting principles to create a distinctive, underrecognized mid-20th-century painting practice.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
2 months ago

Art Movements: New Leaders Everywhere

Jean Cooney will become executive director of Creative Time; major museum leadership changes include Sally Tallant leaving Queens Museum, Yasha Grobman in Jerusalem, and Amy Sherald signing with CAA.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time

Crowd-curated liminal photography captures eerie, nostalgic unease in abandoned commercial spaces, reflecting a collective artistic response to late-capitalist decline.
Arts
fromOpen Culture
2 months ago

A Brief History of Surrealist Art: From the Bible and Ancient Egypt to Salvador Dali's Dream Worlds

Surrealism harnesses dream logic—alternate, internally consistent rules of dreaming—to transform universal dreaming traditions into enduring, imaginative art.
Arts
fromEast Bay Express | Oakland, Berkeley & Alameda
2 months ago

Art / Tech: Postmodern Cultural Incubator critiques technology with art

A six-to-eight-month Cultural Incubator fosters anti-disciplinary collaboration, merging art and technology to critique current tech deployment and broaden who benefits from technological innovation.
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

A View From the Easel

The studio is at my house within a ranch, surrounded by nature. It's on the second floor of the house, where there's better light. My routine all day shifts between studio work and housework, including outdoor garden work. I get up a bit before 7am, drink coffee in the yard, and get morning sunshine. Then my husband and I eat breakfast and do a bit of cleaning or some chores in the garden.
Arts
fromwww.theguardian.com
2 months ago

Her time has come': did Mondrian owe his success to a crossdressing lesbian artist who lived in a Cornish cove?

Why the volte-face? Because it is now widely recognised in the art world that it was as much Moss who influenced Mondrian as the other way round, at least when it came to the double or parallel lines he started using in the 1930s to add tension to his harmonious abstract paintings, one of which hammered last May for $48m.
Arts
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

A Surprisingly Enjoyable Show About Critical Theory

Echo Delay Reverb examines French critical theory's influence on American art, highlighting Francophone thinkers and artworks addressing labor, incarceration, materiality, and formal contrasts.
fromHyperallergic
2 months ago

Anselm Kiefer's Rustbelt Romanticism

"Spirit is Life. It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea." -Gregory Corso ST. LOUIS - At 2,340 miles, the "mighty" Mississippi River borders no fewer than eight American states. Missouri is among them, where the city of St. Louis has been the site of both tenacious (and pugnacious) expansionist gusto and, in the wake of midcentury de-industrialization, precipitous decline.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
1 month ago

Spain's Cosmic Mother of Modernism

MADRID - The most famous portrait of Maruja Mallo depicts the artist covered from head to toe in seaweed. She is crowned and draped with long, rope-like strands of kelp, her arms raised triumphantly like an all-powerful marine goddess. This unconventional photograph, snapped in 1945 by the poet Pablo Neruda on a Chilean beach, was no doubt carefully orchestrated by the Spanish artist, who viewed herself as an extension of her unique work, where female energy is a conduit for natural and even cosmic forces.
Arts
fromHyperallergic
2 months ago

Art Movements: Knights, Presidents, and Crooks

As 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the auction house Christie's is hosting multiple auctions later this month as part of "Americana Week." Was I the only one who didn't know that Jimmy Carter was also a painter? The lots include a painting by that president, Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington for James Madison, and Grant Wood's original study for "American Gothic" (1930).
Arts
fromdesignyoutrust.com
2 months ago

Incredible Scanner Glitch Collages Exploring Emotional Fragmentation and Digital Distortions by Alg Eventual

Alg Eventual is an Ohiobased audio/visual new media artist creating glitch art, digital collages and abstract mixed media works with a reference to the roots of the early 2000s. His works feature scanner experiments, layered textures and titles like Exterior, Interwind, Articulation, Overthinking and Everything leads back to you, blending digital manipulation with tactile, fragmented aesthetics. More: Instagram
Arts
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