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 ...

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 ...

FOR half a century art critics have undertaken to address not a sophisticated minority like the readers of literary magazines, but the mass of unbelievers to whom twentieth-century art is a mystery or ...

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 ...

The primary authors of this post are Dirk B. Walther (University of Toronto) and Claudia Damiano (KU Leuven) Have you ever stood before an abstract painting, feeling a surge of emotion but struggling ...

In his preface to Abstract Art: A Global History—arriving this month from Thames & Hudson—Joseph Low (“Pepe”) Karmel, a professor of art history at New York University, writes that the goal of the ...

Abstract art often poses a challenge for many viewers due to its lack of connection to the physical world. Like other modernist art forms, it raises questions about how we understand and appreciate ...

Some artists — young and old alike — just don’t like realistic drawing. The task of portraying something exactly as it appears in real life can be daunting, and many find the process frustrating. For ...