The Shape of Freedom

Drawing from some of the world's greatest art collections, this sumptuous celebration of mid-century artistic expression explores a vibrant transatlantic exchange during which artists of all kinds radically reimagined the process and meaning of painting.

Brilliant color, bold compositions, and innovative approaches to form and material are the hallmarks of postwar artistic expression in America and Europe, a time when Western painting developed in completely new directions as a generation of artists turned their backs on the dominant styles of the interwar period. This exhibition catalog traces two sister movements-Abstract Expressionism in the United States and Art Informel in Western Europe-from the 1940s through to the end of the Cold War.

Featured here are lush reproductions of works by artists of the traditional canon - Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Georges Mathieu, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tapies and Emilio Vedova. The authors also shine a light on the heroic accomplishments of female abstractionists, including Mary Abbott, Janice Biala, Natalia Dumitresco, Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Judit Reigel, Janet Sobel, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.

Essays by leading curators from around the world illuminate how, as an expression of individual freedom, the spontaneous artistic gesture gained symbolic significance; how large-scale color-field compositions created a meditative space for contemplating the fundamental questions of human existence; and how these truly radical ideals and accomplishments continue to reverberate in contemporary art today.