It’s always been difficult to generalize about the impulses toward abstraction evident in American art during the decades after the Second World War. The virtue of Claudine Humblet’s 2,000-page, three-volume study of the subject, The New American Abstraction, 1950-1970, is that it doesn’t really try. She is content to let the individual artists and their works speak for themselves.

There is something refreshing in this approach, which frees the works from having to illustrate a wider idea or art historical thesis. We can just look at the pictures and listen to Humblet talk about the artistry. I like that sort of book. But it also raises a question as to its intellectual purpose: Aren’t there enough books already about this much-storied moment in art?

Having spent a great deal of time reading the 25-pound monster—I weighed it on the scales at home—I still don’t have an answer. Perhaps I missed it, or perhaps it’s simply not there. If so, then that is a flaw in what is an otherwise extraordinary and commendable endeavor. The book profiles more than 50 artists and contains hundreds of beautiful color images along with a sheaf of detailed references and a bibliography spanning 75 pages. It is a remarkable feat of research and writing. It serves, as well, as a kind of art historical search-and-rescue operation, for in addition to comprehensively covering all the big names of the era—artists like Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella—Humblet reacquaints us with the work of a sizable number who had a moment of glory but now are largely forgotten.

The canon is limited, and it tends get more and more limited as time goes on. History is incredibly cruel in this regard, playing favorites with certain painters, sculptors and the like and consigning everyone else to obscurity. Even very successful artists are often remembered only for a single work. That is what makes it such a pleasure to see expansive entries on people like Paul Brach, Al Held and Jack Youngerman, all of whom would seem ripe for resurgence.

Geography, too, plays a part in canon creation. New York was the center of American abstraction, but it is often forgotten that good practitioners were working in other cities as well, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington. Humblet gives these regional centers their due, most notably with a section in the second volume on the Washington Color Painters. Extended essays profile Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring and Paul Reed.

Other sections group artists by theme, such as “the shaped canvas” (Will Insley, Charles Hinman, Sven Lukin, Larry Bell), “modular abstraction” (Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, David Novros) and “a new painterliness” (Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Walter Darby Bannard). Although the focus is on painting, the final volume contains a chapter devoted to makers of abstract sculpture, with entries on Mark di Suvero, Peter Forakis, Robert Grosvenor and Tony Magar.

So what conclusions can be drawn from exposure to 25 pounds of American abstraction? Certainly, that it was more varied and diverse than we are often led to believe; that the art was chiefly about color and sensuality, what you might call the experience of looking; and finally and more generally, that the movement evinced an underlying fascination with visual structures—we tend to think of abstraction as all stains and smudges, but much of it was very ordered and precise.

The volumes’ overall design and layout are clean, and the text readable, although occasionally Humblet lapses into artspeak or constructs wobbly sentences with several subclauses and a confused subject. This is perhaps understandable, given the nature of the source documents on much of this artwork: No movement has been so reinforced with theoretical mumbo jumbo as American abstract painting. Art critics and academics made careers of obfuscation.  

Regrettably, women abstract painters of the period are not represented in depth. Surely Miriam Schapiro, Perle Fine and Lee Krasner rated mentions, if not dedicated chapters. And what about Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell? But quibbling with lists is pedantry, an accountant’s errand. All those who are lucky enough to be included in this lavish production are beautifully served. 

"Form's Forefront" originally appeared in the December 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see the Art+Auction December 2007 Table of Contents.