Debra Bricker Balken Books

Focusing on Mark Tobey's significant contributions to abstract art, this comprehensive survey highlights his role as a pioneering figure in American abstraction. It accompanies a major retrospective that showcases his innovative techniques and artistic evolution, emphasizing his influence on the art world. The book explores Tobey's unique style and the historical context of his work, offering insights into his creative process and the impact he had on future generations of artists.

The first substantial, scholarly overview of the American creative community living in postwar Paris, featuring never-before-published interviews with Americans and French artists, critics, and dealers. This book delves into the various circles of artists who lived in France following World War II. Featuring new scholarship and illuminating essays, the groundbreaking volume illustrates many of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photos, and films produced between 1946 and 1962. Americans in Paris introduces the story of the American creative community that inhabited the City of Lights following the Second World War. Proposing Paris as decisive for the development of postwar American art, this volume investigates the academies where many of these artists studied, the spaces where their work was exhibited, the aesthetic discourses that animated their conversations, their interactions with European artists, and the overarching issue of what it meant to be an American abroad.

Focusing on Harold Rosenberg's influential role in reshaping art criticism, this biography explores his dual identity as both an art and social critic. It highlights his contributions to abstract expressionism and the New York School, alongside his reflections on art commodification and celebrity culture. Set against the vibrant intellectual backdrop of his era, the narrative delves into Rosenberg's literary work and key essays, particularly "The Herd of Independent Minds," making the book relevant to contemporary discussions on art and identity.

When Duchamp moved from Paris to New York in 1915, he was disappointed by the predominantly nature-based abstraction he observed, publicly proclaiming that American artists were too dependent on outmoded European traditions and had overlooked their greatest subjects--the skyscraper and the machine. Meanwhile, the artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz and his "291" gallery remained loyal to their belief in nature as a source of ongoing renewal for visual culture, and emphasized the crucial role that intuition and spirituality played in their creation of art. The crossfire between Duchamp and Stieglitz and their respective circles defined a critical moment in early twentieth-century American art. Debating Modernism includes reproductions of work by artists from both camps, from Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand to Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marsden Hartley. An essay by curator Debra Bricker Balken traces the threads of the debate through the 1910s and 20s, and also addresses the appearance of sexualized imagery in nearly all of these artists' works, a phenomenon that ironically unifies the two seemingly opposed camps. Jay Bochner's essay focuses on the artists' respective violations of American expectations about art.

In this incisive study, the curator and writer Debra Bricker Balken examines the work of the leading artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. At the same time she examines the myths surrounding the movement, the variation in the motivation and practice of artists grouped by art historians under the same heading, and the role played by critics in the movement's reception, both at the time and up to the present day.Of equal value to the general reader and the art historical scholar alike, Balken's text is a valuable addition to the literature on one of the most influential of all twentieth-century art movements.