Leonhard Emmerling Book order

From the streets of New York to the walls of its most prominent galleries, follow the short, prolific, and politicized career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a cult figure of artistic social commentary. This introduction explores how the young trailblazer drew from inspirations as varied as Greek, Roman, and African art, along with French poetry and...

A tragic icon of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) took influences from Picasso and Mexican surrealism and developed his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Though his name inevitably conjures up images of the drip paintings for which he is most famous, this technique was only developed midway through his career.

Four positions of nonrepresentational painting from Iceland and New Zealand relate to classical positions of modernist abstract painting. The character of this reference—with Stephen Bambury the recourse to Malevich, with Judy Millar the relationship to Pollock, with Ingólfur Arnarsson the investigation of the category of the sublime, and with Tumi Magnússon the reference to Barnett Newman—is completely different: affirmative or critical, ironic or contradicting.

Starting as an enigmatic street graffiti artist in New York in the late 1970s, Jean-Michel Basquiat went on to become the shooting star of the art world before succumbing to a drug overdose in 1988. This is his story.