Defining Abstraction: How Postwar New York Became American
Journal: Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Year: 2019

This thesis reexamines the art historical narrative of abstraction in 1950s New York City. I argue that this story as written since the 1960s chooses to regard abstraction as bifurcated into styles supposedly native to either Europe or America. Examining the works of two European artists, Nicholas de Staël and Pierre Soulages, I demonstrate rather how American curators, gallerists, and critics in the fifties promoted a pan-national abstraction. The affinities they stressed between Paris and New