Some artists — young and old alike — just don’t like realistic drawing. The task of portraying something exactly as it appears in real life can be daunting, and many find the process frustrating. For ...

Resist reading the titles of the paintings on this page. Just take them in. Think what you think, feel what you feel, wonder what you wonder. Then, check out the names and see how they reshape, enrich ...

It is hard to tell if abstract painting actually got worse [after the 1960s], if it merely stagnated, or if it simply looked bad in comparison to the hopes its own accomplishments had raised. —Frank ...

Thomas Downing, “Center Grid” (ca. 1960), detail (Image by the author for Hyperallergic) WASHINGTON, DC — The magazine selection in the visitors’ waiting room at the George Bush Center for ...

The mind processes abstract art and figurative art very differently, and the experience of viewing one or the other can change the way you think, a new study shows. Our minds process events and ...

Abstract art often gets an undeserved bad rap. Many people famously dismissed Jackson Pollock‘s signature drip paintings in the 1950s, for instance, as being something that a trained chimpanzee could ...

DENVER — The story goes like this. It is 1950. Virginia-born painter Judith Godwin learns that dancer and choreographer Martha Graham will be in the region and all Godwin can think about is her desire ...

Walk into any contemporary gallery in Las Vegas, and you'll likely encounter a canvas splashed with colors that seem to defy logic. No recognizable shapes. No obvious subject. Just pure, raw visual ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Hashtags have become a standard in ...