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Oskar Fischinger’s achievements as an abstract painter stem from his bold experiments as an avant-garde filmmaker. By John Dorfman The painter and filmmaker Oskar Fischinger has long been a well-kept secret of the midcentury Southern California modern-art scene—itself a rather well-kept secret of the American art world in general. The German-born artist, who was active…

There’s far more to Biedermeier-era painting than domesticity and sentiment. By John Dorfman The term “Biedermeier” is usually applied to an almost modernistic-looking furniture design style that was popular in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the 19th century. But there is also a Biedermeier style of painting, and it is hardly proto-modern….

An exhibition highlights the fruitful overlap of women artists connected to both abstraction and New York’s storied East End. By Sarah E. Fensom The first artist group to establish roots in the Hamptons was a sort of boys’ club. The Tile Club, an informal, New York City-based fraternal order of artists, writers, and musicians, was…

Flora Crockett is emerging from obscurity to gain recognition as an original, important, and delightful abstract painter. By John Dorfman As recently as 2017, Flora Crockett was being called a “forgotten painter.” The phrase appeared in Roberta Smith’s New York Times review of an exhibition of the artist’s work at Meredith Ward Fine Art in…

They never met in life, but Willem de Kooning and Chaïm Soutine have an artistic kinship that transcends time and place. By John Dorfman In 1977, when asked to discuss his influences, Willem de Kooning pointed to one above all—Chaïm Soutine, the Russian-born Parisian painter who died in miserable circumstances in 1943. In some ways,…

Artworks once owned by the wealthy Morozov brothers of Moscow, pioneering collectors of modernism in the early 20th century, are being seen outside Russia for the first time. By Sarah E. Fensom The famed Moscovite brothers Mikhaïl and Ivan Abramovich Morozov brought an astounding amount of masterpieces from Western Europe to Russia, creating collections of…

Clyfford Still, PH-972, 1959, oil on canvas, 112 x 155 in. Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver / ARS, New York Clyfford Still managed to become one of the most celebrated Abstract Expressionist painters and one of postwar art’s most elusive figures.   By Sarah E. Fensom   Clyfford Still…

Z. Vanessa Helder, Pettit Carriage House, 1942, watercolor on paper, 15 3⁄8 x 20 1⁄4 in.; Collection of John and Patti O’Keefe Magic realism, a relatively neglected school of American painting, probed the disquieting truths beneath the surface of modern life. By John Dorfman “For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law…

For American artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Spanish art and culture held an irresistible allure. By John Dorfman Spain once exerted a magnetic force on the American imagination. After losing most of its New World colonies in the 1820s, Spain entered a long period of political and economic decline during which it…