Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection,

with contributions by Yve-Alain Bois, Enrique Juncosa, Rosalind Krauss, Richard D. Marshall, and Brenda Richardson. Zurich: Alesco; Zurich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 1999.

ISBN 3-908247-99-3

In English.

Bound in linen, dust
jacket, 181 pages,
98 color reproductions, including 55 full page
and 6 foldouts.

Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture

American Abstract Expressionism is one of the most fascinating and influential periods in the art of the 20th century. Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture focuses not only on the heroes of this style of painting but also examines its development and later artistic responses to it. In the essays specially written for this volume, renowned authors discuss a selection of some fifty paintings from the Daros Collection.

Keyworks of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell represent the "pure" phase of Abstract Expressionism implying gesture on a large scale, in which the artist transfers the movement of his or her body to the painting. A variant to that, écriture, stands for a scriptural gesture that has evolved out of handwriting as demonstrated, for instance, in the work of Cy Twombly. Twombly's oeuvre is examined in an extraordinary group of paintings that spans the artist’s entire career. Brice Marden’s alternately fluid and tensile abstractions also involve écriture, specifically Far Eastern calligraphy. And Jean-Michel Basquiat’s pictures walk the fine line between abstraction and representation that makes them more than just graffiti. The Abstract Expressionist movement has challenged many artists of subsequent generations, inviting their commentary, paraphrase, and interpretation. Robert Ryman’s intensive occupation with the stroke of the brush is discussed as well as Andy Warhol’s answers to action painting in his Oxidation and Shadow paintings of 1978. Much of the art of the eighties questioned the meaning and legitimization of painting. Jonathan Lasker, David Reed, and Philip Taaffe are among those who explored means of shifting painting to a more conceptual level and experimenting with the conditions and possibilities of contemporary abstract painting.

Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture covers American art of the last fifty years from the original gesture of action painting to the distanced and critical approach of the younger generation.