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Barr, A.H., Jr (1936) Cubism and Abstract Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966. (A classic account of varieties of Cubism.) |
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Cheetham, M. (1991) The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Detailed analysis of philosophical theories influencing Gauguin, Kandinsky and Mondrian.) |
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Courbet, G. (1861) ‘Letter in the Courrier du dimanche, December 25 1861’, in L.
Nochlin (ed.) Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1966, 34–6. (Gives Courbet’s criticism of abstraction in visual art referred to in §1.) |
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Danto, A.C. (1981) The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Contains ambitious interpretations of works by abstraction expressionists and their successors, among others; relevant to §5.) |
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Fried, M. (1965) Three American Painters, Boston: Garland Publishing Company. (Impressive formalist analysis of spatial effects in nonfigurative abstraction; relevant to §4.) |
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Greenberg, C. (1973) Art and Culture, London: Thames & Hudson. (‘Collage’ and ‘Abstract, Representational, and so forth’ deal with the relation of image to surface discussed in §4.) |
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Kandinsky, W. (1911) Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. and with intro. by M.T.H.
Sadler, New York: Dover, 1977. (An early, highly speculative attempt to provide a theoretical basis for abstraction by one of its principal creators.) |
| Museum of Modern Art (1984) The Museum of Modern Art, New York: the History and the Collection, New York: Harry N. Abrams and The Museum of Modern Art. (Especially useful compendium of illustrations of cited works.) |
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Osborne, H. (1979) Abstraction and Artifice in Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (The only comprehensive treatment of the subject by a philosopher available in English. Generally sound, provided that one abstracts from the information-theoretic concepts by substituting ‘schematic’ for ‘semantic’ and ‘nonfigurative’ for ‘syntactic’ [abstraction].) |
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Pohribny, A. (1979) Abstract Art, Oxford: Phaidon. (Rich in illustrations of cited works; also contains a useful historical summary of modes of abstraction through the mid-1970s, except for Cubism.) |
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Rosenberg, C.M. (1971) ‘Cubist Object Treatment: a Perceptual Analysis’, Artforum 9 (8): 30–36. (An insightful, though somewhat technical analysis of Cubist pictorial devices.) |
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Schapiro, M. (1978) Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries, Selected Essays, New York: George Braziller. (‘Abstract Art’ and ‘Mondrian’ give probing analyses of the relation of abstract art to its antecedents and social context.) |
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Walton, K.L. (1990) Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. (Major study of representation and fictional worlds.) |
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Whitford, F. (1984) Understanding Abstract Art, New York: E.P. Dutton. (A wide-ranging introduction to abstract painting.) |
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Worringer, W. (1908) Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael
Bullock, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1967. (A seminal study of abstraction in traditional art, both fine and decorative.) |