American abstract expressionism (Tate Gallery Liverpool critical forum)

This first volume in the Tate Gallery Liverpool Critical Forum series is derived from a conference held in conjunction with the display of Abstract Expressionist Painting from the USA, which was mounted at Tate Gallery Liverpool from March 1992 to January 1993. The display comprised 21 paintings by 13 artists, including Ad Reinhardt, Norman Lewis, Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. The objectives of the conference, involving speakers from the international community of scholarship in the field, were: to elicit new observations, critical judgments and proposals from the knowledge base of abstract expressionism and perhaps to challenge some of its prevailing conventions; and to debate the role of the Tate Gallery Liverpool as a modifier of this field of knowledge. In exploring the establishment of myths within the genre of American expressionist painting, the contributors to "American Abstract Expressionism" offer new factual or interpretative information to existing art historical and critical knowledge of the field; reflect on already-mythologised aspects of the canon of American expressionist painting and criticism; and consider the act of bringing into conjunction these phenomena and Tate Gallery Liverpool as a mythologising institution.