"Not an illustration but the equivalent"

The author of this well-illustrated study uses the heuristic models developed by contemporary cognitive scientists for describing human perception and cognition to articulate a new interpretive framework and critical terminology to address the interpretation of New York School abstraction. Although art history, as it stands now, offers few methodological avenues to address such issues persuasively, recent cognitive psychology provides the possibility of treading new interpretive ground. This book, therefore, is an attempt to bring the latest findings of cognitive psychology to bear on the interpretation of Abstract Expressionism. Though frequently articulate about their intentions, Abstract Expressionist artists have frustrated interpretive ventures by deliberately avoiding clear explanations of their individual works. By insisting that their works were abstract yet simultaneously capable of disseminating meaning to a wider audience, the artists ran afoul of accepted notions of abstract art and raised a number of key issues that have bedeviled scholarship ever since the movement began. If the majority of critics saw abstraction in purely formal terms, the artists themselves insiste