The first book to take a transnational view of destruction in abstract painting of the postwar period. Painting the Void: 1949��962 focuses on one of the most significant consequences of the
rise of gestural abstraction in twentieth-century painting: artists��literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the social and political climate of the postwar period��specially the
crisis of humanity resulting from the atomic bomb��nternational artists ripped, cut, burned, or affixed objects to the traditionally two-dimensional canvas. The exhibition and accompanying
catalogue mark the first time that these strategies have been considered together as a coherent mode of artistic production, expanding the scholarship on this critical moment in history.
Artists featured in the exhibition include very well-known figures as well as more obscure ones, though no less important, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint
Phalle, Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Salvatore Scarpitta, Antoni T�pies, and Kazuo Shiraga, as well as Jean Fautrier, Raymond Hains, John Latham, Otto M羹ehl, Jacques Villegl矇, and Shozo
Shimamoto.
