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The 1950s and '60s were especially stimulating times for American art. While some vanguard artists began to paint or sculpt in the 1930s as beneficiaries of WPA-era government support, other immigrant artists fled to the United States as Nazi power grew in Germany. A few artists were highly educated; others left school at an early age to pursue their art. Working in New York, California, the South and abroad, these artists blended knowledge, gleaned from the old masters and modernists, Picasso and Matisse in particular, with philosophy and mythology to create abstract compositions that addressed current social concerns and personal history. Some mixed hardware-store paint with expensive artist colors and bits of paper torn from magazines, linking their work with...
