The Oldness of Abstraction (or Can Abstract Art Be New?)

Abstract art is now more than a hundred years old, having developed its own complex formal vocabularies over the course of the twentieth century. In this lecture, Briony Fer — 2014 Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and a Professor of Art History at UCL, London, UK — discusses a critical point in that history, focusing on the work of Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin in the 1960s in order to explore the problem of so-called pure painting and its ramifications for abstraction, then and now. Does the charge of hermeticism and mysticism long attached to (old) abstract painting still matter today?