Although she never identifies it in the titles of her paintings, Nina Murdoch constantly returns to a mysterious, shadowy place in Battersea. Here, gazing at a road dominated by heavy bridges and the insistent din of unseen London traffic, she finds herself mesmerised. Street kids who hang out in thi

Dense, Industrial, Intense, Urban

The spiritual, the sublime, infinity itself: all seem to hover beneath the translucent surfaces of Mark Rothko's blurred and veil-like rectangles. The brilliantly colored blocks of his best-known works, distillations of all that this Lithuanian-born immigrant had learned during his first 15 years of

Abstract expressionism, Abstract painting, Dense, Depressive, Monochromatic, Post-painterly abstraction, Saturated, Silence

Manny Farber, though still much-revered as a film critic, eschewed film in favor of painting. Farber began writing film reviews for The New Republic in 1942. He continued his film career through the 1970s, writing most notably for publications such as Film Comment. As his book "Negative Space" (1970)

Agitated, Dense, In-your-face, Quirky, Smart

"De Kooning is probably the most libidinal painter America has ever had." So says art critic Robert Hughes, and when we look at de Kooning's paintings, the way he immersed himself in the female form in his famous "Women" series from the 50s, and the way the body -- admittedly in pieces, but the sensu

Abstract expressionism, Biomorphic, Dense, Improvised, Kaleidoscopic, Kinetic, Manic, Violent, Whimsical