Abstraction, Geometry, Painting: Selected Geometric Abstract Painting in America Since 1945

Familiar icons of geometric abstract art--including Josef Albers's squares within squares, Frank Stella's ``seemingly demonic'' black bands, Larry Poons's dotted-grid paintings and Kenneth Noland's splicing of color stripes--are reproduced in this catalogue of a traveling exhibition. Twenty-five artists are featured, among them Dorothea Rockburne, Charmion von Wiegand, Ad Reinhardt, Ilya Bolotowsky and Ellsworth Kelly. In his 81-page, wide-angled introductory essay, Auping, curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., charts the course of geometric abstraction, starting with the American Abstract Artists Group, founded in 1937 with an impetus from the Works Progress Administration. Current innovators shown here include Peter Halley, whose hybrid motifs sardonically comment on topics ranging from Freud to prisons, and Agnes Martin, inventor of a personal geometry created with ruler, pencil and paint. (Nov.)