Subject Matter of the Artist: Writings by Robert Goodnough, 1950-1965

Literary Nonfiction. Art Studies. Edited by Helen A. Harrison. Foreword by Irving Sandler. The absence of traditional subject matter was a primary issue for painters in mid-twentieth-century America whose imagery lacked representational references; it was also a problem for those struggling to understand modern art. Robert Goodnough (19170-2011), then a New York University graduate student and an artist deeply involved with these issues, responded to the situation in a 1950 research paper, "Subject Matter of the Artist: An Analysis of Contemporary Subject Matter in Painting as Derived from Interviews with Those Artists Referred to as the Intrasubjectivists." Goodnough's paper constitutes the first scholarly work on the artists who became known as the Abstract Expressionists and includes interviews with William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. This previously unpublished study is presented here for the first time alongside related writings by Goodnough.