Author Description

Jonathan Lasker's Complete Essays 1984-1998 provides us with an important historical document about the development of American abstract painting over the course of nearly two decades. Besides analyzing the work of Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, and Eugne Leroy, and the critic Clement Greenberg, the artist discusses abstract painting's relationship to violence, sensation, the media, the physical and cognitive world of images, experience, reality, intentionality, beauty, consciousness and mortality in the contemporary world. In his thinking and work, as evidenced in these essays, Lasker explores "the unhappy marriages of the biomorphic and the decorative, the mark of the loaded brush and the geometric, the psyche and popular culture" -- and the intensely complex relation between substance and time, materiality and subjectivity, narrative and the means of abstraction in the context of meaning, the human condition, and the conditions of nature. Lasker writes: "I have underlined my intellectual personality in these essays not to show that I am a philosopher but rather that I seek only the truth of my desires, even if they go beyond provable reason."