When Ira Glackens, son of American impressionist William Glackens, died in 1991, he left his substantial collection of works by his father to the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale. 

 

 

In 1948, while in Paris for an international conference, a group of northern European artists founded a movement that quickly came to be known as CoBrA, an acronym for the capitals of the artists’ respective countries – Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. The CoBrA style, abstract and expressionistic in nature, embraced spontaneity, childlike naiveté, and the exuberant use of bold, bright colors. And while the movement itself was short-lived – 1948 to 1951 – its influence proved to be far-reaching and enduring. Among the foremost CoBrA artists were Asger Jorn of Denmark, Pierre Alechinsky of Belgium, and Karel Appel of the Netherlands.

 

 

This installation from the heart and hands of Duval-Carrié bespeaks his ineradicable connection to the island of his birth. Knowledgeable about Vodou since childhood, the artist incorporates the religion’s theatrical sacred personages as players in his visual dramas of upheaval and transcendence. Migration out of Haiti, with consequences for the country left behind, is a persistent theme.

 

 

Names for this body of work have changed over the decades.  Charles Biederman (1906 – 2004), one of the best known artists represented here, used the term constructionism to describe his work, something related to and yet distinct from the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1910s and 1920s known as constructivism. Later, the term structurism was used. By the late 1970s, however, Biederman settled on the simpler term: new art.

 

 

In the late 1940s, following the end of World War II, a group of artists living in downtown New York created an informal gathering place they called the Eighth Street Club. Conrad Marca-Relli was one of the founding members along with Willem and Elaine DeKooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnet Newman, all hailed as pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, the first internationally recognized art movement to originate in North America. Drawing on the artists’ unconscious and individual abstract styles, Abstract Expressionist painting is characterized by uniform all-over composition and significant scale. Marca-Relli’s contribution—here exemplified by Night Rider (1959) — was to raise the medium of collage to the scale and complexity associated with the painting of this ground-breaking movement.