Surrealists in New York: Atelier 17 and the Birth of Abstract Expressionism

An absorbing group biography revealing how exiles from war-torn France brought surrealism to America, sparking the movement that became abstract expressionism.

In 1957 the American artist Robert Motherwell made an unexpected claim: "I have only known two painting milieus well … the Parisian Surrealists, with whom I began painting seriously in New York in 1940, and the native movement that has come to be known as 'abstract expressionism,' but which genetically would have been more properly ca...