Black and White, Jewish Museum, 1963

Catalog of an exhibition held at New York City’s Jewish Museum from December 1, 1963 to February 5, 1964—an early entry in a sequence of groundbreaking exhibitions at the Museum that helped elevate a group of American (and at least Jewish-adjacent) minimalist artists to international prominence. Per the Introduction, the exhibition grew “out of a long felt need to see assembled a large number of black and white paintings, to re-experience to re-appraise the strange phenomena of a large group of individualistic personalities…exploring a particular discipline; and to see what the work will teach us. ..the exhibition has no ax to grind other than to stress the widespread involvement of painters with black and white painting since WW II.”

Featured works by established and emerging artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Willem De Kooning, Josef Albers, Jim Dine, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Condrad Marca-Relli, Ray Parker, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Frank Stella, Myron Stout, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Youngerman. 8vo, 16 pages, with (naturally) black-and-white pictorial wrappers and illustrations. Text by curator Ben Heller, with an introduction by museum director Alan R. Solomon. Designed by Elaine Lustig Cohen. Gentle bumping and light rubbing to extremities. Scattered foxing throughout.