A new installation of fourteen works on paper from the period of Postwar Abstraction—including eight recent acquisitions that have not yet been on display—will go on view October 15 in the Amon Carter Museum’s Focus on Works on Paper Gallery. This small space features a rotation of prints, watercolors and drawings from the museum’s permanent collection with interactive materials that demonstrate the techniques and processes artists used in the works of art.

Abstraction became a powerful force in modern art following World War II, when American artists took the lead in developing highly innovative modes of creative expression. Many artists probed the evocative qualities of colors, lines, and shapes without apparent reference to identifiable forms. Others used the new artistic vocabulary to evoke familiar shapes such as those seen in this installation, including trees, still lifes, and elevated train tracks.

The spirit of innovation extended to artistic methods. Printmakers, for example, mixed processes in a single work, experimented with the addition of color, and even invented entirely new techniques. Three of the printmaking processes featured in the installation—intaglio, relief printing, and lithography—are each represented by a black-and-white and a color example.

In recent years, the Amon Carter Museum has sought to expand its holdings of prints and drawings from the decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a period whose rich diversity is only now being explored by scholars and collectors.