Adja Yunkers

(1900–1983). Printmaker and painter. Associated with abstract expressionism during the 1950s and 1960s, he subsequently simplified his approach without relinquishing its emphasis on the poetic and painterly. Noted for complex color woodcuts, he worked as well in other print media, including intaglio, lithography, and screen print. He also favored pastel. Born in Riga, Russia (now Latvia), from 1914 he studied art in St. Petersburg. Three years later he embarked on a peripatetic existence of three decades, working and continuing to study in Paris and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in Latin America. In 1939 he settled in Stockholm, where he edited and published two art magazines, Ars and Creation. In 1947 he moved to the United States and was naturalized as a citizen six years later. A celebrated woodcut polyptych numbered among works that positioned Yunkers as a leader of the 1950s woodcut resurgence. Comprising twenty-eight blocks, each printed in multiple colors, the abstract Magnificat (1953) measures fourteen feet wide. After 1960 he became more interested in lithography. Although he worked in New Mexico shortly after his arrival in the United States and later taught occasionally elsewhere, he resided primarily in New York, where he died.

In 1952 he married art critic and historian Dore Ashton (1928–), noted particularly for writings on abstract expressionism and the New York School. She brings to her consideration of these artists a rich philosophical, literary, and historical context. Born in Newark, New Jersey, she earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1949 and a master's degree from Harvard University the following year. After serving for three years as an editor at Art Digest, she wrote art criticism for the New York Times from 1955until1960. Since 1968 she has been a professor at Cooper Union. She has also lectured widely and curated a number of exhibitions. The Unknown Shore: A View of Contemporary Art (1962) provides an informed and personal response to abstract expressionism and related European work. The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (1973; published the previous year in England as The Life and Times of the New York School: American Painting in the Twentieth Century) scrutinizes cultural conditions sustaining mid-twentieth-century American art. Her other books include Modern American Sculpture (1968), A Reading of Modern Art (1969), and A Fable of Modern Art (1980). In addition, she has published monographs on Joseph Cornell, Philip Guston, Richard Lindner, Isamu Noguchi, and Mark Rothko, among others, and has compiled anthologies of artists' writing. She and Yunkers separated before his death, and in 1985 she married critic and writer Matti Megged. She lives in New York.