Karmel, a professor of art history at New York University, approaches the field not as a steady tunneling toward nothingness, but as something more dynamic—and much less white, Western, and male.

My key discovery in “Magnetic Fields,” however, may be Mary Lovelace O’Neal (b. 1942), a very accomplished painter who was once chair of the University of California, Berkeley art practice ...

According to this article, abstract art gained traction in the early 20th century as artists experimented with depictions of ...