Michael Darling, the Seattle Art Museum's curator of modern and contemporary art, has assembled a surprisingly cool show with , which opened last weekend at SAM and runs through Sept. 7. The post-WWII period saw the apex of high Modernism in painting with the abstract expressionists, led by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. They took the Modernists' radical approach to painting to the utmost extreme, by actually separating the brush from the canvas and completely rejecting representational art. At the same time, though, a new group of painters were laying the groundwork of Postmodernism, and were searching for new ways to break free of the canvas. more ›

DEAD GIRL ART: Today it will be warm and sunny, which means it's a good day to break out of the office at lunch, snag a free parking spot at the Frye, and pop into their cafe for a bite before enjoying some disturbing paintings. Their exhibit Over Julia's Dead Body showcases Gabriel von Max, a Munich Secessionist "best known for his paintings of beautiful, dead women." Gabriel was into spiritualism, somnambulism, and painting with a dark palette. more ›