ST. LOUIS, MO.- The Saint Louis Art Museum is pleased to announce that Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976, curator Norman L. Kleeblatt and consulting curators Charlotte Eyerman, Maurice Berger and Douglas Dreishpoon, have won the award for Best Thematic Museum Show in New York City by The International Art Critics Association (AICA).

Organized by The Jewish Museum, New York in collaboration with the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Action/Abstraction is the first major U.S. exhibition to reconsider Abstract Expressionism in over 20 years. The featured exhibition, which drew in 44,668 visitors during its nearly three-month showing in St. Louis, closed January 11, 2009 at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Action/Abstraction opens at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery February 13.

Each year the AICA's 400 members vote for the best exhibitions produced during the season. These awards are given in recognition of the exceptional and important work in the visual arts contributed that year by artists, curators, gallerists, writers, scholars, and cultural institutions.

Last year's winners included the Museum of Modern Art, LA MoCA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The AICA Awards ceremony will honor the award recipients with a formal presentation. The event will be held on March 2, 2009 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

The New Yorker hailed Action/Abstraction as one of the 10 best art shows of 2008 and Time Magazine's 'Looking Around' blog called the exhibition, "the world's greatest classroom slide lecture, except that it's been done with real paintings and sculpture, some of them of the first order." Artforum said Action/Abstraction "promises a fresh take on those fabled denizens of Tenth Street. By placing unprecedented emphasis on contemporaneous academic criticism and the mass media, this show…claims the persistent centrality of social history."

Action/Abstraction features more than 50 key works that were carefully chosen from major institutions and collections throughout the U.S. and abroad, including major masterpieces by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, as well as Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Jasper Johns, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, David Smith, Frank Stella and Clyfford Still.

Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940–1976 was curated at the Saint Louis Art Museum by Charlotte Eyerman, curator of modern and contemporary art. It was conceived and organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, the Susan & Elihu Rose Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum, New York, with consulting curators Maurice Berger, Senior Fellow at The Vera List Center for Art & Politics, New School University and Senior Research Scholar of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland; Douglas Dreishpoon, Senior Curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; and Charlotte Eyerman. Maurice Berger curated the context rooms in the exhibition.