Abstract Expressionism “THE NEW YORK SCHOOL”

Breaking away from accepted conventions in both technique and subject matter, the artists made monumentally scaled works that stood as a reflections of their psyches. • Artists valued. Spontaneity and improvisation• PROCESS ABOVE ALL ELSE.• Action Painting• Color field Painting• Radical new directions in art –and shifted the art worlds

focus.

Summary

• Main Influences:– Surrealism, cubism, Fauvism– Historical Context:– WWII, Great Depression

• Main Artists– Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko

• Public reaction

Quick review:

• Cubism- Geometric shapes, sharp lines, didn’t paint with natural lines– Picasso– Duchamp

• Fauvism- Ordinary scenes, played with the lighting and color of the scene and flattening color fields– Matisse

• Surrealism- Psychological, impulsive, subconscious.– Dali, Ernst

Great Depression

• Works Progress Administration (WPA)– Tried (somewhat successfully) to get U.S. out

of Great Depression– Optimistic

• Federal Art Project– Government hired artists to paint murals

(just and example) and bring hope to the people

World War II

• Genocide of Jewish culture – Affected Rothko specifically

• Expressed opinion against totalitarian government control in Europe

• Showed their pessimism and negative feelings

• Showed violence to mirror wartime.– “Their brutality of their art was screaming

out of rage at what their world had become.”

• CONTENT Early• Turned to primitive myth and archaic art for

inspiration. PRIMITIVISM

• Directness of expression was most important, best achieved through lack of premeditation.

• “To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.”-Newman.

Naked Man with Knife, 1938-1940, Pollock

Action painting

Artists:• Jackson Pollock• Willem de Kooning• Franz Kline: Lead into color field

• Techniques– Used various tools, unconventional tools– Drip painting (Pollock), swiping brushes across canvas– “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one american painter

after another as an arena in which to act-Rather then as a apace in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ and object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”- critic Harold Rosenburg.

Action Painting•Motive- wanted to evoke strong emotion

•Wanted to be a part of the painting•Directness and immediacy of expression.•Used large canvases

Jackson Pollock

http://youtu.be/yaKy6Ag_pLQ

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

• Troubled childhood

• Lived in New York City

• Worked on the Federal Art Project (Great Depression).

• Dealt with severe alcoholism; died in a drinking and driving accident

Jackson Pollock

• Drip painting: 1947-1950– Used wall paints (fluid paint, muted colors,

unconventional applicators, unprimed and un-stretched, large canvas)

• Defined “drip painting” as a type of action painting.

• Wanted to be “in” the paintings.

No.5 1948, Pollock, 1948

Blue Poles, Pollock, 1952

It is for this reason that the paintings are so compelling, because in Pollock’s work we have the feeling of order wrested out of disorder. Giving in to the nature of the materials and the forces of gravity, and giving free rein to the human desire to burst all constraints, Pollock’s paintings were able to embody a recurrent theme in contemporary America, that of modern man as ‘the helpless prey of forces both within and without himself’. At the same time, by exhibiting his technical finesse in the management of these forces, Pollock achieved a victory in the face of what could only seem impossible odds.

Convergence, Pollock (1952)“I can control the flow of the paint, there is no accident.”

Rather than imposing hierarchy onto our experience of the painting, Pollock asks the viewer to choose his or her own points of interest. As Pollock insisted, the viewer ‘should not look for, but look passively – and try to receive what the painting has to offer’.12 To look for, to bring a pre-conceived idea to the painting, would interfere with the experience of being in front of the work.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

• Sculptures and paintings

• Started as a commercial artist

• Federal Art Project (1935-1939)– Murals

Willem De Kooning

Willem de Kooning

• Subjects of paintings are easily recognizable, unlike other abstract expressionists.

• Women series is his most famous works

• Applied paint in aggressive manners

Woman, de Kooning (1950)

Excavation, de Kooning (1950)

Women and Bicycle, de Kooning (1953)

Color field

Artists:• Franz Kline• Mark Rothko• Techniques– Blocks of bright colors– Huge canvases

• Motive- Evoke intense emotional reaction• Emotion- The color in the painting

FRANZ KLINE

Franz Kline (1910-1962)

• Childhood upbringing influenced his aggressive painting style

• Influenced by wife’s illness

• Didn’t have a meaning behind what was painted on the canvas• Black and white paintings

– Avoided bright colors“loomed in gigantic black strokes which eradicated any image, the strokes expanding as entities in themselves, unrelated to any entity but that of their own existence."

Chief, Kline (1950)

Painting No. 2, Kline (1954)

Mahoning, Kline (1956)

Paintings were typically very large and painted on big canvases

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

• Born in Latvia, moved to the U.S.

• Attended Yale– Dropped out because of the elitist feelings there.

• Worked with Jackson Pollock.

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko

• He looked at art as something that is inspired from one’s feelings within.

• Wanted to expose and bring out reality to the viewer.

• Painted to represent a single idea that summarized all the ideas of human feelings such as human values.

White Center, Rothko (1950)

No. 10, Rothko (1950)

No. 2, Rothko (1951)

Public Reaction

After Abstract Expressionism

• Pop art– Andy Warhol

• Minimalism

• Was the transition between modernism and postmoderism

Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg

• Bridged the gap between abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

• Began to Use Assemblage.• Return to the figure and interpretations of

surroundings.

Robert Rauschenberg

Bed

Canyon

Jasper Johns

TargetThough the target is closely linked with the acts of looking and aiming, the concentric circles of Johns's version are obscured and the surface made tactile with encaustic—pigment mixed with beeswax—on collage. Mounted above the target, four plaster casts taken from a single model over a period of several months are arranged in nonsequential order. A hinged wooden lid offers the option of shutting away the small niches that hold these cropped, eyeless faces.

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