PAINTINGS OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

THE DEEP(1953)

• The Deep evokes a chasm - an abyss either to be avoided or to get lost inside. White paint was built up with layered brush strokes, showing a return of Pollock's direct involvement with the canvas. Drips are still evident, now creating a web that floats above the chasm. Pollock was clearly looking for a new approach, an image to create, desperate to break away from his signature style, yet his last paintings represent neither a new beginning nor a

conclusion.

Seated Woman (1940)

• Seated Woman was de Kooning's first major painting of a woman, and it evolved, curiously, out of a commission for a slightly earlier picture, Portrait of a Woman (c.1940). The artist seems to have held on to the commissioned portrait and started to use it to develop new pictures. The earlier work was shaped in part by contemporary images of women in magazines and by de Kooning's wife Elaine who had even stood in as a model when the portrait's subject was not available. These factors surely encouraged de Kooning to see the possibilities of using a 'portrait' to represent womankind in general, rather than a specific individual. Seated Woman was also undoubtedly influenced by Arshile Gorky, in particular the figurative The Artist and his Mother, which Gorky worked on for almost fifteen years after 1926.

Hemlock (1956)

• Mitchell's paintings are striking in their sheer physicality. She used bold and active strokes of paint on large canvases. In Hemlock, her use of cool whites interplays with the horizontal lines of green and black and gives the sense of an evergreen in the winter.

Meryon (1960)

• Meryon has a strong architectonic sense in its composition. The inspiration was possibly an engraving of a clock tower by the nineteenth-century French artist Charles Meryon. Again, Kline represents not the object itself, but his vision of it. Seemingly spontaneous in its arrangement, this composition was conceived through a number of preliminary studies, shedding a new light on the nature of his gestural technique.

Mysteries (1972)

• Here, Lee Krasner's use of rich unsaturated colors, hard-edged organic forms, and palette of white, red, and black displays the influence of Northwest coast art, especially wood carving by such peoples as the Haida, the Tlingit, and the Kwakiutl. In 1941, MoMAexhibited a major show of Native American art, which greatly excited several abstract painters including Lee Krasner and Barnett Newman. Inspired by Carl Jung's theories of a collective unconscious, Native art was seen as especially relevant to modern art and life through its formal complexity and mythological basis.

IN LOVELY BLUENESS

• In the mid 1950s, Sam Francis inaugurated a succession of monumentally scaled paintings informed by a variety of artistic sources, including Abstract Expressionism and French Impressionism. With their spontaneous brushwork and lyrical interplay of primary hues, these paintings established Francis as one of the foremost colorists of the postwar era. The artist often found inspiration in literary works and kept a notebook containing titles of books and verses. He named this and a related painting (In Lovely Blueness No. 1, 1955–57) after a poem by the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin, hoping to capture the poem’s sublime imagery and prophetic vision.

Hip, Hip, Hoorah!

• The title of Hip, Hip, Hoorah! was intended to celebrate the artistic freedom from tradition achieved by the CoBrA group. The figures are hybrid creatures, combining human attributes with animal or bird-like features. Appel thought of them as ‘people of the night’, and so gave them a dark background. The bright colours and child-like imagery are typical of CoBrA. Appeloften took inspiration from children's drawings, believing that ‘the child in man is all that's strongest, most receptive, most open and unpredictable’.

Entrance to Subway (1938)

• This early figurative work demonstrates Rothko's interest in contemporary urban life. The architectural features of the station are sketchily recreated, including the turnstiles and the "N" on the wall. Although the mood of the pictures is softened somewhat by the influence of Impressionism, it reflects many of the artist's feelings towards the modern city. New York City was thought to be soulless and inhuman, and something of that is conveyed here in the anonymous, barely rendered features of the figures.

Burst (1973)

• The picture's elongated form echoes the vertical composition of his earlier paintings, emphasizing the empty space between the lower and upper portions of the picture. A warm beige and compressed horizontal zone at the very bottom of the composition serves as a ground for the more delicate and complaisant black, gestural marks pushed against the lower edge. An achingly long distance separates this lower area from the hovering, red orb at the top of the composition, which casts an increasingly pink glow.

Desert Pass (1976)

• With its minimally defined forms and earthy palette, Desert Pass is an excellent example of the ways Frankenthaler responded to the natural landscape. Inspired by a trip to the American Southwest, the painting captures the colors and forms as well as the climate of the region. Among them: yellow-gold, evoking sand as well as the desert's aridity and intense light and greenish-blue, suggesting the form and color of cacti.

Tiger Lilies (1953)

• This early oil painting dates close to Noland's first visit to Helen Frankenthaler's studio, when the artist was clearly still working under Abstract Expressionism's influence and trying to find his own painterly voice. Noland's early style is exemplified by visible brushwork, monochromatic palette, and calligraphic markings; the painting's title indicates that he had not yet ceased making references to the material world in his art.

Third Station (1960)

• Third Station is part of Newman's major fourteen-piece series, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (1958-66). The title refers to Christ's cry on the cross, yet he also intended to evoke the cries of humanity throughout history. The series is characterized by a stark palette of black, white, and raw canvas - Newman wanted the unpainted canvas to become its own color - and the picture expands the artist's use of the zip, with some appearing starkly straight and others seeming feathered and about to explode.

Michapol I (1971)

• The shaped canvas recurs in the works of Stella's Polish Village series, to which Michapol Ibelongs. Each composition is developed from color variations and interlocking geometric forms influenced in part by Russian Constructivism. Also inspired by Polish synagogues of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, the works of the Polish Village series are large-scale collages, in which the artist pasted felt, paper, and wood onto the stretched canvas. Despite their sculptural qualities, Stella described the impulse behind Michapol I and the other works of the series as "pictorial."

• Point of Tranquility is an example of Louis's series of Florals, a later phase of his Veil paintings. In a technical innovation, Louis created each Floral by rotating the canvas as he poured the paint, rather than working from a single vantage point. The layers of acrylic then ran and dried in a form suggesting a flower, with the bleeding pigment creating a muddled, denser area at its core.

Point of Tranquility (1959-60)

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