June 24 |
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Existential Angst |
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http://www.catscradlebks.com/book_images/1640035.jpg |
"The main premises of Western painting have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power." - Clement Greenberg in The Decline of Cubism
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Assignments Due: Worksheet #2 Reminder: Community #1 is due on Tuesday |
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Jackson Pollock
1912 - 1956
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Jackson Pollock. Going West.
c. 1934 -35. Emmerling, Leonhard. Pollock. Koln: Taschen, 2003. |
Thomas
Hart Benton. Palisades, from the series American Historical
Epic. 1919 - 1924. Richard G. Tansey and Fred S. Kleiner, Gardner's Art Through the Ages. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996) Tenth ed., 1049. |
Jackson Pollock. Moon Woman. 1942. |
Jackson Pollock. Male and Female. c. 1942. |
Pollock standing in front of
blank canvas for Mural
Harrison, Helen A. ed. Such Desperate Joy:
Imagining Jackson Pollock. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000.
Jackson Pollock. Mural.
1943. 8' X 19'.
Emmerling, Leonhard. Pollock. Koln:
Taschen, 2003.
Spring 1945 |
Jackson Pollock. The Key. 1946. |
Included works by: Joan Miro, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottleib |
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Critics met Peggy Guggenheim's challenge by naming the new movement Abstract Expressionism |
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The group preferred to be called "The New York School" |
Lee Krasner. Cornucopia. 1958. |
Abstract
Expressionism = term used to describe a wide variety of work produced
in New York between 1940 and 1960 |
As
the name suggests, combines two important strains of modern art: |
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Abstraction
= emphasized a non-representational, formalist approach |
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Expressionism
= sought emotional responses from both the artist and the viewer |
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Jackson Pollock. Number 1.
1949.
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/P/pollock/pollock_1_1949.jpg
Painted horizontally, on the floor |
Jackson Pollock at work, 1950. |
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Used "everyday" paint and sticks |
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Instead of traditional artist's materials |
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Works intuitively with an automatist technique |
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automatism
= technique whereby the usual intellectual control of the artist over
the brush is foregone. The artist's aim is to allow the subconscious
to create the artwork without rational reference. |
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Considers space in a completely new way |
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Rejects Renaissance perspective |
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All-over composition |
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Painted gestures move across the picture plane instead of attempting the illusion of moving through it |
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The painter becomes the painting's subject
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"He transformed the obligation for social relevance, a pervasive current between the wars, into an unrelenting moral commitment to a search for the self." - Fineberg |
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Salvador Dali. Consruction with Boiled Beans. 1936.
http://www.canadianart.ca/online/see-it/2008/06/26/salvador_dali1_1000.jpg
Jackson Pollock. Cathedral. 1947. |
"At
a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter
after another as an arena in which to act- rather than a space in which
to reproduce, redesign, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined.
What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." -
Harold Rosenberg in The American Action Painters
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Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). 1950.
Stokstad,
Marilyn. Art History. Revised Second ed. Vol. 2. New York: Prentice
Hall Inc., and Harry N. Abrams, 2005.
"My
opinion is that new needs need new techniques…the modern painter
cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the
old forms of the Renaissance…the modern artist is living in a mechanical
age…working and expressing an inner world- in other words, expressing
the energy, the motion, and other inner forces." - Jackson Pollock |
Hans Hofmann: "You don't work from nature. You work by heart. This is no good. You will repeat yourself." |
Hans Hofmann. The Third Hand. 1947. |
Jackson Pollock: "I am nature...Put up or shut up. Your theories don't interest me." |
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August 8, 1949 issue of Life Magazine
"The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is a Gothic, morbid, and extreme disciple of Picasso's Cubism and Miró's post-Cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and surrealist inspiration. His name is Jackson Pollock." - Clement Greenberg in 1947 |
Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg.
Stills from the film Jackson Pollock. 1951.
Emmerling, Leonhard. Pollock. Koln:
Taschen, 2003.
The Irascibles" from 1950,
published in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.
Emmerling, Leonhard. Pollock. Koln:
Taschen, 2003.
From left to right seated: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko; Standing: Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin |
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Lee Krasner. Volcanic. c.
1951. Brach, Paul. "Lee Krasner: Front and Center." Art in America. February 2001: 90 - 99. |
Norman Lewis. Twilight Sounds. 1947. Kalina, Richard. Guardians of the Avant-Garde. Art in America. september 2008: 47 - 54. |
Clyfford Still. 1947-R, No.
2. 1947. |
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Common characteristics of the New York School: |
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Interest in Surrealist automatist techniques |
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Influenced by the Mexican muralists |
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Existential connection to the "Modern Man" = notion that man was fundamentally irrational and driven by unknowable forces from within and without |
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Participated in the Federal Art Project 1935 - 1943 |
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Insistence on the individual character in each of their expressions |
Lee Krasner
1908 - 1984
Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner
in the studio. 1949.
Emmerling, Leonhard. Pollock. Koln:
Taschen, 2003.
Hans Hofmann. Bachanale. 1946. |
Lee Krasner. Image Surfacing.
c. 1945. |
Highest
praise given to Krasner by Hofmann: "this painting is so good
you'd never know it was done by a woman." |
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Lee Krasner. Noon. 1947.
http://www.spaniermanmodern.com/06_LIAbstraction/krasner06noonf_lg.jpg
Lee Krasner. Easter Lilies. 1956.
Fichner-Rathus, Lois. Understanding Art. Seventh edition. Australia: Thomson Wadsworth, 2004.
Lee Krasner. Listen. 1957.
Existentialism and the New York School |
Alberto Giacometti. Man Pointing.
1947. |
existentialism = a 20th century philosophy that is centered upon the analysis of existence and of the way man finds himself existing in the world, the regards human existence as not exhaustively describabble or understandable in scientific terms, and that stresses the freedom and responsibility of the individual |
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the world and life are essentially meaningless, therefore it is up to each individual to give themselves meaning |
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Factors that bred Existential approaches: |
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The world wars were horrific, depraved and absurd |
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Many countries reckoning with their participation and denial of the horrors of the Nazi agenda |
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Sense that religion had failed to heal society's wounds |
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Amidst this lack of reason and order, the only thing a person could surely know was their self |
Alberto Giacometti. Walking Man. 1960. |
Jean Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism 1946 |
"We
felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by
a great depression and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at
that a time to paint the kind of painting that we were doing - flowers,
reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. At the same time we could
not move into the situation of a pure world of unorganized shapes and
forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And I would say that,
for some of us, this was our moral crisis in relation to what to paint.
So that we actually began, so to speak, from scratch, as if painting
were not only dead but had never existed." - Barnett Newman |
Elegy to the Spanish Republic series |
Robert Motherwell. Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 78. 1962. |
More than 700,000 people killed in combat |
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First air-raid bombings of civilians in history |
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To Motherwell, the Spanish Civil War served as a metaphor for injustice |
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(the U.S. government used it as a symbol of the fight between democracy and fascism) |
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He conceived the series as commemorations of human suffering |
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Intended as abstract symbols for the cycle of life and death |
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elegy = lament or funeral song |
Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937.
http://likovna-kultura.ufzg.hr/images31/Picasso.Guernica2.jpg
