Art History

Art History

Abstract Expressionism

16/12/15

Abstract Expressionism: A development of abstract art which originated in New York in the 1940's and 1950's aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the spontaneous creative act.

After the war, people were looking for a sense of salvation, and were trying to find a way to salvage themselves in what was a horrific landscape. The artists began to describe very passionately the importance of painting, and also began to work on an unpresidented scale. The works also lost focal points, and the eintire composition became one thing, rather than having something of importance within the picture. As the pieces were painted, the artists would have their eyes move over the painting as they painted it.

Jackson Pollock: 1912 - 1956

Pollock was one of the artists at the forefront of the movement. He was born in Wyoming and later lived with his wife, a painter called Lee Krasner, in Long Island. 

Pollock was considered a 'Wild Artist'. He was a very angry person when drunk, yet was subdued when sober and was very self-destructive. 

His dream of art had soon become a nightmare because it was all constructed, and his art became less for him and more for other people and the people who filmed him at work. When he did work, he worked in layers, creating a piece by layering paint over paint until he was content. He preferred to work on the floor on a large canvas, which helped him feel near and more a part of the painting he was working on. He preferred using sticks, and dripped him paint onto the canvas. He did this to express his feelings rather than to illustrate them.

His wife decided that if he were to come into some success, he would get out of his depression, yet after creating a film, he was driven back to drink due to stress. His work, however, brought him very little financial awards, and instead, earned him notoriety and abuse

Eventually, Pollock reached a point were he could no longer work because he had run out of ideas.

In 1956, Pollock was driving drunk with his lover, Ruth Klingman, and her friend Edith Metzner, while his wife was in Europe. He was driving a car that he got in exchange for a small painting, however, he drove into a tree. Pollock and Edith Metzner died, while Ruth Klingman suffered a broken pelvis.

Pollock's work broke with European tradition and helped create a foundation in America, which soon became the leader in the international art world.

Autumn Rhythm
1950

Convergence
1952

Mark Rothko: 1903 - 1970

Rothko was born in Russia and emigrated to Portland, Oregon in 1913 with his family at the age of 10. He was the forth child of Jacob Rothkowitz, a pharmacist. His initial intention was to become an engineer or an attorney, however, he gave up his studies in 1923 and moved to New York. 

In the 1930'a, his paintings became influenced by Milton Avery and Matisse, with amplified compositions and flat areas of colour. 

He worked in a surrealist idiom in 1942 to 1947, when he changed to complete abstraction. In the 1950's, he adopted a symmetrical presentation, and his later works becoming more somber in colour.

In the summers of 1947 to 1949, he taught at the California school of fine arts along side with Clyfford Still.

Rothko's career spanned over 5 decades, during which he created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting. His work was characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as shape, colour, balance, depth, composition, and scale.

Rothko's street scenes and subway pictures of the 1930's have been compared to examples of Ashcan School and depression-era realist painting (social realism). He seemed far more interested in conveying the perceptual experience of architectural space

Ashcan school, also called the Ash Can school, was an artistic movement in the United States during the early 20th century that is best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in the cities poorest neighborhoods. 

In the 1940's, his work became increasingly symbolic, after the social climate of anxiety dominated world war two. He felt that, due to this, images of every day life had become to appear outmoded. He felt that, if art were to express the tragedy of the human condition, new subjects and a new idiom had to be found. 

The old and new testament became a rich source of inspiration. Some of his works were composed in horizontal bands, which is said to represent geological strata- possibly a metaphor for unconscious.

Geological Strata: In Geology, and related fields, a stratum (plural: strata) is a layer of sedimentary rock or soil with internally consistant characteristics that distinguish it from other layers. 

His 1940's pieces are characterized by a biomorphic style stimulated by the example of the surrealists, several of whom had recently immigrated from war torn Europe. And during this time when it was relitively water colout-free, Rothko began exploring the fluidity of the medium to evoke a vision of primeval life.

When looking at Rothko's work, you are meant to have a spiritual epifany.

Rothko died in 1970 after committing suicide.

Blue, Orange, Red
1961

The Rothko Chaple
Built after his death

Franz Kline: 1910 - 1962

Kline was born in Pennsylvania. What at the age of 7, his father commited suicide. Shortly after, his mother remarried and sent him to Girade College, which was an academy for fatherless boys. 

He studied at Bosten University from 1930 to 1935, and then studied at Heatherly's school of art in London, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth V. Parsons, a British ballet dancer, who eventually moved back to the United States with him in 1938. Upon return, he began working for a department sore in New York as a designer. In 1939, he moved to New York, where met Willem De Kooning and worked as a sceneic designer and developed his artistic techniques and gained recognition as a significant artist.

Before developing his unusual style of gestural abstraction, Kline took inspiration from John French Sloan (1871 - 1951) and William Glakens (1870 - 1938).

Some of his work c.1946 were abstract, and had a cubist structure. In 1950, he began to make vigorous, large scale, calligraphic abstract paintings in black and white. 

After a one man exhibition in 1950 that elevated him within the art world, he became one of the leading Abstract Expressionists.

From 1958, he began introducing strong colours into some of his work. His unusual approach to Gestural Abestraction was beginning to influence the ideals of many Minimalists.

Gestural Abstraction: Action painting, also called Gestural Abstraction, is the style of painting in which paint if spontaneously dripped, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rater than being carefully applied.

In 1962, Kline died of Rhuematic Heart Disease.

Untitled
1960

Meryon
1960 - 1961

Willem De Kooning: 1904 - 1997:

De Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. De Kooning's parents dicorced in 1907. At the age of 12, he was an apprentice to a firm of commercial decorators and artists. While working as an apprentice, De Kooning took evening classes for 8 years at Rotterdam Academy of fine arts and techniques. After learning at the Academie van Bee,dende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschnappen, which later became the Willem De Kooning Academie, he travelled to the USA as a stowaway on the Shelley, which was a British freighter bound for Argentina.
When he immigrated to the United States in 1926, he supported himself through paining signs, department store displays and also did some carpentry. He decided to become a painter after a year on the WPA art project 1935.

WPA: The federal art project was the visual arm of the great depression era works progress administration, a federal one program.

In the 1930's and early 1940's, De Kooning painted abstractions and figures, and around 1945, he worked in mainly black and white with high velocity and erotic shapes, and since 1969, has also made numerous sculptures. His style was that of fused Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism. 

De Kooning was on of the most prominant abstract expressionists after Pollock

De Kooning established his reputation with entirely Abstract paintings, and he felt a strong pull toward subjects and would eventually become most famous for his pictures of women.

Woman I
1950 - 1952

Marylin Monroe
1954

Asheville
1948

Robert Motherwell: 1915 - 1991:

Motherwell was a painter, but also an editor, teacher and, a writer. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington, and studied briefly at California school of fine arts between 1937 and 1937, and also earned a BA in Philosophy from Standford University.
In 1940, he moved to New York to study history at Columbia University. After this, he began to paint.
He became friends with Malta and other Surrealists who lived in New York, and decided in 1944 to become a professional painter. He met Pollock and Baziotes and experimented with them in the use of Automatism and other Surrealist techniques.

Automatism: The performance of actions without conscious thought or intention.

In 1944, Motherwell also became the director of the series 'The Documents of Modern \Art', which as published and written by Schultz.
Motherwell also collaborated with Baziotes, Hare, Rothko and later Newman in running the art school 'The subjects of the artists' in 1948 to 1949.

Motherwell painted many large pictures, including the extensive series known as '\Elegy to the Spanish Republic' and 'open', and has also made a number of collages. 

-His paintings, prints and collages feature simple shapes, bold colour contrasts and a dynamic balance between restrained and boldly gestural brush strokes. His artwork reflects a dialogue with art history, philosophy and contemporary art, but also a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events, and the essential human conditions of life, death, oppression and revolution.

Due to his asthmatic condition, Motherwell grew up mainly on the Pacific coast, and as a result, developed a love for broad spaces and bright colours, that later emerged as essential characteristics of his abstract paintings. His later concerns with themes of morality ca likewise be traced back to his frail health as a child.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic
1970

Figure with Blots
1943

Untitled
1978