Abstract Expressionism “Gestural” Painters (action painting) “Color Field” Painters
Post WW2 Philosophical/Psycho-analytic influences: Existentialism, Carl Jung
In the lineage of Romanticism, Expressionism: emphasis on subjective, individual experience Less analytic than early, pre-WW2 modernist abstraction. More instinctive, raw.
Embodies the modernist process of simultaneously rejecting and continuing the art tradition it is reacting to
Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1943* Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930 Charles Sheeler, Church Street El, 1920 Hans Hoffman, Spring, 1945* Andre Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1924
Surrealist Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1931
16.3 Arshile Gorky, Mechanics of Flying, 1936 Arshile Gorky, The liver is the cock’s comb, 1944 * Kandisnsky, Composition VII, 1913 Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the secret, 1943 16.7 Jackson Pollock
“The canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena to act— rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” -Harold Rosenberg Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948 * Pollock, Convergence, 1952 Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948 * Willem De Kooning, Woman No. 1, 1952* Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 Cezanne, Large Bathers, 1899-1905 Ingres, Turkish Bath, 1858 Willem De Kooning, Excavation,1950 Franz Kline, Nijinsky, 1950 * Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34, 1954 * Kurt Schwitters, Blue Bird, 1922
Hedda Sterne, Alaska #1, 1958 Lee Krasner, Milkweed, 1955 * Lee Krasner, Gothic Landscape, 1961 Picasso, Accordionist, 1911 Grace Hartigan, October New England ,1957 Hartigan, Modern Cycle, 1967 Mark Rothko, Multiform, 1948 Rothko, untitled, 1949 * Josef Albers, Study for Nocturne, 1951 Kazmir Malevich, 1915 Mark Rothko, Untitled No. 17, 1961
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1951 * “Zips”
Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross, 1958-1966 Ad Reinhardt Abstract Painting No. 4, 1961** Clyfford Still, Number 2, 1949 * Clyfford Still, 1957J No. 2, 1957