DOCSLIB.ORG

Ernest Briggs' Three Decades of Abstract Expressionist Painting

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Ernest Briggs' Three Decades of Abstract Expressionist Painting Ernest Briggs' Three Decades its help in allowing artists of the period to go to school. They were set of Abstract Expressionist Painting free economically, and were allowed to live comfortably with tuition and supplies paid for. The Fine Arts School would last about 3 years Ernest Briggs, a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter under McAgy. The program took off due to the presence of Clyfford known for his strong, lyrical, expressive brushstrokes, use of color and Still, Ad Reinhardt, along with David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer sometimes geometric composition, first came to New York in late 1953. Bischoff and others. Most of the students at the school, about 40-50 He had been a student of Clyfford Still at the California School of Fine taking painting, such luminaries as Dugmore, Hultberg, Schueler and Arts. Frank O’Hara first experienced the mystery in the way Ernest Crehan, had had some exposure to art through university or art school. Briggs’ splendid paintings transform, and the inability to see the shape But there had been no exposure to what was going on in New York or in as a shape apart from interpretation. Early in 1954, viewing Briggs’ first Europe in the art world, and Briggs and the others were little prepared one man show at the Stable Gallery in New York, O’Hara said in Art for the onslaught that was to come. in America “From the contrast between the surface bravura and the half-seen abstract shapes, a surprising intimacy arises which is like The California Years seeing a public statue, thinking itself unobserved, move.” With the entry of Still, the art program would “blow apart”. It was Clyfford Still who would galvanize the Fine Art school’s art Ernest P. Briggs, Jr. was born Decem- “When Briggs first started program. Mark Rothko would also arrive in 1949 to teach during the ber 24, 1923 in San Diego, California. painting he was painting in summer months. Still had been at the School for one semester teaching a He spent his childhood and youth in a figurative symbolic style, design and composition class, and by the time McAgy knew who he was California, and then served in the and not really knowing and more about him, Still turned the program over to those working Army during WW11. He spent about where he was headed.” 18 months in Tampa as part of the abstractly. Briggs would later recall that the real stimulation, the Army Air and Signal corps, where he excitement of the California School was the tension that arose when got to read Dali’s Secret Life. He would later serve a year in India. After David Park (and Elmer Bishoff) switched back to figuration. Still and the service he moved back to San Francisco. As a child, Briggs had Park were the central figures at the school, and although they socialized taken up drawing and design, and was exposed to and had met Mark together were not much in agreement on anything in their approach Tobey. His major influence early in life was that of Paul Klee’s work. to art. An interesting argument was set up between the disciples of He would carry Sweeny’s book on Klee around with him during his Still, Rothko, and Pollock and the new figurative artists. Park was a Army service abroad. But Briggs was totally lacking in any historical art taciturn, New England quiet person; Still was a hyper-Romantic, very orientation. After the Army, he had initially intended to attend articulate and historically oriented person. Briggs knew he had lucked Cranbrook, but because San Francisco was a beautiful city and out in the mix of the students and that this was the opening phase in his environment, and knowing there was an art school locally “up there commitment to painting. After one semester, Briggs switched to Still’s on the Hill”, decided not to leave the area. In 1946-47, while working class because he had a reputation for having something to say to the at Gumps trimming windows, he attended Rudolph Schaeffer’s School students. According to Briggs, Park would just come around, slap the of Design, managed by his uncle. But Briggs realized that something students on the back and disappear back into his private studio. psychological had occurred, and he knew he couldn’t fit in with those areas of graphic and industrial design. He inadvertently fell into an When Briggs first started painting he was painting in a figurative exciting situation in 1948 where Douglas McAgy had started a program, symbolic style, and not really knowing where he was headed. Park, one primarily for WW11 veterans at the California School of Fine Arts. He of his first instructors, said “We don’t have a model; we don’t have still Ernest Briggs, 1984, Maine, would study there until 1951. The G.I Bill cannot be underestimated for life; we just paint.” Among the 30 or so students, they all just painted Image courtesy of Bob Brooks. and didn’t look at anything, but they all influenced each other. It was in terms of personalities. Rothko was the epitome of the New York and wanted to move to New York. Alan Frumkin, a Chicago dealer, along with Pollock, de Kooning and Kline. Briggs would observe the a revelation to Briggs, as he had thought there had to be a “subject”, Jewish intellectual artist/painter who exuded an entirely different kind offered not only to include Briggs in a group show there, but also to “cold war mentality”, paranoia and anxiety – the very characteristic of as in the Ashcan or Regionalist style. The fact that one could include of energy. He was urbane, deeply intent, and a quintessential New pay the expenses of shipping his art to Chicago and on to New York in the individuals involved. However, nobody was really well served by all their own imagination as the starting point or as the interpretative or Yorker. This was a complete contrast to Still’s Puritanism, almost the fall of 1953. While landing in Hoboken, he and Edward Dugmore the conflict. dominant element and that one could just paint was liberating for him. Calvinistic manner. Rothko would pay attention to each student and would take a couple floors above a bar in the Fulton Fish Market. He One could start with a stretched canvas; paint big color shapes and his work, and would have something to say to each, whereas Still would was soon to have his first show at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in the Brigg’s 1954 Stable Gallery show was important to his career. Mark just feel one’s way through the process. The interaction with the other stand in the room and declaim. The importance of Rothko’s presence winter of 1954. Rothko, John Ferren, and David Smith, among others came to the open- students was sustaining in this. Students had come from New York, was his weekly lecture to all the students, not just the painting class, ing and were very supportive and gave him the recognition to establish Chicago, Seattle, and various parts of the country, and most of taking questions and getting into conversations with the students. In The New York Years him in the art world. Several of the pieces in his first show had been them had different kinds of experience in the service; it was an the studio, his attitude was very similar to Still’s. In 1949 there were done on the West Coast. By that time through a view of de Kooning’s extraordinary experience for Briggs. Students socialized and saw each no ideological programs yet in terms of their esthetics. It was more Briggs’ arrival in New York late in 1953, and early 1954, was work, he would become aware of the possibility of gesture and thinking other five days a week at school, and they worked after school and at in terms that they knew what they did not want. It was an attempt exciting. Fantastic things happened to him in a city where things in terms of the quality of color, and in trying to use color to eliminate or home. Some had very clear ambitions to get to New York as soon as they to eliminate, from their imagery and from their practice in order to can click and where one was suddenly swept into a whole milieu recapture and restore some kind of quality to his work that eliminated could. Others opted to eventually stick it out on the West Coast. About arrive at what was their big image, their big style. They were trying meeting dozens of new people in an art world that was very small. Philip and freed it from some of the decorative aspects. While reading much two dozen would go on to continue painting and sculpture. The Fine Arts to work away from the past, eliminate all temporal images, whether Pavia immediately helped him get a job to help with expenses, and literary criticism, and trying to educate himself in the activity of the art program would subsequently close due to its focus on abstraction, transparency, movement, or space. Still and Rothko were very tight and he also invited Briggs to join “The Club”. This was a scene where world, Briggs would turn completely away from any reference to the McAgy’s departure and Still’s move to New York. By this time, the were a tremendous stimulus to each other and each in their own way, artists were still fighting the battle of modern art, where there was a lot French School of Bonnard and Matisse.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The American Abstract Artists and Their Appropriation of Prehistoric Rock Pictures in 1937
    “First Surrealists Were Cavemen”: The American Abstract Artists and Their Appropriation of Prehistoric Rock Pictures in 1937 Elke Seibert How electrifying it must be to discover a world of new, hitherto unseen pictures! Schol- ars and artists have described their awe at encountering the extraordinary paintings of Altamira and Lascaux in rich prose, instilling in us the desire to hunt for other such discoveries.1 But how does art affect art and how does one work of art influence another? In the following, I will argue for a causal relationship between the 1937 exhibition Prehis- toric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the new artistic directions evident in the work of certain New York artists immediately thereafter.2 The title for one review of this exhibition, “First Surrealists Were Cavemen,” expressed the unsettling, alien, mysterious, and provocative quality of these prehistoric paintings waiting to be discovered by American audiences (fig. ).1 3 The title moreover illustrates the extent to which American art criticism continued to misunderstand sur- realist artists and used the term surrealism in a pejorative manner. This essay traces how the group known as the American Abstract Artists (AAA) appropriated prehistoric paintings in the late 1930s. The term employed in the discourse on archaic artists and artistic concepts prior to 1937 was primitivism, a term due not least to John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art as well as his influential essay “Primitive Art and Picasso,” both published in 1937.4 Within this discourse the art of the Ice Age was conspicuous not only on account of the previously unimagined timespan it traversed but also because of the magical discovery of incipient human creativity.
    [Show full text]
  • Oral History Interview with Edward Dugmore, 1994 May 13-June 9
    Oral history interview with Edward Dugmore, 1994 May 13-June 9 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Edward Dugmore on May 13, 1993. The interview was conducted at Edward Dugmore's home in New York by Tram Combs for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview ED: EDWARD DUGMORE MD: EDIE DUGMORE [MRS. DUGMORE] TC: TRAM COMBS Tape 1, Side A (45-minute tape sides) TC: This is an interview for the Archives of American Art, conducted by Tram Combs for the Archives with Edward Dugmore. There will be three voices on the tape. This is Tram Combs speaking. ED: This is Edward Dugmore. MD: And this is Edie Dugmore. TC: Edie is Mrs. Dugmore. She is sitting in on the interview for information that doesn’t come immediately to mind, and any disagreements about [our accuracy]. [all chuckle] Ed, tell us about your background, your family. ED: Okay, I was born in 1915. I have two brothers, approximately four years apart. Older brother and a younger brother. TC: Their names? ED: There’s Leonard, and then myself, and then Stanley is the youngest. My father came over from England, and my mother, and he was a photographer. TC: With your mother? MD: No. ED: No, he didn’t do that; that’s right.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright by Cary Cordova 2005
    Copyright by Cary Cordova 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Cary Cordova Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE HEART OF THE MISSION: LATINO ART AND IDENTITY IN SAN FRANCISCO Committee: Steven D. Hoelscher, Co-Supervisor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Co-Supervisor Janet Davis David Montejano Deborah Paredez Shirley Thompson THE HEART OF THE MISSION: LATINO ART AND IDENTITY IN SAN FRANCISCO by Cary Cordova, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2005 Dedication To my parents, Jennifer Feeley and Solomon Cordova, and to our beloved San Francisco family of “beatnik” and “avant-garde” friends, Nancy Eichler, Ed and Anna Everett, Ellen Kernigan, and José Ramón Lerma. Acknowledgements For as long as I can remember, my most meaningful encounters with history emerged from first-hand accounts – autobiographies, diaries, articles, oral histories, scratchy recordings, and scraps of paper. This dissertation is a product of my encounters with many people, who made history a constant presence in my life. I am grateful to an expansive community of people who have assisted me with this project. This dissertation would not have been possible without the many people who sat down with me for countless hours to record their oral histories: Cesar Ascarrunz, Francisco Camplis, Luis Cervantes, Susan Cervantes, Maruja Cid, Carlos Cordova, Daniel del Solar, Martha Estrella, Juan Fuentes, Rupert Garcia, Yolanda Garfias Woo, Amelia “Mia” Galaviz de Gonzalez, Juan Gonzales, José Ramón Lerma, Andres Lopez, Yolanda Lopez, Carlos Loarca, Alejandro Murguía, Michael Nolan, Patricia Rodriguez, Peter Rodriguez, Nina Serrano, and René Yañez.
    [Show full text]
  • Pat Adams Selected Solo Exhibitions
    PAT ADAMS Born: Stockton, California, July 8, 1928 Resides: Bennington, Vermont Education: 1949 University of California, Berkeley, BA, Painting, Phi Beta Kappa, Delta Epsilon 1945 California College of Arts and Crafts, summer session (Otis Oldfield and Lewis Miljarik) 1946 College of Pacific, summer session (Chiura Obata) 1948 Art Institute of Chicago, summer session (John Fabian and Elizabeth McKinnon) 1950 Brooklyn Museum Art School, summer session (Max Beckmann, Reuben Tam, John Ferren) SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017 Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont 2011 National Association of Women Artists, New York 2008 Zabriskie Gallery, New York 2005 Zabriskie Gallery, New York, 50th Anniversary Exhibition: 1954-2004 2004 Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont 2003 Zabriskie Gallery, New York, exhibited biennially since 1956 2001 Zabriskie Gallery, New York, Monotypes, exhibited in 1999, 1994, 1993 1999 Amy E. Tarrant Gallery, Flyn Performing Arts Center, Burlington, Vermont 1994 Jaffe/Friede/Strauss Gallery, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 1989 Anne Weber Gallery, Georgetown, Maine 1988 Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Retrospective: 1968-1988 1988 Addison/Ripley Gallery, Washington, D.C. 1988 New York Academy of Sciences, New York 1988 American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. 1986 Haggin Museum, Stockton, California 1986 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 1983 Image Gallery, Stockbridge, Massachusetts 1982 Columbia Museum of Art, University of South Carolina, Columbia,
    [Show full text]
  • A Finding Aid to the Elaine De Kooning Papers, Circa 1959-1989, in the Archives of American Art
    A Finding Aid to the Elaine de Kooning papers, circa 1959-1989, in the Archives of American Art Harriet E. Shapiro and Erin Kinhart 2015 October 21 Archives of American Art 750 9th Street, NW Victor Building, Suite 2200 Washington, D.C. 20001 https://www.aaa.si.edu/services/questions https://www.aaa.si.edu/ Table of Contents Collection Overview ........................................................................................................ 1 Administrative Information .............................................................................................. 1 Biographical / Historical.................................................................................................... 2 Scope and Contents........................................................................................................ 2 Arrangement..................................................................................................................... 2 Names and Subjects ...................................................................................................... 3 Container Listing ............................................................................................................. 4 Series 1: Personal Papers, circa 1960s-1989.......................................................... 4 Series 2: Interviews, Conversations, and Lectures, 1978-1988............................... 5 Series 3: Photographs, circa 1960s, 2013............................................................... 7 Series 4: Printed Material, 1961-1982....................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Christine Giles Bill Bob and Bill.Pdf
    William Allan, Robert Hudson and William T. Wiley A Window on History, by George. 1993 pastel, Conte crayon, charcoal, graphite and acrylic on canvas 1 61 /2 x 87 '12 inches Courtesy of John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, California Photograph by Cesar Rubio / r.- .. 12 -.'. Christine Giles and Hatherine Plake Hough ccentricity, individualism and nonconformity have been central to San Fran­ cisco Bay Area and Northern California's spirit since the Gold Rush era. Town Enames like Rough and Ready, Whiskey Flats and "Pair of Dice" (later changed to Paradise) testify to the raw humor and outsider self-image rooted in Northern California culture. This exhibition focuses on three artists' exploration of a different western frontier-that of individual creativity and collaboration. It brings together paintings, sculptures, assemblages and works on paper created individually and collabora­ tively by three close friends: William Allan, Robert Hudson and William T. Wiley. ·n, Bob and Bill William Allan, the eldest, was born in Everett, Washington, in 1936, followed by Wiley, born in Bedford, Indiana, in 1937 and Hudson, born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1938. Their families eventually settled in Richland, in southeast Washington, where the three met and began a life-long social and professional relationship. Richland was the site of one of the nation's first plutonium production plants-Hanford Atomic Works. 1 Hudson remembers Richland as a plutonium boom town: the city's population seemed to swell overnight from a few thousand to over 30,000. Most of the transient population lived in fourteen square blocks filled with trailer courts.
    [Show full text]
  • California Modernism After World War Ii
    1 CALIFORNIA MODERNISM AFTER WORLD WAR II So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. JACK KEROUAC, ON THE ROAD POSTWAR EXCHANGES Most historical accounts of cultural and artistic developments in the United States after World War II have offered little information about trends affecting artists across the country. In the rush to figure out who did what first and to locate it geographically—usu - ally in New York— the historians have ignored the fluid interchanges between the two coasts, and cultural opportunities offered on either of them in these postwar years.
    [Show full text]
  • The Museum of Modern Art No. 58
    THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NO. 58 tl y/EST 33 STREET, NEW YORK 19, N. Y. TELEPHONE: CIRCLE 3-8900 FOR RELEASE Wednesday, May 30, 1956 PRESS PREVIEW Tuesday, May 29, 1956 11:00-^:00 pm TWELVE AMERICAN ARTISTS FEATURED AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART TWELVE AMERICANS, the major summer exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, will be on view on the third floor from May 30 through Septem­ ber 9. Directed by Dorothy C. Mil3.er, Curator of the Museum Collections, the ex­ hibition is the latest in a series of contemporary American painting and sculpture shows organized periodically by the Museum. It contains the work of eight painters, Smest Briggs, James Brooks, Sam Francis, Fritz Glarner, Philip Guston, Grace Har- tigan, Franz Kline, and Larry Rivers, and four sculptors, Raoul Hague, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, and Jose de Rivera. Approximately 90 works in all are shown. As Miss Miller points out in the catalog accompanying the exhibition, this series was designed by the Museum to contrast with the usual large American group show in which a hundred or more artists are represented by one work each. Instead, the Museum exhibitions consist of a sequence of one-man shows with a separate gal­ lery for each artist so that the character and quality of his individual achieve­ ment can better be estimated. To illustrate trends or to discover new talent was not the purpose of this particular exhibition, Miss Miller says. These artists, except for Raoul Hague, exhibit regularly in New York galleries and are familiar to those who follow the gallery shows.
    [Show full text]
  • Seymour Boardman “Personal Geometries” a Selection 1940’S—2000’S
    SEYMOUR BOARDMAN “PERSONAL GEOMETRIES” A Selection 1940’s—2000’s Untitled, 1949, O/c, 32 1/2” x 49 1/2” Untitled, 2001, O/c, 42 1/2” x 52 1/2” samplePublished 2013 by the Anita Shapolsky Gallery Seymour (Sy) Boardman (1921–2005) After opening my gallery in Soho (99 Spring St) in 1982 and exhibiting mostly decorative art, I searched for quality artists. I saw Sy Boardman’s work at the David Anderson Gallery collection (son of Martha Jackson) on West 57th St. He was not in vogue, as was the case for most Abstract Artists at the time. Minimalism and Pop Art were the flavors of the day in the 80’s. Sy had no gallery affiliation and I felt that he was a painter to consider. He created paintings that are unique, while avoiding fashionable art trends. I think his art education in Europe (through the GI Bill) influenced him to use the grid as an understructure of his paintings for Untitled, 1949, O/c, 18” x 24” many years. I consider Sy the most intellectual of all the artists that I have ever exhibited. His paintings resonate like jazz, ever evolving, the transcendence of improvisation is constant. He never went along with the group of Abstract Expressionists that he exhibited with. He liked jagged, architectural phrases, and beginning a line without knowing where it would end. He went through many stages in developing his oeuvre. Sy was called a geometric colorist and an abstract illusionist who contributed to the psychology of perception with the use of only one hand (the other was disabled in the war).
    [Show full text]
  • Linda Stein Cv
    A.I.R. LINDA STEIN CV SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017 HOLOCAUST HEROES: FIERCE FEMALES–TAPESTRIES BY LINDA STEIN, Maine Jewish Museum, Portland, ME 2016 THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Holter Museum of Art, Helena, MT HOLOCAUST HEROES: FIERCE FEMALES–TAPESTRIES BY LINDA STEIN, Museum of Biblical Art in collaboration with University of North Texas, Dallas, TX HOLOCAUST HEROES: FIERCE FEMALES–TAPESTRIES BY LINDA STEIN, Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Columbia University, Teachers College, Macy Gallery, New York, NY HOLOCAUST HEROES: FIERCE FEMALES–TAPESTRIES BY LINDA STEIN, Flomenhaft Gallery, New York, NY HOLOCAUST HEROES: FIERCE FEMALES–TAPESTRIES BY LINDA STEIN, Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara in collaboration with Morris Squire Foundation and Congregation B’nai Brith, Santa Barbara, CA THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Allegheny College Art Galleries, Meadville, PA 2015 HOLOCAUST HEROES: FIERCE FEMALES–TAPESTRIES BY LINDA STEIN, Rosen Museum of the Levis JCC, Boca Raton, FL HOLOCAUST HEROES: FIERCE FEMALES–TAPESTRIES BY LINDA STEIN, Futernick Gallery of the Alper JCC, Miami, FL THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Noyes Museum of Art, Oceanville, NJ THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Penn State Berks, Freyberger Gallery, Reading, PA 2014 THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Pennsylvania State University, Hub-Robeson Galleries, University Park, PA THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Andrews Art Museum, Andrews, NC THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Coastal Carolina University, Bryan Gallery, Conway, SC 2013 THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, Fulton Montgomery Community College, Perrella Gallery, Johnstown, NY THE FLUIDITY OF GENDER: SCULPTURE BY LINDA STEIN, St.
    [Show full text]
  • Crsaforum ● from the President Nancy Mowll Mathews Spring 2007 Since Last Winter There Has Been Some Progress on Proposed Programs for CRSA Members
    CRSA forum The Journal of the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association An Affiliated Society of the College Art Association Spring 2007 ● No 21 ● CRSAforum ● from the President Nancy Mowll Mathews Spring 2007 Since last winter there has been some progress on proposed programs for CRSA members. Thanks to our faithful director of programming, Steven Manford, a fall panel at the Dedalus Foundation in New York is in the works. He is also partnering with CRSA member Adina CONTENTS Gordon to present a panel on catalogues raisonnés of sculptors during the 2008 CAA meet- New & Noteworthy 03 ing in Dallas. By Way of Introduction 05 A number of other CRSA members, such as Ellen Epstein, have begun looking into programs Websites and the for the future, and we applaud their efforts. Although Steven and I do our best in this regard, Catalogue Raisonne 08 the organization will only be as active as its members are. Please feel free to organize CRSA Book Reviews 10 events in your locale and according to your special interests. Scott Ferris has been very Publications 11 good at setting times and locations for discussion meetings for whomever can make it. His Announcements 12 efforts can serve as a good model. The CRSA Forum and the list serve are handy vehicles for announcing your programs to the wider membership. And for those who can come to an- nual CAA conferences, there will always be a CRSA meeting and/or panel. As an affiliated society, we are also eligible to hold our own sessions if a CRSA member would like to chair ON THE COVER one.
    [Show full text]
  • Hedda Sterne and Abstract Expressionism
    1 Menacing Machines and Sublime Cities: Hedda Sterne and Abstract Expressionism Tasia Kastanek Art History Honors Thesis April 12, 2011 Primary Advisor: Kira van Lil – Art History Committee Members: Robert Nauman – Art History Nancy Hightower – Writing and Rhetoric 2 Abstract: The canon of Abstract Expressionism ignores the achievements of female painters. This study examines one of the neglected artists involved in the movement, Hedda Sterne. Through in-depth analysis of her Machine series and New York, New York series, this study illuminates the differences and similarities of Sterne‟s paintings to the early stages of Abstract Expressionism. Sterne‟s work both engages with and expands the discussions of “primitive” signs, the sublime and urban abstraction. Her early training in Romania and experience of WWII as well as her use of mechanical symbols and spray paint contribute to a similar yet unique voice in Abstract Expressionism. Table of Contents Introduction: An Inner Necessity and Flight from Romania…….…………..……………….3 Machines: Mechanolatry, War Symbolism and an Ode to Tractors……………………......13 New York, New York: Masculine Subjectivity, Urban Abstraction and the Sublime...…...26 Instrument vs. Actor: Sterne’s Artistic Roles………………..………………………….……44 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………49 Images…………………………………………………………………………………………...52 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………..67 3 “Just as each spoken word rouses an internal vibration, so does every object represented. To deprive oneself of this possibility of causing a vibration
    [Show full text]