ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM (8 ottob 1942 anni – 21 dic 1955 anni)

Descrizione:

1942 - 1955

- after the war, Europe was in ruins, galleries had trouble gaining financial and social support, art was lost, and many artists were killed
- America's economy started to grow and New York became a refuge for artists
- movement was founded in New York and was independent from Europe (the New York School)
- very large paintings
- after the war and the Great Depression, artists believed that is was impossible to paint flowers, musical instruments, and nudes like they did in the past
- there was a sense of alienation and loss of faith in old systems and forms of expression
- intuition and accident played a key role in their work
- inspired by Surrealist automatism
- rejected the Renaissance idea that paintings are detached from the viewer and are a self-contained unit
- paintings were environments that encompassed the viewer

GREENBERG
- started abstract expressionism
- believed that drawings were entities
- they do not stand in or need to reference an object
- no illusion of 3D space

MONDRIAN
- left Europe during WWII and moved to New York
- inspired by the Neo-plastic effect of American skyscrapers (i.e. their lights) and the dynamism of the city -> translated them into paintings
- work was based off New York road maps
- departed his previous mathematical formulas
- grids were now colourful rather than black and rectangles were white rather than coloured
- art had subtle textural effects

DE KOONING
- created "Women Series"
- visible and violent brush strokes and show the artist's gestures
- Gestural application of the paint is more important than the figure itself
- hard to see where the figure begins or where the background ends
- start of depicting celebrities

NEWMAN
- artists were conscious of the surface they were creating
- the "zip"
- wanted viewers to stand in front of the work and actually experience and be encompassed by it
- believed that an artist is an individual making a big statement
- he paintings were concerned with time (wanted viewers to spend time look and contemplating about it)
- his art was quite unpopular to the public
- Not a representation of something: inspire action/emotion

MOTHERWELL
- automatism, interested in the subconscious
- art embraced accidents
- paintings were not abstract but full of subject matter (ex. response to the Spanish Civil War)
- surrealist concept of automatism: intuitive, irrational, accidental
- influenced by psychologist Carl Jung (collective unconscious, unconscious mind)
- Surrealists: freud —> primary difference between these two movements

POLLOCK
- drip paintings
- squeezed paint onto the canvas and moved it around with sticks
- purely abstract art, non-representational, no narrative
- abandoned a centre of interest
- action painting
- painting is all surface
- worked around the canvas (laid it on the floor rather than on an easel)

ROTHKO
- soft edges
- similar colours blend into each other, opposite colours seem to vibrate (art is not static)
- large fields of colour
- titles were descriptive of the colour
- wanted his work to emphasize the difference between vertical and horizontal, and warm and cool colours (opposites)

KRASNER
- wife of Pollock (worked very closely together, combined his and her work into her collages)
- collage
- cut up old canvases and rearranged them
- committed to the Mondrianesque grid structure
- however, her forms seem to struggle against the grid that lies underneath them

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