ART 355 Contemporary Art History Chapters 16

Chief, 1950 Franz Klein

Action painter. Emphasis on the making and the process. We can sense him creating this. this was inspired by a steam engine that passed through the coal mining town he was born in. reducing it to pure line. He had an interesting life. His mom committed suicide, he went to an academy for fatherless boys. Studied art, then a designer for a department store. Tons of worldly experience. So many of these things don't seem to make their way into his art. Broad strokes, spontanious looking movement. yet it took a lot of thinking and planning. Like cave art and primitive markings. The white is just as important as the black

Untitled, c.1945 by Clyfford Still

American Artist that feeds into all the European fantasies of the United States. baroness and aridity of the west is captured in his work. He didn't like to title his work, he didn't want to impose meaning on the work for the viewer. This is expressionism and abstraction, but there is verticality of strokes, with a figure ground relationship (a person or natural form?) There is a heavy clunky quality to his work and viscosity. There work accesses the unconscious of the individual.

Landscape, 1941 by Hans Hoffman

Artis Student League teacher in New York. Expressionism in line color and form. It is landscape, abstract but not non-objective. Interdependency of color and space and the push and pull. He facilitated experimentation among his students and encouraged them to follow their own path

Eyes of Oedipus, 1945 by Adolf Gottlieb

Born in New York, Studied at Artist Sutdent League. He went to Europe to see the art. He returned to New York. He traveled west and lived in Arizona. There he changed his painting. Hieroglyphic notational style. Inspired by cave art and tribal art. He is also interested in the psychology of Freud. This is a pictograph. He has a rich body of work. Image maker is his role as an artist. This are an expression of the neurosis which is the reality of our time (realism). The grid is an outgrowth of cubism and reduction of form. they are realted to eachother on the same plane. He says there is no intrinsic meaning that he says he put into it. biomorphic shapes. rectilinear space and rounded biomorphic space juxtaposition. Also trying to harness the subconscious (also his Crimson Spinning, 1959 is simple and graphic, Asian element are quite visually satisfying)

Onement #1, 1948 Barnett Newman

Color Field painters. He was interested in mysticism and world religions. He wanted to get to a place where we were thinking about the metaphysical world. This is a small piece. It was moving toward reduction: elements, space, color, form. reference to atonement, origins, the origin of the world, get at the base of it all, reuniting with God or the origin. The "zip" is the stripe down the center. (Greenberg wants to to only stand for a reiteration of the edge of the canvas- no outside meanings! the subject of the painting is the edge of the canvas)

The Liver is the Cock's Comb, c. 1944 by Arshile Gorky

Elder and mentor, Arshile Gorky. You can see abstraction and surrealism. HE inveted his name and background (turkish-armenian and took the name of an author). He was the last important painter of surrearlism. Biomorphism- the interest in biological and organic forms that don't necessarily represent real world things.

Untitled #16, 1948 Elaine de Kooning

Fellow artist of Willem and his wife. biomorphic. all-over imagery. largeness of scale. She kind of took a back seat to her husband.

Number 5/22, 1950 (dated back on 1949), Rothko

Fields of color. Meant to fill the vision. He will move to generally a veritical orientation later and the edges become more ephemeral. could this ba radically reduced version of old paintings of realms of terrestrial, telestial, and celestial. Could Christ be laying on the lap of his mother in the center. He did work on an earlier entombment scene.

Cubi Totem Seven & Six, 1961, David SMith

He creates gestural writing on it with brunishing the metal.

She Wolf, 1943 Pollock

He defied all the ideas of what painting is. He destroyed it in order to reinvent it. Independent cowboy artist from Wyoming. Depression and alchoholism throughout his life. HE talked aobut being interested in Native art and western art.

Seated Woman, c 1940 Willem de Kooning

He did a woman series. He was obsessed with representation of women. He was dutch, a child prodigy. He was arguable the leader of AbEx painting during the time. He had a reverence for art history and recognized he was a part of that history and the conversations that history held. His art contained a record of how it came into being. He would almost attack the canvas and then take a scraper and scrape the canvas and begin again. Leaving layers of glaze, leaving them looking like stained glass with a luminous quality.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, no. 110, 1971 by Robert Motherwell

He did over 100 paintings in this series. He did it almost obsessively. It is highly meditative. IT is very planned with preperatory sketched thinking about all the formal things. he applied it to unprimed canvas. HE makes us feel that there is something unrehearsed about it and honest. His works we see as gestural and they are so large that when you are in front of it, it becomes a color field painting.

Pink Angels, Willem de Kooning

He had a muscular brushstroke, with a sense of urgency. We see Picasso in it, Matisse, biomorphic forms and abstraction

Excavation 1950 Willem De Kooning

He is creating objects with deep structures and the excavation of them. The trademark of the AbEx group is an all over composition, with the eye moving everywhere. doodlings, hieroglyphic. trying to access the unconscious and take us there, too

Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive?; Motherwell 1943

He is engaged in contemporary events. Spain especially. the object and it's reflection. Expressionim and cubism. pictographic reduction of form

Hudson River Landscape David Smith 1951

He is moved to create this as he watches the untamed beauty and ideal of the Hudson river landscape.

At Five in the Afternoon, 1949 by Robert Motherwell

IT is a reference to a peom by lorca, a spanish poet discribing a bull fight where a matador was gored to death at 5pm. It is a moment of violence. Take the poetic vision and translate it through painting. it is austere, in Spain black was super iportatn associated with the clerics and the airstocray. The balck white tension in the gestural strokes

Sky Cathedral, Louise Nevelson, 1958

Immigrant. He father worked in a lumber yard, and she would go to bring him his lunch and hoard some wood. She studied with Hans Hoffman. She loved to use found objects. Signiture style, pieced found objects together in gridlike boxes (like krasner and Gottlieb). She gives it uniformity by painting it all one color. is it sculpture or painting? IT is meant to be read pusshed against the wall. it is 11x10 feet- huge!. interpretted as an ode to the skyscraper and compartmentalized lives.

Noon, 1951 Lee Krasner

It is deep and textural, the paint comes up quite far and is rough. There are bright colors and small gestures. But still gestural painting. She was slow and methodical. When Pollock dies her art changes

Cubi XVII, 1963, David Smith

Like Golgotha. Reduced forms.

Kouros 1944-45 Isamu Noguchi Biomorphism

Made out of pink georgia Marble. Interlocking sculptures, 9 feet high. No pinions and no adhesive. Engineering element in all his work. only stone holding itself together. It has a primitiveness to it.

Vir Heroicus Sublimus, 1950-51 Barnett Newman

Man heroic and sublime, is is thinking about the nature of man. it is to fill the vision. the red is the landscape, the zips are the personification of man (figure). It has a flat and non textural element. It is divided to look like a triptic - very Christian.

Cathedral - 1947 - Jackson Pollock

Moved to vertical orientation. It is like there is something spiritual or religious about this. Is it metaphysical? Unstretched and unprimed canvas. is it like the facade of a Gothic Cathedral? design, shadow, lifted vertical to the heavens? Jackson and his wife, Lee Krasner, in a 1950 article in Life Magazine

Woman, I William de Kooning. 1950

Oil on canvas Woman, I reflects the age-old cultural ambivalence between reverence for and fear of the power of the feminine. Sumarian idols or the woman of willendorf are inspiration. His mom? His wife? Is this a monstrous woman or a celebration of a woman in power? both! He gave idealization and denigration.

Royal Bird, 1947, David Smith

Sculpture wasn't big at the time. Collectors weren't eager to have these. Direct metal technique. He would weld the metal to create the sculptures (he was also a painter). The works read 2D. So you don't feel like you need to go around it. So it is all-at-once and immediate legibility- very AbEx. 59 inches long- very large. sense of violence and aggression, a truth to materials. interest in the machine aesthetic.

Blind Leading the Blind, 1947, Louise Bourgeois

She had childhood memories of hiding under the tables and under her Father's hospital bed (he had been injured during WWI). So the legs of the table appear in her work. it is anti-greenbergian. IT is a person she created, her friend to ease her homesickness while she stayed at home.

Untitled - 1948 - Lee Krasner

She would paint, scrape, rub, add more paint to create a texture. She worked from 1946-69 and did about 40 of these remained untitled. Reworking of Hebrew script perhaps (working right to left). Jewish culture surfacing in her work. A response to the Holocaust? Trying to recover text of what was lost Her style is all over, and yet there is still more of a representational likeness in her work.

Green and Maroon, 1953, Rothko

The teacher loved this work and it drew her to modern art. This is in the Phillips collection in Washington D.C.. There are no forms or direct Christian . The application is more like staining with rags and sponges. It is etherial and rematerialses the immaterial. I'm interested in expressing the basic human emotion: tragedy, doom, He is in a romantic spiritual journey of a genius. There is something devotional about his work.

Autumn Rhythm, 1950 Pollock

The work is not sealed off or finished, so it could be continued to be worked on. The existentialist believed that they were coming into existence so, be able to continue to grow and work on it was important. Look passively and receive what the painting has to offer. harmony, intuition and innocence of the Native American might be a theme of his.

Violet, Black Orange, Yellow on White and Red, 1949, Rothko

There is still a sense of ground and figure. Is it a window?

Number 1, 1948 Pollock

aka Lavender mists for the lavender tones in it. Used house paint, dripped and flung paint onto the canvas on the ground. never touching the paint brush to the canvas. very innovate. Action jackson- nickname. Stresses the surface texture. IT is a stunning visual record of the painting process. There is energy, pushing and pulling, impasto. Drippy house paints, sense of action. It as if he is a shaman or wise man involved in a ritual. As he is trying to create a form out of chaos. The act of his painting has an element of doing something deep and important. There is balance and considered composition, color relationships, textural elements. Random materiality that came just by being, he didn't have a feeling of preciousness about it.

Lamps designed by Noguchi

ikea lamps

Dawn's Wedding Chapel IV, from Dawn's Wedding Feast, Louise Nevelson

it is in white (wedding) a sort of decaying white. the shift of the innocence of premarriage to post marriage. She hated it to be seen as women's issues- she was an artist! not a woman artist.

Pasiphae, 1943 Pollock

mother of the minotaur, wife of minos. The composition is beginning to break up and a gradual disinnegration moving towards what he is known for. Breaking through the rigidity. We are seeing the process and how his body is making it. Action painting. A representation of a woman,

Femme Maison series - 1947 - Louise Bourgeois

this was like journaling and the roles women were assigned post WWII. The women at home as mothers and nothing else. she worked in a lot of different media.

Bull, 1958 Elaine de Kooning

went from a more Regimented form to more gestural in this drawing.