ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM
New York City 1945-1960s
During WWII most organized art movements came
to a virtual standstill.

While Europe was recovering , a new center for

artistic creativity emerged in New York City.

It offered youth , energy, money and freedom.

Aim = Express inner life through art

Technique = Free application of paint, with no

reference to visual reality

Theory= The image is not a result of any pre-

conceived idea; but of the creative process
Key Points :

Abstract Expressionism respected, but challenged and overturned

the clear domination of the early twentieth century giants, Matisse
and Picasso

Many artists were directly affected by what had happened in Europe

- the genocide, the bombing of Japan - and as a result had an
enormous sense that the world needed to be reinvented

The artists felt that by forging a new painting they were contributing
to the birth of a new culture, a new civilization

The 1940s saw beginnings of the transformation of contemporary art

being a tiny insider-type phenomenon to what it is today - a topic
that interests almost everybody
INFLUENCES

Kandinsky : these artists followed his dictum that

art, like music, could be without pictorial subject
matter. Their emphasis was on dramatic colors
and sweeping brushstrokes and being aimed at
the direct presentation of feeling .

Automatism of the Dadaists : relying on their

creative instincts to shape the works : becoming
an unpremeditated process
Willem de Kooning
Action Painting

painting is a way of living

-Willem de Kooning

The title excavation deals with digging up the

art of the past to find a new meaning for it.
(1947- MOMA did an exhibition of petroglyphs
and cave paintings)

Canvas = an arena in which to act

Excavation 1950 The painting has become a record of an event

 The artist fills space with an attitude. The attitude never
comes from himself alone.

I see the canvas and I begin... It's a necessary

evil to get into the work, and it's pretty
marvelous to be able to get out of it.

Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.

The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the

artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of
view. All that we can hope for is to put some
order into ourselves

It's really absurd to make... a human image, with paint, today, when you think
about it... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.
Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollocks Mural represents the break from representational painting on traditional canvases
to his unique drip style, completed on canvases stretched out on the floor. He assimilated painting
techniques from Pablo Picasso, Thomas Hart Benton, and David Alfaro Siquieros, as well as Native
American sand painting techniques to form his own unique drip style, which sometimes included
sand or chards of glass, combined with enamel house paint, loosely dripped, squirted, and flung
across his canvas or board.
We already have a mechanical way of representing objects in
nature. So the modern artist is working with space and time
Expressing feeling rather than illustrating
Today , painters do not have to go to a subject outside of themselves ; they work from within
Traces in Time When I work on the floor I feel like apart of the painti
I am in it , Im not aware of what I am doing- the painting takes
on a life of its own. I just try to let it come through.
Painting is a state of being. Painting is self discovery
Every good painting is its artist
Pollock himself denied there was any loss of
control when painting: I have a general
notion of what Im about and what the results
will be With experience, it seems possible to
control the flow of paint to a great extent I
deny the accident.
New needs need new techniques. It
seems to me that the modern cannot
express this age, the airplane, the
atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms
of the Renaissance or of any other past
culture. Each age finds its own
techniques Most of the paint I use is
a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The
brushes I use are used more as sticks
rather than rushes -- the brush doesnt
touch the surface of the canvas, its
just above.
It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while
you may like it or you may not.
Franz Kline
Lee Krasner
Joan Mitchell
Elaine de Kooning
COLORFIELD PAINTERS
THE SPACE MYSTICS
Robert Motherwell
Helen Frankenthaler
Mark Rothko
 Organic Shapes

Large Canvas

Color
 Thin Overlapping glazes

Non objective forms

Asymmetrical compositions
 Floating Rectangles

Verticality relates to
figurative and a
spirituality

Blurred edges allow the

colors to appear to
vibrate and oscillate

Meant to be looked at from

8 away to contemplate
the spatial complexities
Rothko used Magna
Colors rather than oil
or acrylic.

Magna colors are

more similar to acrylic
than they are to oil, but
they do not
dry quite as quickly as
acrylic paints
dry. When mixed with
turpentine,
magna colors produce
a translucent and
luminous quality.
Often times, magna
colors are added to oil
paint to help
speed the drying time
of the paint.
Rothko liked to
abandon the use
of titles to name his
work, he resorted to
numbers or colours to
distinguish between
paintings. Then he
went a step further
,and just stopped
explaining the meaning
of his work. He said
Silence is so
accurate, he feared
that by giving a title to
the painting he would
then subject the
viewer to see his
views, his imagination
He used rags more than he used
brushes. The purpose for this was to
stain the canvas and create areas of
color that float on the canvas. He
wanted no clearly defined space.
 I am not interested in relationships of color or
form or anything else. I am interested only in
expressing the basic human emotions-
tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.. And the
fact that a lot of people breakdown and cry
when confronted with my pictures show that I
communicate with those basic human
emotions. The people who weep before my
pictures are having the same religious
experiences I had when I painted them. And if
you , as you say, are moved only by their color
relationships, the you missed the point.

- Mark Rothko
HARD EDGE PAINTING
Ellsworth Kelly
Frank Stella
Yves Klein