We are asked to research Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting (or Tachisme) and those artists who developed this style of spontaneous, expressive painting.
Abstract Expressionism was an art form centred in America, and more specifically in New York, from the early 1940s to the 1960s, and was the first time the focus of the art world had shifted from Europe. During the Second World War, many intellectuals and artists fled the destruction and persecution to the US and most settled in New York. The style of painting they took with them was split into two distinct groups: the purist abstract styles of Mondrian, Leger and the Bauhas; and the expressive, emotional styles of the Surrealists (Ernst, Dali and Breton).
Two particular artists can be seen to have been the catalyst between the original abstract artists, such as Kandinsky, and the action painters of the 40s and 50s. Hans Hofmann had lived in both Paris and Munich, and so had in-depth knowledge of cubism, fauvism, abstraction and expressionism. He created an art school in New York where, in the early 40s, he experimented with drip techniques and mixed media (The Wind 1942). The other artist was Arshile Gorky who died at the age of 43 in 1948. He has been described both as the last Surrealist and the first Abstract Expressionist, blending the abstract painterly techniques favoured by Hoffman with the surreal imagery ( Virginia Landscape 1944).
American artists were receptive to all these styles, and, as there had been an American move towards abstraction since the beginning of the century, individual artists (they were never a coherent group despite their names being linked) began developing artistic styles wholly their own.
Abstract Expressionism can broadly be split into two groups: the action painters (Jackson Pollock being the most famous but also including Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline) and the colour-field painters (Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman).
One critic, Harold Rosenberg, stated “... the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyse or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of that encounter.” He went on to say “In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, colour, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which – or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvas – can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.”[1]
Jackson Pollock is probably the most famous of the action painters – his huge canvases covered for which he is most famous, covered in drips, spatters and dribbles, were mainly painted in a brief phase between 1947 and 1951. He stated in ‘My Painting’ in Possibilities I, 1947/8 “I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to take the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. ... I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through”.[2] (No 1, 1948, 1948).
Willem de Kooning’s work, while being classed under the heading of Abstract Expressionism, is the only one whose work remained, to some degree, representational. Many of his works contain clearly identifiable forms, frequently those of the human figures, such as Attic, 1949, which gives the impression of a mass of human flesh, tangled together and pressing down upon one another.
The other branch of Abstract Expressionism – colour-field painting – is most closely linked with the artist Mark Rothko. Rothko’s art at first appears very simple; large canvases painted with a small number of coloured panels. However, as Rothko is reported as saying (S Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York 1957) “I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.” Rothko’s painting style is more that of staining rather than the visible application of paint. The first layer of colour is soaked into the canvas, with subsequent layers being applied thinly; scumbled over the surface to show the underlayers of paint, achieving a subtle effect which almost glows[3]. Red, Orange, Orange on Red (1962)
Another proponent of large-scale canvases was Clyfford Still, who, like Rothko, generally worked with a limited palette of colour, but unlike Rothko, Still’s work appears much more solid due to the thickly applied paint and defined edges of his forms. Still applied his colour in large, jagged shapes which have been described as akin to peeling billboards, or animal hides. Along with Rothko and Adolph Gotlieb, Still wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1943 to explain the Abstract Expressionist point of view, stating “We favour the simply expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane”[4]. 1964, 1964)
[1] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 834
[2] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 835
[3] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 838
[4] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 836
No comments:
Post a Comment