Abstract Expressionism

broad movement in American painting that began in the late 1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others included Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, AdReinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. Most of these artists worked, lived, or exhibited in New York City.

Although it is the accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not an accurate description of the body of work created by these artists. Indeed, the movement comprised many different painterly styles varying in both technique and quality of expression. Despite this variety, Abstract Expressionist paintings share several broad characteristics. They are basically abstract—i.e., they depict forms not drawn from the visible world. They emphasize free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exercise considerable freedom of technique and execution to attain this goal, with a particular emphasis laid on the exploitation of the variable physical character of paint to evoke expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with a similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display the abandonment of conventionally structured composition built up out of discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated field, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. And finally, the paintings fill large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing power.

The early Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted suggestive biomorphic shapes using a free, delicately linear, and liquid paint application; and Hans Hofmann, who used dynamic and strongly textured brushwork in abstract but conventionally composed works. Another important influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on American shores in the late 1930s and early '40s of a host of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists who were fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe. Such artists greatly stimulated the native New York City painters and gave them a more intimate view of the vanguard of European painting. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally regarded as having begun with the paintings done by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s and early '50s.

In spite of the diversity of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three general approaches can be distinguished. One, Action painting (q.v.), is characterized by a loose, rapid, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes and in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced Action painting by dripping commercial paints on raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline used powerful, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to create starkly monumental forms.

The middle ground within Abstract Expressionism is represented by several varied styles, ranging from the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pictures of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The third and least emotionally expressive approach was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters used large areas, or fields, of flat colour and thin, diaphanous paint to achieve quiet,subtle, almost meditative effects. The outstanding colour-field painter was Rothko, most of whose works consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular areas that tend to shimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism had a great impact on both the American and European art scenes during the 1950s. Indeed, the movement marked the shift of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar decades. In the course of the 1950s, the movement's younger followers increasingly followed the lead of the colour-field painters and, by 1960, its participants had generally drifted away from the highly charged expressiveness of the Action painters.

POP ART

art in which commonplace objects (such as comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers) were used as subject matter and were often physically incorporated in the work. The Pop art movement was largely a British and American cultural phenomenon of the late 1950s and '60s and was named by the art critic Lawrence Alloway in reference to the prosaic iconography of its painting and sculpture.Works by such Pop artists as the Americans Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselman, James Rosenquist, and Robert Indiana and the Britons David Hockney and Peter Blake, among others, were characterized by their portrayal of any and all aspects of popular culture that had a powerful impact on contemporary life; their iconography—taken from television, comic books, movie magazines, and all forms of advertising—was presented emphatically and objectively, without praise or condemnation but with overwhelming immediacy, and by means of the precise commercial techniques used by the media from which the iconography itself was borrowed. Pop art represented an attempt to return to a more objective, universally acceptable form of art after the dominance in both the United States and Europe of the highly personal Abstract Expressionism. Itwas also iconoclastic, rejecting both the supremacy of the “high art” of the past and the pretensions of other contemporary avant-garde art. Pop art became a cultural event because of its close reflection of a particular social situation and because its easily comprehensible images were immediately exploited by the mass media. Although the critics of Pop art described it as vulgar, sensational, nonaesthetic, and a joke, its proponents (a minority in the art world) saw it as an art that was democratic and nondiscriminatory, bringing together both connoisseurs and untrained viewers.

Pop art was a descendant of Dada (q.v.), a nihilistic movement current in the 1920s that ridiculed the seriousness of contemporary Parisian art and, more broadly, the political and culturalsituation that had brought war to Europe. Marcel Duchamp, the champion of Dada in the United States, who tried to narrow the distance between art and life by celebrating the mass-produced objects of his time, was the most influential figure in the evolution of Pop art. Other 20th-century artists who influenced Pop art were Stuart Davis, Gerard Murphy, and Fernand Léger, all of whom depicted in their painting the precision, mass-production, and commercial materials of the machine-industrial age. The immediate predecessors of the Pop artists were Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and Robert Rauschenberg, American artists who in the 1950s painted flags, beer cans, and other similar objects, though with a painterly, expressive technique.

Some of the more striking forms that Pop art took were Roy Lichtenstein's stylized reproductions of comic strips using the colour dots and flat tones of commercial printing; Andy Warhol's meticulously literal paintings and silk-screen prints of soup-can labels, soap cartons, and rows of soft-drink bottles; Claes Oldenburg's soft plastic sculptures of objects such as bathroom fixtures, typewriters, and gigantic hamburgers; Tom Wesselman's “Great American Nudes,” flat, direct paintings of faceless sex symbols; and George Segal's constructed tableaux featuring life-sized plaster-cast figures placed in actual environments (e.g., lunch counters and buses) retrieved from junkyards.

Most Pop artists aspired to an impersonal, urbane attitude in their works. Some examples of Pop art, however, were subtly expressive of social criticism—for example, Oldenburg's drooping objects and Warhol's monotonous repetitions of the same banal image have an undeniably disturbing effect—and some, such as Segal's mysterious, lonely tableaux, are overtly expressionistic.

American Pop art tended to be emblematic, anonymous, and aggressive; English Pop, more subjective and referential, expressed a somewhat romantic view of Pop culture fostered perhaps by England's relative distance from it. English Pop artists tended to deal with technology and popular culture primarily as themes, even metaphors; some American Pop artists actually seemed to live these ideas. Warhol's motto, for example, was, “I think everybody should be a machine,” and he tried in his art to produce works that a machine would have made.

Pop art was not taken seriously by the public, but it found critical acceptance as a form of art suited to the highly technological, mass-media oriented society of Western countries.

OP ART

also called optical art branch of mid-20th-century geometric, abstract art that deals with optical illusion. Achieved through the systematic and precise manipulation of shapes and colours, the effects of Op art can be based either on perspective illusion or on chromatic tension; in painting, the dominant medium of Op art, the surface tension is usually maximized to the point at which an actual pulsation or flickering is perceived by the human eye. In its concern with utterly abstract formal relationships Op art is indirectly related to such other 20th-century styles as Orphism, Constructivism, Suprematism, and Futurism—particularly the latterbecause of its emphasis on pictorial movement and dynamism. Op painters differed from earlier artists working in geometric styles, however, in their purposeful manipulation of formal relationships in order to evoke perceptual illusions, ambiguities, and contradictions in the vision of the viewer.

The principal artists of the Op movement as it emerged in the late 1950s and '60s were Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Larry Poons, and Jeffrey Steele. The movement first attracted international attention with the Op exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1965. Op art painters devised complex and paradoxical optical spaces through the illusory manipulation of such simple repetitive forms as parallel lines, checkerboard patterns, and concentric circles or by creating chromatic tension from the juxtaposition of complementary (chromatically opposite) colours of equal intensity. These spaces create the illusion of movement, preventing the viewer's eye from resting long enough on any one part of the surface to be able to interpret it literally. “Op art works exist,” according to one writer, “less as objects than as generators of perceptual responses.”

Op art goals were shared by the French Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (“Group for Research in the Visual Arts”) and by the Chilean-born artist Jesus Raphael Soto. These artists made large-scale Op sculptures that employ light and motors, as well as sculptural materials, to create the illusion of movement in space that is fundamental to all Op art.

MINIMALISM

chiefly American movement in the visual arts and music originating in New York City in the late 1960s and characterized by extreme simplicity of form and a literal, objective approach.

Minimal art, also called ABC art, is the culmination of reductionist tendencies in modern art that first surfaced in the 1913 compositionby the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich of a black square on a whiteground. The primary structures of the minimalist sculptors Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Tony Smith, Anthony Caro, Sol LeWitt, John McCracken, Craig Kaufman, Robert Duran, and Robert Morris and the hard-edge painting of Jack Youngerman, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Al Held, and Gene Davis grew out of these artists' dissatisfaction with Action painting, a branch of American Abstract Expressionism based on intuitive, spontaneous gesture that had dominated American avant-garde art through much of the 1950s. The minimalists, who believed that Action painting was too personal and insubstantial, adopted the point of view that a work of art should not refer to anything other than itself. For that reason they attempted to rid their works of any extra-visual association. Use of the hard edge, the simple form, and the linear rather than painterly approach was intended to emphasize two-dimensionality and to allow the viewer an immediate, purely visual response. They turned for inspiration to the impassive, quiet works of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, exponents of the colour-field branch of Abstract Expressionist painting.

Hard-edge painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on an overall flat surface; precise, razor-sharp contours; and broad areas of bright, unmodulated colour that have been stained into unprimed canvas. It differs from other types of geometric abstraction in that it rejects both lyrical and mathematical composition because, even in this simplified field, they are a means of personal expression for the artist. Minimal hard-edge painting is the anonymous construction of a simple object.

Minimal sculpture is composed of extremely simple, monumental geometric forms made of fibreglass, plastic, sheet metal, or aluminum, either left raw or solidly painted with bright industrial colours. Like the painters, minimalist sculptors attempted to make their works totally objective, unexpressive, and non-referential.

Minimal art, along with the music of Erik Satie and the aesthetics of John Cage, was a distinct influence on minimalist music. Reacting against the complex, intellectually sophisticated style of modern music, several composers began to compose in a simple, literal style, thereby creating an extremely simple and accessible music. La Monte Young, for example, composed a number of electronic “continuous frequency environments,” in which he generated a few pitches and then electronically sustained them, sometimes for days or weeks. Young added very little to this texture and virtually eliminated variation as a developmental technique. Like Young, Morton Feldman triedto eliminate variation. His works explored innovative instrumental timbres through a slowly paced succession of unrelated, soft sounds. Another group of composers—Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Cornelius Cardew, and Frederic Rzewski—was influenced by the music of India, Bali, and West Africa. They used simple harmonic and melodic patterns in their highly repetitive music.

In both music and the visual arts, minimalism was an attempt to explore the essential elements of an art form. In minimalist visual arts, the personal, gestural elements were stripped away in order to reveal the objective, purely visual elements of painting and sculpture. In minimalist music,the traditional treatment of form and development was rejected in favour of explorations of timbre and rhythm—musical elements largely unfamiliar to Western listeners.

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