Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [122]
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
PERIOD: Late 1940s, early ’50s
LOCALE: New York, East Hampton
AIM: Express inner life through art
TECHNIOUE: Free application of paint, no reference to visual reality
THEORY: Image not result of preconceived idea, but of creative process
Pioneered by such artists as Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock, the Abstract Expressionists liberated themselves from geometric abstraction and the need to suggest recognizable images. Giving free rein to impulse and chance, the impassioned act of painting became an absolute value in itself.
No one better epitomized this wildly subconscious approach than Pollock. Labeled “Jack the Drip-per” by Time magazine, Pollock made a revolutionary breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush altogether, sloshing, pouring — and dripping — commercial paints onto a vast roll of canvas on the floor of his studio/barn. With Herculean ambition, he also abandoned the easel format for a monumental, murallike scale. The image of Pollock is of a man possessed — possessed by his own subconscious — as he flung and slung skeins of paint in an all over configuration, throwing out in the process such conventional artistic considerations as foreground, background, focal point, and perspective like so many empty paint cans.
The resulting highly improvisational canvases by Pollock and friends not only stole Europe’s position as Keeper of the Cultural Flame, it expanded the very definition of what was thought to be “Art.” No longer was art required to imitate tame visual appearance; the energy and emotion of Abstract Expressionism smashed conventions and laid the groundwork for much of what was to follow.
WHAT IS “ART”?
For centuries, a debate has raged over what art is. A lot of what is called art is so outlandish, it stretches the credulity and sabotages one’s appreciation of it. Here are some attempts by a number of people to define art.
Proto-abstractionist Arthur Dove (before 1920): “[Art] is the form that the idea takes in the imagination rather than the form as it exists outside.”
Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka (1936): “[Art is] an attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.”
Realist Ben Shahn (1967): “[Art is] the discovery of images during work, the recognition of shapes and forms that emerge and awoken a response in us.”
Or, as Pop artist Andy Warhol said when asked if his six-hour-long film of a man sleeping was art: “Well, first of all, it was made by an artist, and second, that would come out art.”
ACTION PAINTING
Critic Harold Rosenberg first used the term “action painting” to explain the Abstract Expressionist working method when he wrote: “the canvas began to appear ... as an arena in which to act.... What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” According to theory, the pointer improvises an image as he goes along. The resulting painting records a moment in the artist’s life.
The best known, most widely appreciated Abstract Expressionists are:
ARSHILE GORKY (1904-48) pioneered “automatic” painting in the U.S. Called “a Geiger counter of art” by de Kooning, Gorky typified the development of American vanguard artists as he shifted from Cubism to Surrealism, then broke free of European models. The Armenian-American painter freely brushed washes of glowing color inside clearly outlined biomorphic shapes. He favored oval splotches of flowing primary colors like yellow and red, reminding some of runny eggs. Children fled in terror from this 6’3” painter, habitually dressed in black from head to toe like Count Dracula. After a series of setbacks — losing his wife, his health, and his work in a fire — Gorky hung himself in a woodshed. His scrawled message: “Goodbye my ’Loveds.”
Gorky, “Water of the Flowery Mill,” 1944,
MMA, NY.
JACKSON