Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [124]
Hofmann, “The Gate,” 1960, Guggenheim, NY.
CLYFFORD STILL (1904-80) was as intense and jagged as his paintings. A pioneer of nearly monochromatic painting, Still troweled on uneven shapes of paint with a palette knife. His early work consisted of vertical, ragged areas of color in earth tones. Later he used brighter colors but always with a “ripped curtain” pattern lacking any central focus.
Motherwell, “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 34,” 1953-54, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
ROBERT MOTHERWELL (1915-91) was the wealthy intellectual of the group. After studying philosophy at Harvard and Stanford, he took up abstract painting inspired by European Modernism. Motherwell is known for the more than 100 paintings he called “elegies” for the doomed Spanish Republic. These works feature oval shapes wedged between irregular, vertical bands in black, white, and brown.
Other lesser-known but not necessarily less-important Abstract Expressionists are: Adolph Gottlieb (1903-74), best known for stylized “burst” paintings in which circular forms float above exploding masses of paint. James Brooks (1906-92) invented stain painting (painting on unprimed, absorbent canvas which gives a “fuzzy” effect). William Baziotes (1912-63) portrayed an imaginary underwater world. Ad Reinhardt (1913-67) combined Mondrian with Abstract Expressionism into geometric abstractions, and later did the famous “black-on-black” paintings. Bradley Walker Tomlin (1899-1953) is known for calligraphic strokes like bird scratchings. Philip Guston (1913-80) thickly overlapped brushstrokes in a crosshatching of luminous colors. He became a figurative artist in later years. Lee Krasner (1911-84), Pollock’s wife, suggested human forms without literally depicting them. Ibram Lassaw (b. 1913), one of the first Americans to make abstract sculpture, in 1950 welded open grids and latticed metal sculpture. Esteban Vicente (b. 1903) uses an air compressor to spray luminous colors in abstract paintings.
JOAN MITCHELL
A second generation member of the Abstract Expressionist group who still keeps the flame alive is Chicagoan Joan Mitchell (b. 1926). Her scribbly, darting brushstrokes on a plain white field are abstract versions of landscapes in gold, yellow, and blue. Although the loose brushstrokes seem quickly applied, as if the whole painting were produced in a blaze of improvisation, Mitchell insists, “The idea of ‘action painting’ is a joke. There’s no ’action’ here. I paint a little. Then I sit and I look at the pointing, sometimes for hours. Eventually the painting tells me what to do.”
Still, “Untitled,” 1946, MMA, NY.
FEDERAL ART PROJECT
During the darkest days of the Depression, President Roosevelt put 10,000 artists to work. “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people,” said FDR’s aide Harry Hopkins. In the most ambitious program of government art patronage ever, the U.S. Treasury doled out $23.86 a week to artists like Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Ben Shahn, Isamu Noguchi, and Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock who would become known as Abstract Expressionists. During the program’s tenure of 1935-43, these artists — many young and unknown — produced one work every two months, for a total of 100,000 easel paintings, 8,000 sculptures, and more than 4,000 murals for public buildings. The subsidy allowed a generation of artists the luxury of experimenting with new styles. Painter Stuart Davis traced “the birth of American art” to the Federal Art Project. Its support catalyzed a burst of innovation and catapulted New York to the forefront of advanced art.
FIGURAL EXPRESSIONISM: NOT JUST A PRETTY FACE
Reacting against the prevailing trend of complete abstraction, a few postwar painters kept figurative painting alive. They began, however, with the Modernist principle that art must express a truth beyond surface appearance.