NCC ART104NEW YORK BECOMES THE CENTER

Historic Context

• 1929 Great Depression begins• 1933 Hitler's Nazi Party seizes power•   New Deal begins - program of government

spending to end the Great Depression• 1936 - 1939 Spanish Civil War• 1939 - 1945 WWII• 1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor• 1945 US bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki - first use of

the atomic bomb•   Founding of the United Nations

• The growing artistic community in New York

•• Important art schools and groups:• Art Students League• Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts• The Club• Cedar Tavern

New venues to see and exhibit art in:

• Museum of Modern Art• Museum of Non-Objective Painting (will

later become the Guggenheim Museum)

• Betty Parsons Gallery• Sidney Janis Gallery• Art of This Century Gallery

Peggy Guggenheim in the Art of This Century Gallery

he Museum of Modern Art, 1920s - present day.

Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937.  11' X 23'.  Oil on canvas.

"Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy." -Picasso as quoted in Artforms

Colin Powell standing in front of the covered Guernica tapestry at the United Nations

WWII1939 - 1945About 62 million people die as a result of WWII EuropeLeft in ruinsMany countries remain politically dividedMany artists had immigrated to the U.S.United StatesHousing and construction boom spawned by the return of GIsCountry invigorated by new found strength and prominenceSense of artistic community blossoms in NY "The main premises of Western painting have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power." - Clement Greenberg in The Decline of Cubism

Spring 1945 "A Problem for Critics" exhibition at the Art of This Century Gallery Included works by: Joan Miro, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottleib and Mark Rothko Critics met Peggy Guggenheim's challenge by naming the new movementAbstract Expressionism

Jackson Pollock.  Moon Woman.  1942.

JACKSON POLLOCK1912 - 1956

" Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all to hell. Then there could be new paintings again." - Willem de Kooning

Jackson Pollock. Going West. c. 1934 -35. Thomas Hart Benton. The Arts of the West. 1932.

Jackson Pollock. Male and Female. c. 1942.

Hans Hofmann:  "You don't work from nature.  You work by heart. This is no good.  You will repeat yourself." Jackson Pollock:  "I am nature...Put up or shut up.  Your theories don't interest me."

Hans Hofmann. The Third Hand. 1947.

Jackson Pollock. The Key. 1946.Automatism…technique whereby the usual intellectual control of the artist over the brush is foregone. The artist's aim is to allow the subconscious to create the artwork without rational reference.

Pollock standing in front of blank canvas for Mural

Jackson Pollock. Mural. 1943. 8' X 19'.

Thomas Hart Benton. Palisades, from the series American Historical Epic. 1919 - 1924.

Jackson Pollock. Cathedral. 1947.

What's so innovative about Jackson Pollock's drip paintings?

Painted horizontally, on the floor

Used "everyday" paint and sticks

  Instead of traditional artist's materials

Works intuitively with an automatist technique

Considers space in a completely new way

  Rejects Renaissance perspective

  All-over composition  Painted gestures move across the picture plane rather than into it The painter becomes the paintings subject

"He transformed the obligation for social relevance, a pervasive current between the wars, into an unrelenting moral commitment to a search for the self." - Fineberg

Pollock's barn studio

Jackson Pollock. Number 1. 1948.

• "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well." - Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). 1950."My opinion is that new needs need new techniques…the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance…the modern artist is living in a mechanical age…working and expressing an inner world- in other words, expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces." - Jackson Pollock

August 8, 1949 issue of Life Magazine

August 8, 1949 issue of Life Magazine

• "The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is a Gothic, morbid, and extreme disciple of Picasso's Cubism and Miró's post-Cubism, tinctured also with Kandinsky and surrealist inspiration. His name is Jackson Pollock." - Clement Greenberg in 1947

Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg. Stills from the film Jackson Pollock. 1951.

The Irascibles" from 1950, published in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.From left to right seated:  Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko; Standing:  Richard Pousette-Dart, Willia Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin

de Kooning. Woman I. 1950-2.

Motherwell. At Five in the Afternoon. 1949.

Clyfford Still. 1947-R, No. 2. 1947.

"At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act- rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." - Harold Rosenberg in The American Action Painters

Common characteristics of the New York School:

• Interest in Surrealist automatist techniques• Influenced by the Mexican muralists• Existential connection to the "Modern Man”…

notion that man was fundamentally irrational and driven by unknowable forces from within and without

• Participated in Federal Art Project 1935 - 1943

• Insistence on the individual character in each of their expressions

LEE KRASNER1908 - 1984

Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in the studio. 1949.

Hans Hofmann.  Bachanale.  1946. Lee Krasner. Image Surfacing. c. 1945.

Highest praise given to Krasner by Hofmann: "this painting is so good you'd never know it was done by a woman."

Lee Krasner. Untitled. 1940.

Lee Krasner.  Noon.  1947.  24" X 30".

Lee Krasner.  Untitled.  1949.

Lee Krasner. Prophecy. 1956

Lee Krasner.  Easter Lilies.  1956

Lee Krasner. The Seasons. 1957. 7 3/4' X 17'.

WILLEM DE KOONING 1904-97

Willem de Kooning. Still Life: Bowl, Pitcher and Jug. c. 1921.

Willem de Kooning. Seated Woman. c. 1940

THE END!