Week 1
August 24, 2006
<>Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm 1950Pollock, Autumn Rhythm in situ at Betty
Parsons
gallery c 1950
Ad Reinhardt, untitled, 1938
American Abstract Artists first annual exhibition Squibb Building
Galleries,
1937
Jose Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930, mural for Pomona
College,
Claremont, California
Diego Rivera, Construction: The Making of a Fresco Showing the
Building of a
City, 1931, mural for California School of Fine Arts, San
Francisco
Thomas Hart Benton, overall view and "City Activities" from America
Today
, 1930-31,
mural for the New School for Social Research, New York
Diego Rivera, Zapatista Landscape, 1915
Thomas Hart Benton, Constructivist Still Life, 1917
Thomas Hart Benton, The Ballad of the Jealous Lover, 1930
Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-35
Jose Clemente Orozco, overall view and "Aztec Sacrifice" from The
Epic of American
Civilization, 1932-34, mural for Dartmouth College
Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Jackson Pollock, Square Composition with Horse, mid to late
1930s
Picasso, drawing for Guernica, 1936
Pollock
(1947): “I intend to make large movable pictures that will function
between the
easel and the mural…I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and
the
tendency of modern feeling is toward the wall picture or mural…the
pictures I
contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, an attempt to
point out
the direction of the future.”
Diego Rivera (1929): "There is no form of art which does not also play an essential political role....What is it then that we really need? An art extremely pure, precise, profoundly human, and clarified as to its purpose....It needs great surfaces of walls, masculine and simple methods of fresco and encaustic, effective in publc buildings or places where men congregate to deliberate."
Jose Clemente Orozco (1929): "The highest, the most logical, the purest, and strongest form of painting is the mural....it cannot be hidden away for the benefit of the privileged few. It is for the people. It is for all."
--------
August 29, 2006
Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-35
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950
Diego Rivera, Construction: The Making of a Fresco Showing the
Building of a
City, 1931, mural for California
School of Fine Arts, San Francisco
Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm in situ at Betty Parsons gallery
c 1950
Thomas Hart Benton, Constructivist
Still Life, 1917
Philip Evergood, Nude
by the El, 1934
Stuart Davis, Drawing for
cover of Art Front. 1935
Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Alfred Barr, frontispiece for the catalogue for the exhibition Cubism
and Abstract Art, Museum of Modern Art,1936
Andre Breton's studio circa 1950
European Artists in Exile, circa 1941
(front: Matta, Zadkine, Tanguy, Ernst, Chagall,
Leger; back:
Breton, Mondrian, Masson, Ozenfant, Lipshitz, Tchelitchew, Seligman,
Berman)
First Papers of Surrealism, exhibition view, 1942
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948
Collaboration with William Baziotes, Jerome
Kamrowski, and
Jackson Pollock, 1940-41
Andre Masson, automatic drawing, 1925
Andre Breton, L’ecriture automatique, 1938
Andre Masson, Ariadne’s Thread, 1938
Joan Miro, Painting,
1933
Meyer Schapiro (1936): "Although painters
will say again and again that content doesn’t matter, they are
curiously selective in their subjects. They paint only certain
themes and only in a certain aspect. …[including] his
studio and its intimate objects, his model posing, the fruit and
flowers on his table, his window and the view from it; symbols of the
artist’s activity, individuals practicing other arts, rehearsing, or in
their privacy; instruments of art, especially music, which suggest an
abstract art and improvisation; isolated intimate fields, like a table
covered with private instruments of idle sensation, drinking glasses, a
pipe, playing cards, books, all objects …referring to an exclusive,
private world in which the individual is immobile, but free to enjoy
his own moods and self-stimulation. …Modern artists have …
eliminated the world of action from their pictures."
Artists "who are concerned with the world around them in its action and
conflict . . . cannot permanently devote themselves to a painting
committed to the aesthetic moments of life . . . or to an art of the
studio."
Jackson Pollock (1944): "I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in Europe….Thus the fact that good European moderns are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. This idea interests me more than these specific painters do, for the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Miro, are still abroad.”
Andre Breton (1924): “SURREALISM, n.: Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations.”
--------
August 31, 2006
Andre Masson, Ariadne’s Thread, 1938
Ad Reinhardt, untitled, 1938
Arshile Gorky, Organization, 1933-36
Photograph of Gorky and Willem
deKooning,
circa 1935
Picasso, The Studio, 1927-28
Piet Mondrian, Composition,1921
Willem de Kooning, Mother Father Sister Brother, 1937
Arshile Gorky, Aviation: Evolution of forms under Aerodynamic
Limitations
, 1937, mural for Newark Airport, New Jersey, and study
Arshile Gorky, Garden in Sochi II, 1940
Joan Miro, Painting, 1933
Arshile Gorky, Garden in Sochi III, 1943
Arshile Gorky, Waterfall, 1941
Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the
Cock's Comb, 1944
Arshile Gorky, The Plow and the Song, 1947
Jackson Pollock, number 1, 1948
Jackson Pollock, Lucifer, 1947
Jackson Pollock, Shimmering Substance, 1946
Jackson Pollock, Eyes in the Heat, 1946
Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947
Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950
"Jackson Pollock: Is He America's Greatest Living Painter?" Life
Magazine August 8, 1949
Hans Naumuth, photographs of Pollock painting, from ArtNews,
1950
Arshile Gorky (1931): “The twentieth century—what intensity, what activity, what restless, nervous energy! Has there in six centuries been a better art than cubism? No. Centuries will go past—artists of giant stature will draw positive elements from cubism. Clumsy painters take a measurable space, a clear definite shape, a vertical or horizontal direction, and they call it a blank canvas, while every time one stretches canvas he is drawing a new space.”
Clement Greenberg (1948): “Cubism
originated …from a complex of attitudes that
embodied the optimism, boldness, and self-confidence of the highest
stage of
industrial capitalism….Cubism…expressed the positivist or empirical
state of
mind with its refusal to refer to anything outside the concrete
experience of
the particular discipline, field or medium in which one worked; and it
also
expressed the empiricists faith in the supreme reality of concrete
experience.”
Now we are “faced with the debacle of the age of
experiment,
of the …cubist mission and its hope, coincident with that of Marxism
and the
whole matured tradition of the enlightenment, of humanizing the world.”
“In a world filled with nostalgia and too profoundly frightened by what has just happened to hope that the future contains anything better than the past, how can art be expected to hold on to advanced positions.”
Manny Farber (1945): "The artist seems to have started at one point with a color and continued it over the painting without stopping. . . . The painting is laced with relaxed, graceful, swirling lines or violent ones, until the surface is patterned in whirling movement. In the best compositions these movements collide and repeat to project a continuing effect of virile hectic action. The paint is jabbed on, spattered. . . and painted in great sweeping continuous lines. The painting is generally heavily detailed . . . circular movement. . . . An extraordinary quality of Pollock's composing is the way he can continue a feeling with little deviation or loss of purity from one edge to the other of the most detailed design."
Jackson Pollock (1947): “My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting, I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since I can walk around it, work from all four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters in the West. I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives, and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass, and other foreign matter added.”