Week 2
September 5, 2006
"Jackson Pollock: Is He America's Greatest Living Painter?" Life
Magazine August 8, 1949
Hans Naumuth, contach sheet photographs of Pollock painting, from ArtNews,
1950
European Artists in Exile, circa 1941
(front: Matta, Zadkine, Tanguy,
Ernst, Chagall, Leger; back: Breton, Mondrian, Masson, Ozenfant,
Lipshitz,
Tchelitchew, Seligman, Berman)
Nina Leen, photograph of "The Irascibles," Life Magazine January 15, 1951
(front: Stamos, Ernst, Newman, Brooks, Rothko; middle: Pousette-Dart,
Baziotes, Pollock, Still, Motherwell, Tomlin; back: deKooning,
Gottlieb, Reinhardt, Sterne)
Hans Namuth, photograph of Pollock painting, 1950
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1948 and detail
Hans Hofmann, Third Hand, 1947
Handprints,
caves at Gargas, Hautes-Pyrenees, France circa 25000 bce
Hans Namuth, photograph of Pollock painting, 1950
Photograph c 1935 of Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky with Organization
Willem de Kooning, Mother Father Sister Brother, 1937
Willem de Kooning, Standing Man, 1942
Willem de Kooning, Seated Figure (Classic Male), 1939
Willem de Kooning, Pink Lady
1944
Willem de Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945
Willem de Kooning, Asheville,
1949
Willem deKooning, Painting, 1948
<>Willem de Kooning, Attic, 1949
Willem de Kooning, Excavation, 1950
Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950
Jaclson Pollock, Cut Out,
1948-50
Cecil Beaton, photograph for Vogue, March 1951, with Lavender
Mist
Willem de Kooning, study for Woman,
1950
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52
Woman holding bison horn, Paleolithic Europe, circa 25000-20000 bce
Camel cigarette advertisement, Time magazine1949
Willem de Kooning, Woman and Bicycle, 1952-53
Piet Mondrian, Tableau I, 1921
Willem de Kooning, Gotham News, 1955-56
Willem de Kooning, Easter Monday,
1957
Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters" (1952): "With a
few exceptions, most of
the artists of this vanguard fond their way to their present work by
being cut
in two. Their type is not a young painter
but a reborn one. The man may be over
forty, the painter around seven. The
diagonal of grand crisis separates him from his personal and artistic
past....Many of the painters were Marxists (WPA unions artists
congresses) they had been trying to paint society.
Others had been trying to paint Art (cubism,
postimpressionism)—it amounts to the same thing. The
big moment came when it was decided to paint…just to paint."
"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,
re-design, analyze or express an object.
What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."
"A good
painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an
action and
its relation to a transforming process in the artist.
The canvas has 'talked back' to the artist
not to quiet him with Sibylline murmurs not to stun him with Dionysian
outcries
but to provoke him into a dramatic dialogue.
Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered by a new
question. By its very nature action
painting is painting in the medium of difficulties."
Meyer Schapiro, "Recent Abstract Painting" (1957): “Paintings and
sculptures, let us observe, are the last hand-made, personal objects
within our
culture. Almost everything else is
produced industrially, in mass, and through a high division of
labor….The
object of art is, therefore, more passionately than ever before, the
occasion
of spontaneity or intense feeling. The
painting symbolizes an individual who realized freedom and deep
engagement of
the self within his work….The consciousness of the personal and
spontaneous in
the painting and sculpture stimulates the artist to invent devices of
handling,
processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of
the
freely made. Hence the great importance
of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the
substance of
paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of
operation—all signs of the artist’s active presence.”
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September 7, 2006
Hans Naumuth, contach sheet photographs of Pollock painting, from ArtNews,
1950
Willem de Kooning, Easter Monday,
1957
Nina Leen, photograph of "The Irascibles," Life Magazine January 15, 1951
(front: Stamos, Ernst, Newman, Brooks, Rothko; middle: Pousette-Dart,
Baziotes, Pollock, Still, Motherwell, Tomlin; back: deKooning,
Gottlieb, Reinhardt, Sterne)
Bradley Walker Tomlin, 10A, 1948
Bradley Walker Tomlin, number
2, 1950
James Brooks painting mural for LaGuardia Airport, New York, 1940
James Brooks, number 41, 1949
James Brooks, Rasalus, 1959
Franz Kline, Chatham Square,
1948
Franz Kline, Pennsylvania Landscape,
1948-49
Franz Kline, New York, 1953
Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956
Franz Kline, Monitor, 1956
Franz Kline, Siegfried, 1958
Robert Motherwell, untitled, 1943
Robert Motherwell, The Door,
1943
Robert Motherwell, At Five in the
Afternoon, 1949
Robert Motherwell, untitled (Elegy),
1950
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the
Spanish Republic, 34, 1953-54
Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the
Spanish Republic, 55, 1955
Robert Motherwell, Reconcilliation
Elegy, 1978
Mark Rothko, Green and Maroon, 1953
Rothko, Number 10, 1950
Hans Naumuth, photographs of Pollock painting, from ArtNews,
1950
Adolph Gottlieb, Rape of Persephone, 1942
Mark Rothko, Syrian Bull, 1943
Adolph Gottlieb, Minotaur,
1942
Adolph Gottlieb, Oedipus, 1942
Adolph Gottlieb, Masquerade, 1945
Adolph Gottlieb, Labyrinth 2,
1950
Adolph Gottlieb, Frozen Sounds #1, 1952
Adolph Gottlieb, Frozen Sounds #2, 1952
Adoph Gottlieb, Blast I, 1957
Adolph Gottlieb, Positive, 1958
Mark Rothko, Baptism, 1946
Mark Rothko, Primeval Landscape 1945
Mark Rothko, number 1, 1947
Mark Rothko, number
11, 1949
Mark Rothko, Green and Red on Orange, 1950
Mark Rothko, #61, Rust and Blue, 1953
Mark Rothko, Royal Red and Blue, 1954
Rothko, installation at Sidney Janis Gallery 1955
Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948
Barnett Newman, Pagan Void, 1946
Barnett Newman, Genesis, The Break, 1946
Barnett Newman, Death of Euclid, 1947
Barnett Newman, Euclidian Abyss, 1946-47
Barnett Newma, Onement III,
1949
Barnett Newman, Vir Heroica Sublimus, 1950-51
Piet Mondrian, Tableau I, 1921
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-09 and detail
Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, letter to the New York Times (1943): “There is
no such thing as a good painting about
nothing. We assert that the subject is
crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and
timeless. That is why we profess
spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art....Since art is timeless, the
significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full
validity
today as the archaic symbol had then. Or
is the one 3,000 years old truer?"
"We are for the large shape because it has the
impact of the
unequivocal. We wish to reassert the
picture plane. We are for flat forms
because they destroy illusion and reveal truth."
Mark Rothko (1947): "The reason I
paint large pictures is precisely because I
want to be very intimate and human. To
paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to
look
upon experience as a stereopticon view
or reducing glass. However you paint
the larger picture, you are in it. It
isn't something you command."
Barnett Newman (1945): "The artist must of
necessity use abstract symbols,
symbols that he creates out of the pure language that is painting today. Their plasmic nature consists in the fact
that when a personal symbol is integrated with an abstract idea, it has
the
living elements within it that will carry the living thought, as
against
conventional abstract painting . . . the new painter owes the abstract
artist a
debt for giving him his language, but the new painting is concerned
with a new
type of abstract thought."