New York School - Abstract Expressionism
New York School was a common designation for a group of painters and a group of poets in the 50’s/60’s.
They were influenced by the surrealists in the expression of individuality and freedom.
NY School painters were also identified with abstract expressionism. This group included major american artists like Pollock and de Kooning.
A good article in Khan Academy about Abstract Expressionism - https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/abstract-exp-nyschool/abstract-expressionism/a/abstract-expressionism-an-introduction
NY School poets had many connections to painters, since its leader, Frank O’Hara was a curator of MoMA. Other poets and friends integrated the group, such as John Ashberry, Ted Berrigan, Bernardette Meyer, Kenneth Koch and others.
They were all influenced by avant-garde movements and formed a vanguard circle. Jazz was a prime musical expression cherrished by all.
In a way I find many connections between the Beat Generation and Pollock, all the unconformity and «unfit»/«misbehaviour», almost anti-social, regarding the mainstream conservative society of their time, the dark days of McCarthism, fascist persecutions and corrosive anti-communism. The banish of many intellectuals and respective work.
Alcoholism and drugs were a medium of rebellion and creativity. The Howl of Ginsberg, Naked Lunch of Burroughs, On the Road of Kerouac. They lived in a world apart, their own world. The establishment and mainstream society would ridicule them.
Here are a few poems with annotations, displayed in a graphical mode:
Frank O’Hara poem (Lunch poems) - https://idabrandaomooc.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/collage-frank-ohara-a-step-away-from-them.jpg
Frank O’Hara poem – The Day Lady Died – a tribute to Billie Holiday - https://idabrandaomooc.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/collage-frank-ohara.jpg
John Ashbery – The Instructional Manual - https://idabrandaomooc.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/collage-john-ashbery-manual-instruction.jpg
Ted Berrigan - https://idabrandaomooc.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/collage-ted-berrigan-3-pages.jpg
Bernardette Meyer - https://idabrandaomooc.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/collage-bernardette-mayer1.jpg
Jackson Pollock became famous by his drip painting technique in big canvas on the floor, but his first paintings had been influenced by his mentor and teacher Thomas Hart Benton. He also received influences of native american painting, namely indian sand paintings, and mexican muralists Orozco and Siqueiros. Pollock worked as an assistant of Siqueiros atelier in NY.
Going West, 1934 - http://www.jackson-pollock.org/going-west.jsp
Gardians of the Secret, 1943 - http://www.jackson-pollock.org/guardians-of-the-secret.jsp
Mural, 1943- https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/abstract-exp-nyschool/abstract-expressionism/a/jackson-pollock-mural
The Mural painting was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim and the catalog of the exhibition described Pollock as « "volcanic. It has fire. It is unpredictable. It is undisciplined. It spills out of itself in a mineral prodigality, not yet crystallized."[.
His identity mark lies in the paintings he will produce with his drip technique and successive layers of paint dripped on big canvas on the floor. This way he could move around the painting and get different perspectives of the whole. He gave no names to the paintings, just numbers.
He dies prematurely in 1956, at 44, in a car accident.
Pollock's wife was also a painter – Lee Krasner - who supported him all along, obliterated in his shadow. It was a good surprise for me to know about her and her great paintings. Some of her works are collages made sometimes with cuts of other paintings she made or even Pollocks canvas waste. She destroyed many of her works, owing to her auto-critical nature.
« Her style often goes back and forth between classic structure and baroque action, open form and hard-edge shape, and bright color and monochrome palette. Throughout her career, she refused to adopt a singular, recognizable style and instead embraced change through varying the mood, subject matter, texture, materials, and compositions of her work often. By changing her work style often, she differed from other abstract expressionists since many of them adopted unchanging identities and modes of depiction. Despite these intense variations, her works can typically be recognized through their gestural style, texture, rhythm, and depiction of organic imagery. Her interest in the self, nature, and modern life are themes which commonly surface in her works.Krasner is often reluctant to discuss the iconography of her work and instead emphasizes the importance of her biography since she claims her art is formed through her individual personality and her emotional state.» (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Krasner)
Paintings in http://www.theartstory.org/artist-krasner-lee-artworks.htm#pnt_3
Jackson Pollock
Lee Krasner
Título Pequeno
Guardians of the Secret (1943)
Mural (1943)
Blue Poles (1952)
Krasner's Little Image
Krasner's Mysteries
de Kooning
de Kooning is the second great painter of abstract expressionism. He was greatly influenced by Picasso and his themes focus on landscape and women.
«Although known for continually reworking his canvases, de Kooning often left them with a sense of dynamic incompletion, as if the forms were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into definition. In this sense his paintings exemplify 'action painting' - they are like records of a violent encounter, rather than finished works in the old Beaux Arts tradition of fine painting.»
«Woman I is perhaps de Kooning's most famous painting. He worked on the picture for two years, revising it constantly, and aggressively - his dealer noted that his canvases often had holes punched through from the violence of his brush strokes.
He applied newspaper to the surface to keep paint workable for long periods, and when he peeled it off, the imprint often remained, leaving further evidence of his process. Although de Kooning never conceived the pictures as collages, he employed the technique as a springboard to begin many of the pictures in the Women series,pasting magazine images of women's smiles in the position of the mouth, though this element rarely survived in the finished product. This use of popular media as inspiration is in some measure a precursor of Pop art, which developed as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism.» (http://www.theartstory.org/artist-de-kooning-willem.htm)
Mark Rothko
Rothko's aims, in the estimation of some critics and viewers, exceeded his methods.[ Many of the Abstract Expressionists discussed their art as aiming toward a spiritual experience, or at least an experience that exceeded the boundaries of the purely aesthetic. In later years, Rothko emphasized more emphatically the spiritual aspect of his artwork, a sentiment that would culminate in the construction of the Rothko Chapel.» (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Rothko)
His painting techniques are explained in this video - https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/moma/moma-abstract-expressionism/v/moma-painting-technique-rothko
Mark Rothko Rust and Blue (1953)
Second Generation of Abstract Expressionism
Joan Mitchell
Joan Mitchell was an american painter and printmaker who died in the 90's. She produced huge canvas with a post-cubism influence
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler « invented the "soak-stain" technique, in which she poured turpentine-thinned paint onto canvas, producing luminous color washes that appeared to merge with the canvas and deny any hint of three-dimensional illusionism.» - http://www.theartstory.org/artist-frankenthaler-helen.htm
One of the best examples of this technique is a painting of the 50's «Mountains and Sea» commented in https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/abstract-exp-nyschool/ny-school/a/frankenthaler-the-bay
