Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Expressionism

1. Pollock

   • Mural. 1943.
     • 8x20 feet
     • Applied wet on wet initially
     • Used house paint- opaque, quick drying
     • Upright, splashed.
     • Oil paint mixed with a thinner and boiled oil. Intricate.
     • About motion. Large scale black figures moving across the canvas?
     • Electricity of yellow. Stacato movement. Picture of transition- from outside to inside. One end of space to the other. Guggenheim's hallway.
   • Titled 'action painting' by Rosenberg
   • New needs need new techniques. Modern painter can't express this age in Renaissance traditions.
     • The more immediate, more direct, the more effective at expressing its statement.

2. Rothko

   • Seagram Murals. 1958-59
     • Wine dark paintings. Mysterious portals evoking a 'closed space.'
     • Canvas's surface as a field of vision.
     • Saw them as murals not paintings. Initially planned to hang them with no space in between.
     • Browns and reds evoking introspection?
     • Receeding and advancing
     • Overlapping zones of paint
     • Buzzing sensation of two colours meeting/competing
     • Mixed paint with TURPENTINE. Thinned it- more of a wash. Could then see colours through other colours.

3. Newman

   • Heroicus Sublimis. 1950.
     • 1945 Hiroshima bombing. Existentialism.
     • No subject matter: de-politicisation?
     • Burke: spoke of how horror activates the sublime
     • Man: heroic and sublime
     • Compared the experience to meeting a person.
     • Can be life changing.
   • Who's afraid of red yellow and blue I. 1966
     • Colour links to De Stijl. Confrontation on whether they had turned colour combinations into a didactic idea instead of a means of expressionism
       • Wanted the work to be judged as a presence in its own right
     • Dedicated to Jasper Johns
     • Direct reference to Mondrian
     • Bold painting- asks for an opinion
   • Destroyed older surrealist work at this time

4. Irvine Sandler termed coin 'colour field' painting.

   • 'Post Painterley' abstraction by Greenburg.

5. Influence of Mondrian and Malevich?