Abstract Expressionism

Modernism Affirms the Power of Human Beings

• Make

• Improve

• Deconstruct

• Design

• Reshape

Theatre de la mode

Creating small scale replicas to show their clients, how French fashion survived WWII

Traditional Art Forms:

Fundamentally about order

The more ordered the better society

Why as art and design changed so readily since 1863?

The industrial revolution- started in textile mills

New technologies

Rising middle class

Mass production

Capitalism and consumption culture- Now happens way faster (1980-now)

American post-world War II art movement

Started in New york, called them selves the NY School, First specfically american movement to achieve worldwide influence action painters and color field painters, along with sculptors, poets, writers, fiber artists and more.

• Image of being

rebellious, anarchic, and

emotionally intense

• Paintings in this

movement were usually

very large and required

careful planning

• Attracted the attention

of the CIA in the 1950s

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

Was known as a color field painter

Wanted to see the end of totalarinism

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman

Horizon Light

Oil on canvas, 1949

29 x 71 3/16 inches

Clyfford Still

Large contribution to abstract art, “they are life and death, mergining in fearful union”

Lenore Tawney

Fiber art movement in NY in 1950-1960s, redefine possibilities of weaving.

Agnes Martin

Canadian, 6ft x 6ft, grids from edge to edge, no ruler, only pencil, friends with Georgia O’keff

Louise Nevelson

American, known for monochromatic wall structures, used found objects

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)

Born in Wyoming and grew up in californa, 1st solo 1943 at Gugenhiem.

Jackson Pollock Paintings

Willem de Kooning (1904 ~ 1997)

• Born in the Netherlands.

• Apprenticed with commercial artists and decorators in 1916

• Enrolled in the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts at the same time

Early work reflects Picasso and Miro

Willem de Kooning Paintings

Helen Frankenthaler (1928 ~ 2011)

• American “post-painterly abstraction” artist

• Born in New York City

• Father was a justice on the NY Supreme Court

• Career launched in 1952 with exhibition of Mountains and Sea

A major departure from first-generation Abstract Expressionism, Frankenthaler was an abstract artist for whom the natural landscape -rather than the existential confrontation with the canvas or search for the sublime - served as the major focus and inspiration.

Montauk Highway, 1958, Willem de Kooning

Mountains and Sea, 1952, Helen Frankenthaler

Josef Albers > Bauhaus > Color Theorist > Artist > Professor

Robert Rauschenberg

(1925 - 2008)

• Born in Texas

KC Art Institute

• Académie Julian in Paris

• Black Mountain College in

North Carolina