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Jackson Pollock
Autumn Rhythm, Number 30
1950
Enamel on Canvas
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: An art movement founded after WWII that focused on raw new forms of abstraction emphasizing raw, spontaneous gestures of roughly applied paint or large fields of pure color (usually on very large canvases). Abstract Expressionists were unified in seeking deeply personal expression infused with powerful feeling, reaching for the “sublime” in their works. Particularly important to the future Abstract Expressionists was the example of abstract surrealism with its commitment to automatism as a mean to randomly creating unexpected visual forms derived from the unconscious.
Background: Pollock combined Abstract Expressionism with a mythical and mystic worldview, believing in the “collective unconscious”, a viewpoint derived from philosopher Carl Jung. Pollock’s early work reveal the influence that Native American and Western art had on Pollock’s career (he himself hailing from Cody, Wyoming). Pollock popularized action painting (aka gesture painting), which is when action painters worked randomly, brushing or splashing paint without premeditation to discover their compositions in the process of making them.
Depiction + Meaning: Pollock converted his old barn into an art studio and would stretch huge pieces of canvas across the floor and would fling paint in order to create different impressions. He made fully non-representational paintings in which line no longer defined shapes or forms, but becomes independent. In this piece, Pollack employed only four colors - black, white, brown, and turquoise - to created a linear web of color. This “all-over” spread out composition is decentralized and envelops the canvas. These abstractions were understood by Pollock as metaphorical and metaphysical, relating them to powerful inventions and also equating them to organic energy and motion. Through his naturalistic title, he suggest that the energy of the piece partook in the forces of nature.
Lee Krasner
The Seasons
1957
Oil on Canvas
Background: Another member of the Abstract Expressionists and married to painter Jackson Pollock, Krasner worked alongside Pollock in their shared barnyard studio space.
Depiction + Meaning: After the quick and tragic death of Pollack, Krasner took over the studio and created this artwork as a response to her loss. The exuberant painting is rich with swelling and bursting organic forms and early rosey colors. Krasner uses bold painterly gestures, sweeping curves, and expansive passages of pink and green to conjure abstract images suggesting both plant life and the human body. The motion present in the piece is meant to recall natures cycles of germination, growth, and ripeness. The subject of the four seasons has offered artists the opportunity for allegorical meditations on the life cycle. Krasner's version exemplifies the regenerative portion of that cycle, with boldly colored plant forms that seem to morph into sexual organs.
Willem de Kooning
Woman I
1950-52
Oil on Canvas
Background: de Kooning’s paintings often mixed abstraction and representation as he strove for an all inclusive art encompassing a wide range of sensations. His use of distinct shape in his pieces is reminiscent of synthetic cubism, which he drew from often.
Depiction + Meaning: Leaving the world of non-representational art and returning to depicting the human figure, this artwork shows his return to form. This version depicts a wide shouldered, large breasted woman staring out at the viewer with enormous eyes and bared teeth. Her body and the turbulent background are characterized by chaotic strokes. The terrifying appearance of Woman I and other similar paintings have different interpretations. The Women have been viewed as modern incarnations of bloodthirsty goddesses, or as physical representations on tensions between de Kooning and his wife, or as a domineering mother figure. The eyes are reminiscent of ancient Sumerian votive figures.
Barnett Newman
Vir Heroicus Sublimis
1950-51
Oil on Canvas
COLOR FIELD PAINTINGS: Focus on suppressing gestural artwork, instead emphasizing broad simple expanses of intensely saturated color spreading across large canvases. They desired to achieve an effect of the sublime, which is an overwhelming emotion of astonishment or terror. Main goal was to have their artworks experiences intimately and evoke emotions or spirituality.
Background: Newman mainly painted in nonrepresentational ways, and his goal was to elicit powerful and strong emotions purely through abstract means. His original work was geometric, but he started veering into a more random inspired work as he got older. He would titled pieces after ancient myths and cultures, evoking the primal origins of life and the cosmos.
Depiction + Meaning: Newman’s signature style can be described as a collection of bold stripes and vertical standing line. This artwork has a vast enveloping field of smooth red, divided only by five unevenly spaced slender zips of different value. Newman only used vertical zips, which accent and energize the field of color rather than dividing it, so that it may be seen holistically. His radical and reductive painting style would deeply influence the Minimalist style in the 1960s. Newman saw his paintings as infused with metaphysical content, with the zips serving as surrogates for the viewers. Newman wanted people to stand close to the painting and bath in the color to experience the title in full, “man, heroic, and sublime”.
Alberto Giacometti
Piazza
1947-48
Bronze
ART INFORMEL: Often seen as a European parallel to American Expressionism, Art Informel (formless art) was meant to encapsulate the aggressive and strong emotion present in Europe after the destruction of WWII. Art Informel largely rejected past traditions and sought to search for new beginnings in a tattered world.
Background: Known for his work as a Surrealist sculptor, Giacometti’s later work represents a different and more restrained expression. After working from the model again, he was booted from the Surrealist group. Giacometti began making small figures, believing that his figures only “have a bit of truth when small”. When enlarging the small figure, Giacometti made them skinny and lanky, without particularly defining features.
Depiction + Meaning: Solitary and uncommunicative, the spindly, rough surfaced figurines - four walking men and a motionless standing woman - can be read as icons of modern urban anonymity and alienation as well as the existentialist conception of lonely human existence surrounded by the void. Giacometti cared deeply about perception, and wanted the represent bodies AND the space that consumed them. Refusing close-up views that distract the viewer with bodily details, Giacometti enforced a sense of distance between himself and the subject in order to perceive them equally with their environment. He stripped them of individuality, and made the bodies tiny compared to the wide slab they stand on.
Germain Richier
Hurricane Woman
1948-49
Bronze
Depiction + Meaning: Richier, before WWII sculpted in a classically figurative way before leaning into a more stripped back representational style. Hurricane Woman is apart of a dual installation, along with Richier’s other figure named Storm Man. The tough scarred surfaces of their bodies give them the appearance of battered survivors of a horrible storm. The figure’s weathered appearances evoke the impact of the recent devastating war, and the toll it took on many people. Storm Man’s appearance is more degraded, lacking facial features, and with pieces of his body being opened up to show a hollow inside. The feminine figure is less weathered, still retaining facial features. Very few places on her are opened up to show the hollow interior, and her skin appears less textured than her counterpart. The heavily-worked surfaces suggest her affinity to contemporary gestural abstract painting.
Jean Dubuffet
Limbour as a Crustacean
1947
Oil and Sand on Canvas
Background: Inspired by urban graffiti and the art of children and untrained creators, Dubuffet coined the term “art brut” (raw art) - and rejected all professional artistic conventions and worked in a deliberately random and primitive style. Working with mediums such as thick oil paint mixed with other substances such as sand, gravel, coal dust, or plaster, Dubuffet used these non-traditional mediums to make a rough materiality.
Depiction + Meaning: Dubuffet made portraits that depicted his supportive avant-garde friends in wildly caricatured fashions, such as in this work. He portrays surrealist writer George Limbour as a grotesque crab-like creature with a huge head, oval torso, and stiff elongated arms. Limbour’s flat frontal body fills most of the canvas, surrounded by thick, textured fields of paint and sand. Pressing into the paint and canvas with the back of his paintbrush, the ridged effect of the paint piles up and layers texture.
Jean Fautrier
Tete d’otage No. 1
1944
Mixed Media on paper mounted linen
Depiction + Meaning: Though the term “art informal” is generally applied to nonrepresentational art, historians credit its origin to Fautreir’s series of small figurative paintings, such as the one shown here. Fautrier was a veteran of WWI, and was detained by the German police during WWII. He responded to his time as a prisoner and his wartime experiences through his Hostages series. Each painting represents a simplified, anonymous human face or torse built up of thick layers of impasto to give it the appearance of a crushed mass of brutalized flesh. On this piece, Fautrier give it a mouth, nose, and eyes, but mostly left the faces faceless. This artwork was partially also inspired by him time at a sanatorium that bordered an area where German police would secretly torture and execute prisoners. Fautrier evoked their suffering in his paintings, whose imagery hovers between form and formlessness as if straddling the boundary between life and death.
Yves Klein
Anthropometries de l’Epoque bleue
1960
Background: Klein had a short seven year long career, but managed to make a name for himself during it. He sought to transcend materialism and focus on immateriality instead. He did this through monochrome paintings as well as invisible and ephemeral artworks and public actions - focusing on conceptual and performance art. The greatest influence on Klein was the mystical philosophy of Rosicrucianism, a Christian sect. This belief taught that the world is approaching the end of the Age of Matter, and the Spirit will soon by freed by the age of Space.
Depiction + Meaning: Klein believed that monochromatic colors best expressed the freedom and unity of infinite space. He then developed a color he called “International Klein Blue”, which was a ultramarine blue powder pigment suspended in a resin solution to preserve its brilliance. He used this color in many of his canvases, giving the color autonomy ( the color can also be likened to spiritual items such as the Holy Spirit, or Mother Mary). Klein began using nude female models as living paint brushes in the Anthropometries. The models would cover their torsos and thighs with blue paint and pressed them against large pieces of paper leaving imprints. This particular work was a live performance, where Klein directed the female models, as a small orchestra played a single chord held for twenty minutes (followed by twenty minutes of silence). Feminists have critiqued this work as vulgar, and that by directing the ideal nude female models to create his works, Klein denies them agency and are still sexualized.
Shiraga Kazuo
Golden Wings Brushing the Cloud Incarnated from Earthly Wild Star (Chikatsusei Maunkinshi)
1960
GUTAI: Gutai emerged as Japan’s most original postwar avant-garde art movement. The artists of Gutai (which means “concreteness” or “embodiment”) experimented with radically new ways of making art to emphasize life’s freedom. Their values resonated with social and political changes in Japan such as the new democratic government and other American occupation changes. Gutai artists used odd everyday objects to make art, and also used unconventional means of painting such as applying paint with other body parts or smashing paint. Gutai was seen as a vessel of using materialism for human spiritual expression.
Depiction + Meaning: Kazuo was known to use unconventional means of spreading paint onto his canvases. Kazuos performances show the traces of struggle on top of the medium. His nonrepresentational gestural paintings were painted with his feet were made either standing or swinging above a sheet of paper on a rope. This painting shows the dynamic and sensuously expressive effects he achieved through his unconventional painting process.
Yoko Ono
Cut Piece
1965
Performance
Background: Happenings encapsulated the manifestation to merge art and life together. Rather than being shown in theaters, Happenings took place in galleries, lofts, basements or the street before small audiences who interacted with the actors. Happening’s sets, props, and costumes were fashioned of cheap everyday materials and their performances were based on chance and improvisation. Yoko Ono’s art resonates with the Dadaists impulse to abolish the boundaries between art and everyday life. Much of Ono’s work relies on the viewers imaginative or physical participation. Ono wants this stimulation of creativity and internal reflection to lead to better social change.
Depiction + Meaning: This specific art piece was also apart of the Fluxus movement, which was a collection of artists focused on heightening wonder over the ordinary through performance. Ono sits alone as several members of the audience are invited to come on stage and snip off pieces of Ono’s pieces clothing as she kneels impassively. Ono described the piece as a “form of giving and taking”. Cut Piece has been mostly read as a feminist artwork, as it draws critical attention to power dynamics, sexual aggression, and violence against women. Cut Piece also explores the relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer. The work raises questions about the relationship between audience and artist, by basically making the audience into collaborators. Because of the ambiguity and potential for chance, there is an opening that allows for the creation of multiple meanings. The entire piece is inherently tied up with identity as the identity of the performer (this being Ono herself) adds more layers to the meaning of the overall piece, and what it portrays.
Joseph Beuys
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
1965
Performance
Background: Beuy’s goal was to expand the category of art and wished to “change to social order”. Beuy’s aesthetic were strongly influenced by philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who believed in a path to human freedom through spiritual awakening, stimulated by imagination, inspiration, and intuition.
Depiction + Meaning: Beuy’s performances (which he called “Actions”) happened during his participation in Fluxus and they became central to his artwork. This piece could only be viewed through a small window, with the viewer sitting on the outside. Beuy’s head was covered in honey and gold leaf, and an iron sole (representing hard reason) was tied around his right foot. Beuy’s spent three hours mouthing silent explanations of his pictures to a dead hare cradled in his arms. Animals represented free and spiritually unshackled creatures to Beuy. The honey and gold was meant to represent a “transformation of the head and our consciousness”. Beuys said the work represented the “problem of expressing things, especially where art and creative works are concerned”.
