ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

For the greater part of human civilization, art could be found in three places: religious institutions such as mosques, churches, and temples; public monuments and burial sites; and the homes of the wealthy. In 200 BC, the first museum was established for research in Alexandria, Egypt. The word "museum" comes from a Greek word that means "temple of the muses." The muses, as you may remember, are the goddesses who Greeks believed inspire artists. Even though the first museum was established in 200 BC, it would be another two millennia before museums became commonplace.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, with the development of world exploration and trade, Europeans began to keep private collections of artifacts from around the world. By the eighteenth century, museums were established to house these collections, but access to the museum was limited; not everyone was allowed in. The first truly public museum was the Louvre, which opened in 1793. Today there are more than 7,000 museums in the United States and Canada, including art museums, science museums, natural history museums, and so on. Major art museums have a board of directors, a museum director to oversee operations, and a curator.

The museum that houses much of the work you have recently been studying is the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City.

OBJECTIVES

• Discuss the effects of World War II and its aftermath.

• Describe works by Bacon and Miró.

• Explain the emergence of Abstract Expressionism.

• Characterize the work of Pollock, Frankenthaler.

VOCABULARY

HISTORY OF MOMA

In the late 1920s, three progressive and influential patrons of the arts, Miss Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr., perceived a need to challenge the conservative policies of traditional museums and to establish an institution devoted exclusively to modern art.

So in 1929, they founded the Museum of Modern Art. Its mission was to help people understand and appreciate modern art and its goal was to be the greatest museum of modern art in the world.

Learn more about the MOMA.

WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH

World War II broke out in 1939 when Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland. France and Britain immediately joined forces to try to contain the Nazis. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa sided with France and Britain. These were known as the Allies. Italy and Japan took the side of Germany, becoming known as the Axis. Initially, Soviet Russia signed a pact with Germany, but Germany did not honor the pact and eventually invaded the Soviet Union. The Germans quickly overran much of continental Europe and captured Paris. In an effort to demoralize the British, German warplanes began bombing the city of London in September of 1940. The period of bombing, known as the "Blitz", continued through May of 1941. 

Amazingly, London's great architectural treasure, the dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral, designed by Christopher Wren, was not destroyed in the London Blitz. Reporter Ernie Pyle, who witnessed the devastating bombing, wrote this famous account:

"The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape — so faintly at first that we weren't sure we saw correctly — the gigantic dome of Saint Paul's Cathedral. Saint Paul's was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions — growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield."*

"The London Blitz, 1940," Eyewitness to History.

The United States joined the war after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It took another three years to subdue the Axis powers, but in June 1944, the Allied forces landed on the coast of Normandy and began to reclaim France. Russia also made headway on the Eastern Front. The war officially ended on May 9, 1945.

All of the major world powers fought in World War II. In the end more than sixty million people had died, and much of Europe lay in ruins.

One of the Americans caught in the war was Gertrude Stein. During World War I, Stein, who was a writer and art aficionado, drove an ambulance in Paris. Stein and her brother, Leo, had moved from New York to Paris in 1904. They both became interested in art, and their apartment became a "salon" where artists and writers congregated. The walls were covered with paintings by Picasso, Gauguin, van Gogh, and other artists. Picasso even painted her portrait.

During World War II Stein and her lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas, had to hide from the Nazis because of their Jewish ancestry. They had to sell some of their paintings in order to survive during the German occupation of France, but in 1944 they were able to return home to Paris. None of their paintings had been touched by the Germans, who despised modern art. The Nazis even went so far as to stage an exhibit in Munich in 1937 titled Degenerate Art. In included modernist works of art chaotically hung with derisive labels. The perfect modern artifact in Nazi eyes was the steel helmet. Art approved by the Nazis also included idealized images of labor, maternity and family life.

EUROPEAN ART AFTER THE WAR

World War II took a psychological toll on the people of Europe. So much death and destruction had laid waste to their land. A new philosophy called Existentialism gained in popularity among artists and intellectuals. Existentialism is similar to humanism in that no external force is deemed responsible for human behavior. The Existentialists asserted that first we exist, and then we become who we are through our own choices and our own free will. We are responsible for ourselves, which entails a great burden and a great freedom. They believed that the burden of this responsibility is a source of dread and anxiety and that the only "meaning" to life is the meaning we give to it.

The same could be said for art.

Francis Bacon (1910-1992)

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Francis Bacon lived in London and other European cities.

Bacon’s horrific imagery of cruelty, violence and death — which would become a major theme of European painters after World War II — made him one of the most unique artists of the twentieth century. Bacon was able to express in painting what people were not quite ready to deal with in language.

The mood in Europe was ripe for a painter such as Bacon. His works are disturbing and convey a feeling of horror. Yet after the savage butchery of World War II, his work was also a witness to a brutal experience, for which most people had not yet found words.

Joan Miró (1893-1983) 

Joan Miro would have a major impact on American artists. He developed a surrealistic style early on in his career but did not officially join the surrealist movement so that he would be free to pursue other artistic styles. His 1925 painting The Birth of the World was a precursor to the Abstract Expressionist style.

Surrealists believed that artists needed to escape the oppressive control of reason. Miro’s paintings typically include colorful shapes oozing from all sides. There is nothing typical, though, about Miro’s work. He used the Surrealist technique of automatism, a technique where the hand is allowed to move across the paper without conscious direction, to fuel his imagination and free his unconscious mind.

Miró paintings can be characterized by the following:

• Flat neutral backgrounds

• Limited range of bright colors

• Sharp lines

• Shapes and lines that seem to be placed randomly on the canvas

Notes

Notice the dreamlike imagery in the Carnival of Harlequin — the floating hand and the instrument with legs along with the neutral and light background colors.

POST WAR AMERICAN ART – POLLOCK AND FRANKENTHALER

Although the United States had participated in the war, the country itself had been physically isolated from the atrocities that took place in Europe. America was a place of refuge for many artists, scientists, and intellectuals. New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world.

During this period, a group of artists began producing work that had no obvious meaning. It was non-representational and non-realistic. While the work was "expressive" and had a very fresh quality, it was not obvious to the viewer what exactly was being expressed; it was up to the viewer to figure it out for him or herself. While their abstract paintings had no subject matter, they did have content. The movement was called Abstract Expressionism, and its artists were known as The New York School.

In 1951, the Museum of Modern Art put on an exhibition entitled "Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America," featuring a variety of non-geometric abstract paintings. Existentialist theories, which emphasized the creative act over the finished product, influenced these artists. They were also inspired by two retrospectives: one in 1941 on Joan Miró and another in 1945 on Wassily Kandinsky. After the second World War, many painters saw themselves as the voice of the people, commenting on the reality of life.

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) 

American painter Jackson Pollock was a leader of the abstract expressionist movement. "Pollock spent several years traveling around the country and sketching. In the late 1930s and early '40s he worked in New York City on the government's Federal Art Project." In the beginning Pollock painted in a realistic style. But around 1943 Pollock's work began to get more abstract. Mural, which he painted in 1943 for Peggy Guggenheim's new townhouse, was a project that would change the art world.

Mural was supposed to cover an entire wall, but Pollock instead chose to paint it on canvas, making it portable. After overcoming an initial bout of "artist's block," Pollock painted the entire canvas, which was about eight feet tall by 20 feet wide, in one burst of energy. Years later, he would tell a friend, "It was a stampede ... (of) every animal in the American West, cows and horses and antelopes and buffaloes. Everything is charging across that ... surface." Though many things may have inspired Pollock, it's clear that one strong influence was the Native American sand art he had seen as a child.

Its overall effect is one of abstraction, and it was immediately recognized as a turning point for American art.

By 1947 he had become an abstract expressionist. His automatic, action-painting technique entailed dripping paint and commercial enamels onto huge canvases stretched on the floor, creating intricate interlaced patterns of color.

Notes

Go to the website to learn more about Pollock's style. Be sure to enlarge Lavender Mist and review it.

Read the text at this webpage to learn more about Pollock's process. 

Helen Frankenthaler (1928- )

"I've explored a variety of directions and themes over the years. But I think in my painting you can see the signature of one artist, the work of one wrist." (Helen Frankenthaler)

Helen Frankenthaler, influenced in part by the work of Pollack, developed her own techniques, especially in the use of color. When she was 23, she exhibited her large painting Mountains and Sea, which could be seen as a still life rather than a landscape. Although she used oil paints, the painting has the haunting effect of a watercolor. In it, she introduced her technique of soak-staining, which allows the unprepared canvas to absorb the colors. The oil paint was watered down with turpentine or kerosene so that the color would soak into the canvas.

Notes

Go to this website on Helen Frankenthaler's painting, read the text and review the painting.

POST WAR AMERICAN ART – KOONING AND ROTHKO

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997)

Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. In 1926 he moved to the United States, where he eventually settled in New York City. Like Pollack, he worked on the Federal Art Project. His early works from the 1930s include both figurative paintings and portraits, showing great drawing skills, as well as abstractions.

His first exhibition took place in 1948 and included his black-and-white abstractions Light in August, Black Friday, and Mailbox. By 1950, de Kooning had made his mark as a leader in the movement of abstract expressionism. Like Pollock, de Kooning was known for his "action painting."

In the late 1950s de Kooning's work became highly abstract work. The painting A Tree in Naples evokes a landscape in a highly abstract manner. De Kooning completed some forty paintings from 1981 to 1989 before becoming immobilized by Alzheimer's disease.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

While painters such as de Kooning and Pollock created dynamic action paintings, Mark Rothko took Abstract Expressionism in a different direction. His bands of color are subtle and the forms are static.

Notes

Take a virtual tour of Mark Rothko's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, read the text and be sure to enlarge the picture to review it.

LET'S REVIEW!

In this lesson, you have covered the following topics:

• After World War II, New York became the center of the art world with artists, who were greatly influenced by the painters of Europe, especially Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky

• European artists such as Francis Bacon painted themes of death and horror

• Americans were less interested in political dimensions and more interested in innovative techniques such as Jackson Pollock's "action painting" or Frankenthaler's soak-staining

• De Kooning combined figurative and abstract in his series of Woman paintings

• Mark Rothko used a quieter method of pure abstraction in his gradations of colors

Complete the quiz before moving on.