Abstract Expressionism: The era of American art

Background

Abstract Expressionism was a post-World War II art movement. It was developed in America, specifically in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. All artists in this group were committed to art as expressions of the self, born out of profound emotion and universal themes, and most were shaped by Surrealism. However, they translated Surrealism into a new style fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and trauma. These New York painters earned great success, making America the leader of modern art and setting the stage for America’s dominance of the art world worldwide.

Style

Although the movement is called Abstract Expressionism, it is not exactly how the artists of the group depicted their works. Each of them had a different style. Still, many of the Abstract Expressionists were profoundly influenced by Surrealism's focus on mining the unconscious. It encouraged their interest in myth and archetypal symbols and it shaped their understanding of painting itself as a struggle between self-expression and the chaos of the subconscious. Having matured as artists at a time when America suffered economically and felt culturally isolated and provincial, the Abstract Expressionists were later welcomed as the first authentically American avant-garde. Their art was praised for being emphatically American in spirit - monumental in scale, romantic, and expressive of individual freedom.

Artist

Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky was a crucial artist of the movement. He adopted styles of Surrealist painters, but further transformed those styles into more lyrical color and personal content. He shows viewers his childhood experiences of the Armenian Genocide as well as the pleasant and nostalgic sentiments he felt toward his lost homeland. His work is also significant because it so directly reflects the cultural and historical milieu of New York in the 1940s.

Garden in Sochi

This painting (the first of at least six relating to this theme) represents Gorky's nostalgic reflection upon the garden that was part of his father's farm near Lake Van in his native Armenia. A defining influence of Joan Miro's work can be discerned in this painting in terms of its palette, composition, and forms. But more specifically, in a 1942 unpublished typescript that Gorky provided for the Museum of Modern Art, the artist described the garden and its objects (including carrots and porcupines), as well as its depicted motifs, including women rubbing their breasts on rocks to see their wishes fulfilled, and the "Holy Tree" with torn bits of clothing from persons visiting the tree. Gorky also described the "sh-h-h-sh-h of silver leaves of the poplars." According to the scholar Harry Rand, Sos or Sosi is Armenian for the poplar tree that creates the sound Gorky describes. The centrally located image was identified of an elegant shoe that Gorky's father supposedly gave him before he left Armenia. His works allow the viewer to revel in the lyrical play of color, following the rhythm of the curving forms as they open the memories of our own experiences that we realize are common to all humanity.

Agony

A studio fire, cancer operation, and emotional turmoil help explain the title of this painting executed one year before Gorky's death. The presence of images including figures - perhaps at the left the pained and suspended figure of Gorky himself - is suggested in a structured interior. As with Gorky's other paintings, instead of an exact rendering, the viewer is presented with suggestions of real objects that are subjected to the artist's personal interpretation of their forms and meanings. However, the sober palette and the incisive pulling of the lines and forms in this painting inevitably lead us back to the title of the work and feelings of suffering, pain, and sorrow, yet all within the context of the cycle of life and death expressed in the malleability of Gorky's forms.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock is considered “the greatest living American painter” of the late-1940s and early-1950s. He is famous for his “drip paintings” that he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century. Pollock's tough and unsettled early life growing up in the American West shaped him into the bullish character he would become. Later, a series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism helped ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space.

Autumn Rhythm: Number 30

While only one painting from Pollock's 1950 solo exhibition was actually sold, the show gained much attention. It was described by Art News as one of the three best exhibitions of the year, and Autumn Rhythm was one of the major works which appeared in that show. As with many of Jackson Pollock's paintings, he began it with a linear framework of diluted black paint which in many areas soaked through the unprimed canvas. Over this he applied more skeins of paint in various colors - lines thick and thin, light and dark, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. As the title suggests, the coloring, horizontal orientation, and sense of ground and space in Autumn Rhythm are strongly evocative of nature. The balance between control and chance that Pollock maintained throughout his working process produced compositions that can have as much calm tranquillity as some works by Rothko.

Full Fathom Five

Full Fathom Five was among the first drip paintings Pollock completed. Its surface is clotted with an assortment of detritus, from cigarette butts to coins and a key. While the top-most layers were created by pouring lines of black and shiny silver house paint, a large part of the paint's crust was applied by brush and palette knife, creating an angular counterpoint to the weaving lines. These drip paintings might also be read as major developments in the history of modern painting. With them, Pollock found a new abstract language for the unconscious, one which moved beyond the Freudian symbolism of the Surrealists. He broke up the shallow space of Cubist pictures, replacing it with a dense web of space, like a galaxy of stars. He even updated Impressionism, creating pictures that seem to glitter with the effects of light, and yet which also suggest the pitch dark and anxious interior of the human mind.

Willem de Kooning

Willem de Kooning was an American painter and sculptor, one of the most prominent and celebrated of the Abstract Expressionist painters. Unlike most of his colleagues, Willem de Kooning never fully abandoned the depiction of the human figure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, he became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling, and distorting his figures in the process.

Seated Woman

Seated Woman evolved out of a commission for a portrait. Around this time, Elaine Fried (who later became Kooning’s wife) often modeled for de Kooning. The woman, wearing a low-cut yellow dress, sits on a chair with one leg crossed over the other. One arm rests in her open lap while the other seems to bend up toward her face, although there is no hand attached to it. All of her body parts, which seem more like shapes, float around her body, not quite connected to one another. De Kooning wrote in the early 1950s, "With intimate proportions I mean the familiarity you have when you look at somebody's big toe when close to it, or a crease in a hand or a nose - or lips or a thigh. The drawing those parts make are interchangeable one for the other and become so many spots of paint or brush strokes."

One can also see de Kooning's artistic influences on display in this painting. The fractured form of the figure certainly recalls Picasso. The background of oranges, greens, and blues has been scraped down many times, creating a smooth, almost jewel-like surface. The planes of color hint at a Cubist space but also Mondrian's Neo-Plastic paintings. The squares also suggest the artist's studio walls, with various canvases tacked and piled against the wall. This painting can be seen as a companion piece and was Willem de Kooning's first major painting of a woman, a subject to which he would continuously return over the decades.

Pink Angels

In Pink Angels, the pink and coral colors, biomorphic shapes float above and meld with a background of mustard yellows and golds, and the painting marks an important stage in de Kooning's evolution from figuration to abstraction in the late 1940s. The fleshy pink shapes evoke eyes and other anatomical forms that have been torn apart or are in the process of colliding.

In this work, Willem de Kooning resisted disguising the process of the painting's making. Throughout the composition, charcoal lines outline the pink forms and intersect the golden areas. One sees an eye, perhaps part of a fish head, in the bottom left corner, and a circle and rectangle in the bottom center next to a crab-like form in the bottom right.

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko moved through many artistic styles until reaching his signature 1950s motif of soft, rectangular forms floating on a stained field of color. Heavily influenced by mythology and philosophy, he shows a fierce champion of social revolutionary thought, and the right to self-expression. Rothko also expounded his views in essays and critical reviews. Rothko maintained the social revolutionary ideas of his youth throughout his life. In particular, he supported artists' ultimate freedom to express themselves.

Oedipus

Greek mythology was an important theme of Mark Rothko's work in the early 1940s. Oedipus, who is said to have solved the riddle of the Sphinx, was his father's murderer and his mother's lover. For Rothko, Oedipus embodied the victim of pride and passion, which the artist believed were at the center of man's destructive nature. As in other representational works of this time, Rothko has dismembered and then recombined his figures so intricately that they became a single mass of human conglomeration. In this way, Rothko sought to suggest how mankind is bound together by tragedy. The figures appear oddly huddled in the corner of a room with strange architecture. The blue and green zigzag pattern recurs in several of his mythological pictures. He said: "If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.”

No. 9 (1947)

Having left behind the figures and landscapes of his earlier work, the "multiforms", of which this painting is an example, featured blurred shapes created from layered washes of paint. The work anticipates Rothko's 1949 breakthrough to the so-called "sectionals". The warm reds, oranges and yellows of No. 9 are disrupted by the strange black mass coming in from the left as well as the brushy swirls of blue in the lower section. The blurred edges, separated color blocks, and beginnings of rectangular registers can be seen, as well as some experiment with size and scale. Far from being merely abstract forms, however, Rothko believed these motifs were objects imbued with his life force, "organisms with the passion for self-expression."

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In conclusion, Abstract Expressionism had a great impact on both the American and European art scenes during the 1950s. The movement marked the shift of the creative centre of modern painting from Paris to New York City in the postwar decades.

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Bibliography:

• Gorky, Arshile. “Arshile Gorky. Agony. 1947: MoMA.” The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/78740.

• Pink Angels, 1945 by Willem De Kooning, www.willem-de-kooning.org/pink-angels.jsp.

• “Seated Woman (1944).” Seated Woman, Willem De Kooning: Analysis, www.visual-arts-cork.com/paintings-analysis/seated-woman-kooning.htm.

• The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Abstract Expressionism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 5 Dec. 2019, www.britannica.com/art/Abstract-Expressionism.