Abstract Expressionism
...phets of the new style. During the next 20 years of his career his style moved towards and away from recognizable subjects, his worked remained primarily abstract. Jackson Pollock was born in Wyoming, but lived in Arizona and California before settling in New York at the Art Student’s League where he befriended Thomas Hart Benton. There is a definite relationship between Pollock’s abstract arabesques and Benton’s figurative patterns. Pollock’s paintings during the 1940’s were usually mildly figurative with coarse and heavy brushstrokes. By 1947, he had begun to experiment with all over paintings, which were a labyrinth of lines, splatters, and paint drips from which emerged the great “poured” paintings of the next few years. These paintings, usually created on canvases spread on the floor of his studio, are the ones most commonly associated with action painting. One of the great misconceptions about action painting is that the furious and seemingly haphazard scattering of the paint involved a completely uncontrolled, intuitive act. There is no question that, in the paintings of Pollock and many of the other abstract expressionists, the element of intuition or the accidental plays a large and deliberate part, and was indeed one of the principal contributions of abstract expressionism. However, nothing an experienced artist does can be completely accidental; there is always the control of many years’ practice and reflection. Pollock’s skeins of poured pigment introduced the concept of the all-over painting, seemingly without beginning or end, extending to the very limits of the canvas and implying extension even beyond. The main artists associated with color field painting are Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, and Ad Reinhardt, with Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Morhtwell, and Clyfford Still. Color Field Painting, like it sounds, is primarily composed of large patches of color on a monumentally sized canvas created to envelop the viewer. Mark Rothko began painting in 1925 and exhibiting in 1929. By 1947 he had formulated his signature style consisting of large, floating color shapes with loose, undefined edges that gave them both a sense of movement and tangible depth. Eventually these floating rectangles grew in size and his later canvases consisted of a large colored rectangle floating on a colored ground. He used thin washes of oil paint, occasionally layered with watercolor paint to create depth in his colors, creating the almost cloudlike effect of continual shifting. Near the end of the 1950’s he shifted from the bright colors he had been using to darker earth tones. He did an installation in a chapel in Texas where the panels are almost uniform in color ringing the space designed to be completely homogenous with the architecture and changing light of the chapel. Barnett Newman exemplified the characteristic that many color field painters shared; an extreme tendency to continually rework a specific theme. Newman’s signature was called a “zip”. He started in the 1940’s working in w...