-most important influence to come from Europe in the thirties

-the painter should so handle his means-drawing and color- that the finished picture would evoke a sense of depthwhile also afirming the two-dimensionality of its actual surface

-temperature (the hot and cold characteristics that make a given hue seem to advance or recede, expand or contract)

-Hofmann joined Kandinsky and Mondrian in their insistence that process was merely a means of achieving spiritual syntheses

- <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> Cubism, non-representational, gestural, but hates their meta-physicals.

-Admired Kandinsky and Mondrian- similar meta-physical understanding of what art is and how it works.

-Saw art as a spiritual practice. Art to change the world and affect human behavior for the better. -Avant-garde: changes corruption in society to create a new world order.

-self taught

-fascinated by sex, terror, violence

-deliberately intended to shock the "good people" of the art world

Agony. 1947. Number 484

-Surrealist ambiguity of shape and the spontaneity fostered by automatist techniques remainpronounced but have been assimilated into a highly personal style.

-botanical elements and male and female genitalia

-vaguely erotic mood

-links his work to the pictorial methods of such emerging Abstract Expressionists

-great synthesizer and may be viewed as a transitional figure

-Gorky lacked the primitive force and energy to bring on the "new" in art

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> -Arshile Gorky- from Armenia, family came to the Americas, became an artist because it was a way to express himself.

Action painting-color and gesture drawing from the unconscious mind.

Used nature of his distortions. Subjective use of color. Very aware of combining different methods from different artists. Allegory of emotional expression.

Willem de Kooning. Excavation. 1950.

-realize his own personal synthesis of Cubism and Surrealism

-exhibit all the flatness, interpenetration, and firm infrastructure of a high Analytic Cubism work, but the lanes have been shifted and shuffled far more dynamically

-complex and dense style, with its suggestions of both human anatomy and the life of the city

Willem de Kooning. Woman and Bicycle. 1952-53.

-scandalized the more nonobjective American artists

-an assertion of individual freedom

-leader of progressive American painting

-First interpreted as automatic process.

-Feminist critics:When you take the body apart it could be an aggressive act.

Jackson Pollock. Pasiphaë. c.1943

-totemic image and mythic theme reflected the artist's current involvement in Jungian analysis

-Jung's theories of archetypes and the collective unconscious

-abstract painting was an altogether more solemn and even desperate matter.

-more savage and self absorbed

-elementary expression of belief and in this conviction lay his power and originality

-named it for the chimera it still rather irrelevantly suggested

-continuous field ofuniform accents where it was impossible to distinguish between scrolling lin of paint and phantasmagorias

-the symbolic and the plastic

-generous and impersonal flow of pictorial energy

Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm. 1950.

-generous and impersonal flow of pictorial energy.

-surrealistic, action

-Native Am. Shaman-sand painting

-convergent events of WWII

-defies control of reason

-canvas on floor (no top and bottom, left, right)

-allows accidents

-Why Autumn Rhythms? color

-Metaphysical view= Autumn-period of time

-Rhythm-repetition period of time

-Responce of world: his connection to it

-deals with pictorial decorum in a new way

-fragile and oscillating "zips"

-plays tricks on the eye and the mind by their alternate compliance and aggression

-zips served to "cut" the great plane of saturated hue and shock it into waves of visual energy

-making dynamic what otherwise might seem a totally static image

Adolf Gottlieb. Red Earth. 1959.

-colorfield painter or abstract expressionist

-centipital

-expanding consciousness, uncivilized culture, human progress

-parallel of child to adult

-art like a writing-primary experience of markmaking

-unprimed canvas-paint spreads-not fully predictable

-mystic (Art-spiritual, religious)

-Reigion- spiritual experience, intangible

-Eastern Jewish Tradition

-3 Diff. Views (his views, psychologist view, Greenburg view)

-"I am not interested in relationships of color or form...I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions-tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on"

Robert Motherwell. Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34. 1953-54.

-philosophy major- paint philosophy instead of writing it

-Guernica-also about Spanish Republic

-Contrast=dialectic=conscious and unconscious (soft/vague shapes)

-theoretical, visual expression of life  vs. death

Herbert Ferber. Cage. 1954.

-expressive, spontaneous-sculpture

Ad Reinhardt. Abstract Painting. 1960.

-buddhism

-imperfections-nature of world

-Clement Greenberg-understood each other

-Abstract painting 1960

-black painting on canvas-using acrylic

-painting is self-referential

Isamu Noguchi. Kouros. 1944-45.

·      Japanese American Artist

·      Greek male figure, 1944 traces back to Egyptian source

·      The Japanese, considered a danger to the US. Rounded up and put in camps…one was in Wyoming.

·      Body parts carefully arranged, biomorphic forms.

·      What’s Japanese about the work? Arrangement not unlike the calligraphy. Connected to Zen Buddhism and Shinto. Sacredness of the materials. Allowing the materials to be themselves in the work.

o   Example: how Pollock used the paint to express itself.