2. Historic Context
• 1929 Great Depression begins
• 1933 Hitler's Nazi Party seizes power
• New Deal begins - program of government spending to
end the Great Depression
• 1936 - 1939 Spanish Civil War
• 1939 - 1945 WWII
• 1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor
• 1945 US bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki - first use of
the atomic bomb
• Founding of the United Nations
3. • The growing artistic community in New
York
•
• Important art schools and groups:
• Art Students League
• Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts
• The Club
• Cedar Tavern
4. New venues to see and exhibit art in:
• Museum of Modern Art
• Museum of Non-Objective Painting (will
later become the Guggenheim Museum)
• Betty Parsons Gallery
• Sidney Janis Gallery
• Art of This Century Gallery
7. Pablo Picasso. Guernica. 1937. 11' X 23'. Oil on canvas.
"Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense
against the enemy." -Picasso as quoted in Artforms
8. Colin Powell standing in front of the covered Guernica tapestry at the United Nations
9. WWII
1939 - 1945
About 62 million people die as a result of
WWII
Europe
Left in ruins
Many countries remain politically
divided
Many artists had immigrated to the U.S.
United States
Housing and construction boom spawned
by the return of GIs
Country invigorated by new found
strength and prominence
Sense of artistic community blossoms in
NY
"The main premises of Western painting
have at last migrated to the United States,
along with the center of gravity of
industrial production and political
power." - Clement Greenberg in The
Decline of Cubism
10. Spring 1945 "A Problem for Critics"
exhibition at the Art of This Century
Gallery
Included works by: Joan Miro, Hans
Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky,
Adolph Gottleib and Mark Rothko
Critics met Peggy Guggenheim's challenge
by naming the new movement
Abstract Expressionism
Jackson Pollock. Moon Woman. 1942.
11. JACKSON POLLOCK 1912 -
1956
" Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting. Cezanne did it, Picasso
did it with Cubism. Then Pollock did it. He busted our idea of a picture all
to hell. Then there could be new paintings again." - Willem de Kooning
12. Jackson Pollock. Going West. c. 1934 -35. Thomas Hart Benton. The Arts of the West. 1932.
14. Hans Hofmann: "You don't work
from nature. You work by
heart. This is no good. You will
repeat yourself."
Jackson Pollock: "I am nature...Put
up or shut up. Your theories don't
interest me."
Hans Hofmann. The Third Hand. 1947.
15. Jackson Pollock. The Key. 1946.
Automatism…technique whereby the usual intellectual control of the artist over the brush is
foregone. The artist's aim is to allow the subconscious to create the artwork without rational
20. What's so innovative about Jackson Pollock's drip paintings?
Painted horizontally, on the floor
Used "everyday" paint and sticks
Instead of traditional artist's materials
Works intuitively with an automatist
technique
Considers space in a completely new way
Rejects Renaissance perspective
All-over composition
Painted gestures move across the picture
plane rather than into it
The painter becomes the paintings subject
"He transformed the obligation for social
relevance, a pervasive current between the
wars, into an unrelenting moral commitment
to a search for the self." - Fineberg
23. • "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of
what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get
acquainted' period that I see what I have been
about. I have no fear of making changes,
destroying the image, etc., because the
painting has a life of its own. I try to let it
come through. It is only when I lose contact
with the painting that the result is a mess.
Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give
and take, and the painting comes out well." -
Jackson Pollock
24. Jackson Pollock. Autumn Rhythm (Number 30). 1950.
"My opinion is that new needs need new techniques…the modern painter cannot express his
age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance…the modern
artist is living in a mechanical age…working and expressing an inner world- in other words,
expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces." - Jackson Pollock
25.
26. August 8, 1949 issue of Life Magazine
• "The most powerful painter in
contemporary America and the only one
who promises to be a major one is a Gothic,
morbid, and extreme disciple of Picasso's
Cubism and Miró's post-Cubism, tinctured
also with Kandinsky and surrealist
inspiration. His name is Jackson Pollock." -
Clement Greenberg in 1947
27. Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg. Stills from the film Jackson Pollock. 1951.
28. The Irascibles" from 1950, published in Life Magazine, January 15, 1951.
From left to right seated: Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Barnett
Newman, James Brooks, Mark Rothko; Standing: Richard Pousette-Dart, Willia Baziotes,
Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne,
Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin
29. de Kooning. Woman I. 1950-2.
Motherwell. At Five in the Afternoon. 1949.
Clyfford Still. 1947-R, No. 2. 1947.
"At a certain moment the canvas began to appear
to one American painter after another as an arena
in which to act- rather than a space in which to
reproduce, redesign, analyze or express an object,
actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas
was not a picture but an event." - Harold
Rosenberg in The American Action Painters
30. Common characteristics of the New York School:
• Interest in Surrealist automatist techniques
• Influenced by the Mexican muralists
• Existential connection to the "Modern
Man”…notion that man was fundamentally
irrational and driven by unknowable forces from
within and without
• Participated in Federal Art Project 1935 - 1943
• Insistence on the individual character in each of
their expressions
33. Hans Hofmann. Bachanale. 1946. Lee Krasner. Image Surfacing. c. 1945.
Highest praise given to Krasner by Hofmann: "this painting is so good you'd never know
it was done by a woman."
