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Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism

Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. Post -War US Modernism . Abstract Expressionism. Paris to New York…. World War II 2nd wave of modern movements Dominance of abstraction American cultural confidence Influence of European Art and teachers…

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Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism

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  1. Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism Post -War US Modernism

  2. Abstract Expressionism

  3. Paris to New York… • World War II • 2nd wave of modern movements • Dominance of abstraction • American cultural confidence • Influence of European Art and teachers… • Surrealism, Abstraction (Kandinsky, Constructivism, Suprematism…)

  4. Carl Jung • Psychoanalysis • ‘collective unconscious’ =artist as lonely hero =the existentialist act =voyage of self-discovery that is both personal and epic.

  5. “the need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic” - Robert Motherwell 1951

  6. Subject Matter “No possible set of notes can explain our paintings… We favor the simple expression of the complex thought… There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and that only subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless” -Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman 1943. = subjectivity and emotion

  7. “basic human emotions” - Rothko • “only myself, not nature” - Still • “to express my feelings rather than illustrate them” - Pollock • “a search for the hidden meaning of life” - Newman • “to put some order into ourselves” - de Kooning • “to wed oneself to the Universe” - Motherwell.

  8. Action Painting

  9. Harold Rosenberg… “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act… The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation… In a single stroke the painter exists as a somebody…”

  10. ‘

  11. Colour-Field Painting

  12. Other Abstract Expressionists…

  13. Promotion of Abstract Expressionism: • Critics • Museums • Collectors • CIA? “How fresh in the memory even now is the belief that American art is the sole trustee of the avant-garde ‘spirit’, a belief so reminiscent of the US government’s notion of itself as the lone guarantor of capitalist liberty” - Kosloff

  14. Modernist Painting… the endgame? “The one object of 50 years of Abstract Art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressive, non-subjective. The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not” Ad Reinhardt

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