Abstract Expressionism was born of two catastrophes: The Depression and the Second World War. The Depression brought artists together from all parts of the country to work on W.P.A. projects in public buildings (the Post Office in Lake Worth still has theirs) and fostered a belief in the social purposes of Art. The Second World War brought artists from Europe to this country, especially New York City, which had then become the "center of the Art World" by default.
The new immigrants were divided into their two respective camps: Cubist derived Abstraction (Mondrian and the Synthetic Cubists) and the Surrealists (Duchamp, Max Ernst, etc.). Talk about culture shock! Not only the American public, but the American artists were totally unprepared for the Surrealist invasion. Salvador Dali in his outlandish costumes/clothes with his fantastic mustache and an ocelot on a leash wandering down Fifth Avenue with an entourage of surrealists, half in drag, was more than most were prepared for.
What the American artists did like was their concern with process and their attitude toward creativity and the unconscious as a source of universal emotion. Symbolic equivalents for interior states of mind and universal experiences generated by contact with the Collective Unconscious as postulated by Carl Jung.
Carl Gustav Jung (yung), b. July 26, 1875, d. June 6, 1961, was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. He proposed that motivation be understood in terms of a general creative life energy--the libido--capable of being invested in different directions and assuming a variety of different forms. He named two principal directions of the libido: introversion, or inward into the realm of images, ideas, and the unconscious; and extraversion, or outward into the world of other people and objects.
The personal unconscious comprises mental contents acquired during the individual's life that have been forgotten or repressed, whereas the collective unconscious is an inherited structure common to all humankind and composed of the archetypes--innate predispositions to experience and symbolize universal human situations in distinctively human ways.
If these universally meaningful forms were buried in the unconscious, the problem was how to bring them to the level of consciousness in order to express them in Art. Psychic Automatism was first used by the Dada artists, adopted by the Surrealists, and now appropriated by the Abstract Expressionists. Jackson Pollock, who had rejected Abstract Art (Mondrian and De Stijl) as mere formalism, talks about "being in his painting" so involved with the process that he moved beyond conscious awareness and into a state of "being" one with the painting. He then would step back and appraise what he had done... consciously working to enhance the effect he had created.
The major link between Surrealism, based more or less on Freudian concepts which emphasised the individual, and Abstract Expression was the Arminan born Ashley Gorky (1904-48); he was the last major painter that Andre Breton claimed for Surrealism. His The Liver Is The Cock's Comb of 1944 is often seen as the "bridge" between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
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 Above: Golden Brown Painting c.1947 Left: The Liver Is The Cock's Comb c.1941 |
A retrospect
of over two hundred paintings and drawings by Wassily Kandinsky at
the Museum of Nonobjective Art, in New York, in 1945, would have a major
influence over Jackson Pollock, soon to be the leader of the Abstract
Expressionist school. Pollock, who was already familiar with Jungian concepts
of the collective unconscious (having been in analysis), found that Kandinsky's
insistence on the role of art (as an evocation of the "basic rhythms"
of the universe and their relationship to inner states of mind) satisfyingly
close to Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. Pollock's work
became "looser", by the late 40's he began dripping paint onto a canvas
laid flat on the floor.
Pollock was the first "all-over" painter, pouring paint rather
than using brushes and a palette, and abandoning all conventions of a
central motif. He said: "The painting has a life of its own. I try to
let it come through.'' He painted no image, just ``action'', though ``action
painting"' seems an inadequate term for the finished result of his creative
process. He was strongly supported by advanced critics, but was also subject
to much abuse and sarcasm as the leader of a still little comprehended
style; in 1956 Time magazine called him"Jack the Dripper".
ONE c.1950
BLUE POLES c.1953
Robert Hughes, the critic, talks about Pollock wanting "to be nature, to create the way nature does." Remember Pollock was from Wyoming, Big Sky Country -- If you've ever had the chance to walk through a winter woods after a storm, with the light reflecting off the ice coated branches and brambles, you've seen Pollock. These are landscapes or perhaps NatureScapes would be a better term, built up in layer after layer of "brambles" and "branches" as they would have evolved in nature and the size of the paintings contribute to the over all effect. BLUE POLES is just over 16 feet long -- when you stand in front of it, it fills your whole field of vision... it "is" your whole field of vision, your environment. Not quite as radical or abstract as you thought is he.
 Two Women Willem de Kooning c.1953 |
Another
major Abnstract Expressionists was
Willem de Kooning born in Rotterdam,
Holland in 1904. He studied at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts from
1916 to 1924, moving to the United States in 1926.
His style became increasingly abstract, especially after he became
acquainted with Arshile Gorky in 1929. During the late 1930s and early
1940s, de Kooning painted both figurative and nonfigurative subjects,
which led to a series of monumental and expressive abstract paintings
of women produced from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s.
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), the "old man" of the group belongedto a
wholly different generation than most of the Abstract Expressionists.
He was born in Bavaria and lived and worked in Paris from 1903 thru 1914.
Moving to New York in 1932 he opened the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts
in New York City. Hofmann's earliest paintings are landscapes, still lifes,
and figures, but by 1940 his work had become entirely abstract, and he
had begun to use the techniques of dripping and splattering paint on the
canvas to create nonrepresentational art prefiguring some some aspects
of Pollock's work although never on the scale of Pollocks's "nature-scapes".
 Effervescence Hans Hofmann c.1941 |
Continuing
to explore the theoretical basis of abstraction, Hofmann combined
hard-edge, oblong forms with reckless, loosely brushed areas. He created
a visual tension between impulsive gestural areas and floating geometric
forms. Rectangles seem to advance and recede against the ground, inducing
a dynamic back and forth in space that epitomizes Hofmann's "push-pull."
In a way, Hofmann produced a synthesis of Fauvism and Cubism. Or, in terms
of the younger generation of American artists, a synthesis of the gestural
painting of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline, and the
color-field painting of Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman.
 The Golden Wall Hans Hofmann c.1961 |
By the 1950's the "First Generation" of Abstract Expressionists had
distilled the characteristic images by which they would be know. Abstract
Expressionism would split into two distinct styles: "Action Painting"
exemplified by Franz Kline and the "Chromatic Abstractions"
exemplified by Mark Rothko. Chromatic Abstraction would again divide with
the advent of the "Hard Edge" painters.
Franz Kline
 Mahoning c.1956 |
 The Chief c.1950 |
Mark Rothko
 White and Breens In Blue c.1957 |
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 Black,Pink,Yellow Over Orange c.1951-52 |
Here again, like Pollock's work, we lose the scale so necessary to the work. Rothko's paintings average a little over eight feet in height and a little over six feet in width and, as Robert Hughes pointesd out, they're meant for silent contemplation, a kind of mantra to be viewed by itself not lined up on a museum wall, or across a computer screen.
By the mid-1950's Abstract Expressionism and it's prodgeny, Action and Chromatic painting, had become the "official" language of High Culture in America and another product for the new commercial Art Market, an American phenomenon that sold art like automobiles and still does. The reaction to this merchandising of the "art object" would be Neo Dada and the return of our old friend Marcel Duchampe!
Lynn University Art Appreciation
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