Willem de Kooning: Palisades, 1957
Oil on canvas, 6 feet 7 inches x 5 feet 9 inches (2 x 1.75 m).
Collection of Adriana and Robert Mnuchin
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, around the outbreak ofWorld War II, many Surrealists fled Europe and settled in New York.Their interest in unmediated expression to reach the absolute sooninfluenced a young generation of painters struggling to find a voice forAmerican art. The new movement, which became known as AbstractExpressionism, was heavily indebted to the ideas of the Europeanpioneers of abstraction, including Vasily Kandinsky, whose work waschampioned in influenced a young generation of painters struggling to find a voice for American art. The new movement, whichbecame known as Abstract Expressionism, was heavily indebted to theideas of the European pioneers of abstraction, including VasilyKandinsky, whose work was championed in this country by the Museumof Non-Objective Painting (subsequently renamed the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum) beginning in 1939. Many of the AbstractExpressionists celebrated spontaneity and the exploration of the selfin large paintings bursting with free form and gestural brushwork. Themovement s free-wheeling spirit and its unbridled, heroic energy areexemplified both by Jackson Pollock's method of dripping paintdirectly onto the canvas in an improvisational act of art m aking and byWillem de Kooning's slashing of form and agitated brushstrokes.However, other artists associated with the movement avoided gesture andemphasized their paintings flatness. Barnett Newman, for example,explored the expression o f the sublime through large expanses of colorinterrupted by zips, one or more vertical lines of contrasting hue. MarkRothko's brooding compositions, such as White Band (No. 27) (1954),represent a hybrid of gesture painting and the use of color fields. Andthe monochromatic paintings of Ad Reinhardt hark back to works byKazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, in which pure color andgeometric order provoke deep contemplation.
The Museum of Non-Objective PaintingAbstraction in theTwentieth Century
Abstraction in:
Photography