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Oil on canvas; 132.4 x 129 cm.
Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生 Kusama Yayoi?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.[1] Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.
Born in Matsumoto, Nagano into an upper-middle-class family of seedling merchants,[2] Kusama started creating art at an early age, going on to study Nihonga painting in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary mediums, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal during the early 1960s, where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots.
In 1973, Kusama moved back to her native Japan, where she found the art scene far more conservative than that in New York. Becoming an art dealer, her business folded after several years, and after experiencing psychiatric problems, in 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself to a hospital, where she has spent the rest of her life. From here, she continued to produce artworks in a variety of mediums, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several novels, a poetry collection and an autobiography.
Kusama's work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and Tate Modern, whilst in 2008 Christies New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist.
Oil and enamel on paper mounted on canvas; 78.4 x 57.4 cm.
Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.
During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety, a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.[1]
Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related, single-car accident; he was driving. In December 1956, several months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.[2][3]
In 2000, Pollock was the subject of the film Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris, which won an Academy Award.
Gotham News, 1955
oil on canvas
69 ½ x 79 ¾ inches
© 2009 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ Artists Rights Society, New York
Willem de Kooning, born in Rotterdam Holland, received early training at the academy in Rotterdam primarily in what was referred to as applied art. Here he learned the craft of building displays for department stores, poster design, illustration, lettering and other commercial applications.
Coming to the US in 1926 and moving to Manhattan in 1927 he met artists Arshile Gorky and John Graham both of whom were to become his biggest supporters and influences in his new artistic milieu.
While his most recognizable signature works were strong and violent abstractions of women he quite often created in the realm of pure abstraction with no subject matter other than his paint and the fertile impressions of his cavernous collective unconscious. Gotham News is one of the latter.
Permission to post this image generously given by the Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society and the Albright-Knox Gallery.
Abstraction Black and White I
ca. 1955
Graphite and eraser on cream paper, 22-5/8 x 28-9/16
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
Jackson Pollock
American, 1912-1956
One: Number 31, 1950, 1950
Oil and enamel on unprimed canvas, 8' 10" x 17' 5 5/8"
Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection Fund (by exchange)
Gallery label text, 2006:
This is one of three wallsize paintings that Pollock realized in swift succession in the summer and autumn of 1950. In 1947, Pollock began laying canvas on the floor and pouring, dribbling, and flicking enamel paint onto the surface, sometimes straight from the can, or with sticks and stiffened brushes. The density of interlacing liquid threads of paint is balanced and offset by puddles of muted colors and by allover spattering. The pictorial result of this tension is a landmark in the history of Abstract Expressionism.
Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 194:
One is a masterpiece of the "drip," or pouring, technique, the radical method that Pollock contributed to Abstract Expressionism. Moving around an expanse of canvas laid on the floor, Pollock would fling and pour ropes of paint across the surface. One is among the largest of his works that bear evidence of these dynamic gestures. The canvas pulses with energy: strings and skeins of enamel, some matte, some glossy, weave and run, an intricate web of tans, blues, and grays lashed through with black and white. The way the paint lies on the canvas can suggest speed and force, and the image as a whole is dense and lushyet its details have a lacelike filigree, a delicacy, a lyricism.
The Surrealists' embrace of accident as a way to bypass the conscious mind sparked Pollock's experiments with the chance effects of gravity and momentum on falling paint. Yet although works like One have neither a single point of focus nor any obvious repetition or pattern, they sustain a sense of underlying order. This and the physicality of Pollock's method have led to comparisons of his process with choreography, as if the works were the traces of a dance. Some see in paintings like One the nervous intensity of the modern city, others the primal rhythms of nature.
Oil on canvas; 126 x 100 cm.
Ejler Bille was a Danish artist. Born in Odder, Denmark, he studied at the Kunsthåndværkerskolen in Copenhagen, with Bizzie Høyer 1930-1932 and the Royal Danish Academy of Art, 1933. In 1934 he joined Linien, Corner in 1940 and CoBrA in 1949. He had concentrated on small sculptures, but moved into painting after joining CoBrA. In 1969 he was Guest Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Art.
Bille made his début as a sculptor at the Kunstnernes Efterårsundstilling (Artists’ Autumn Exhibition) in Copenhagen in 1931. He became interested in abstract art very early in his career; in 1933, with the artist Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, he was one of the first artists in Denmark to exhibit abstract sculptures and paintings. In 1934 Bille was a founder-member with Richard Mortensen and Bjerke-Petersen of the artists’ group Linien (The Line), whose journal of the same name he also co-edited. During Bille’s many trips abroad in the 1930s he was particularly stimulated by the work of Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp and Max Ernst. His originality was nevertheless clearly apparent in the early sculptures, which often used animals as subjects, for example Marten (1931) and Walking Form (1933–6; both Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst).
New York School. A loose association of vanguard artists working in New York City during the 1940s and ’50s. At the center of the New York School were artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, who were associated with Abstract Expressionism and helped establish a uniquely American avant-garde and propel New York City to eclipse Paris as the center of the art world. These artists created stylistically diverse, often monumental paintings that introduced bold innovations in form and content and reflected a desire to embrace spontaneity and individual expression. The New York School also encompasses the poets, filmmakers, composers, and photographers such as Aaron Siskind who formed close relationships, collaborated, and shared inspiration with New York School painters. www.artsy.net/gene/new-york-school
Abstract composition of November 7, 2015. Harriman State Park, New York. Work by Alecsey Boldeskul.
Sony a6000 with Helios 44M-6 58mm f2 lens set at f/11. Post-processed with Nic Software Silver Efex Pro 2 - 004 High Contrast (smooth).
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. He started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896 he settled in Munich and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He went back to Moscow in 1914 after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France and became a French citizen.
Acrylic on paper; 75 x 105.5 cm.
Walasse Ting (Chinese: 丁雄泉, October 13, 1929 – May 17, 2010) was a Chinese-American visual artist and poet. His colorful paintings have attracted critical admiration and a popular following. Common subjects include nude women and cats, birds and other animals.
He was born in Shanghai in 1929. He left China in 1946 and lived for a while in Hong Kong, then settled in Paris in 1952. There, he associated with artists such as Karel Appel, Asger Jorn, and Pierre Alechinsky, members of the avant-garde group, CoBrA.
In 1957, he moved to the United States, and settled in New York where his work was influenced by pop art and abstract expressionism. He began primarily as an abstract artist, but the bulk of his work since the mid- 1970s has been described as popular figuratism, with broad areas of color painted with a Chinese brush and acrylic paint.
He lived in Amsterdam in the 1990s, but regularly moved between there and New York.
He is the author of 13 books, including "One Cent Life" (E.W Kornfeld, 1964) a portfolio of 62 original lithographs by 28 artists, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, James Rosenquist, Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Kiki Kogelnik, Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis.
He won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (for Drawing) in 1970
His works are found in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Hong Kong Museum of Art, among others.
He was sometimes referred to by his Chinese name "丁雄泉" or its various romanizations : Ding Xiongquan or Ting Hsiung-ch'uan.
Gracias por las visitas, amables comentarios e invitaciones
Thank you for the visits, kind comments and invitations
A still frame of a new digital painting composed using action movie gun fights. Colorful forms from bursts of gun fire and smoke are extracted using custom software and are layered over time to form abstract expressionist paintings. This composition was made from the movie Leon: The Professional.
More information about Action Painting is available here: www.mantissa.ca/projects/actionpainting.php
Pen and ink on paper; 72.4 x 96.5 cm.
Arshile Gorky, original name Vosdanik Adoian (born April 15, 1904, Khorkom, Van, Turkish Armenia [now in Turkey]—died July 21, 1948, Sherman, Conn., U.S.), American painter, important as the direct link between the European Surrealist painters and the painters of the American Abstract Expressionist movement.
Gorky’s early life was disrupted when his father abandoned Turkey, his wife, and his family in order to avoid service in the Turkish army. The rest of the family soon fled to Armenia to escape Turkish persecution and were subsequently dispersed. In 1920 Gorky emigrated to the United States, where he rejoined his sister in Watertown, Mass., and assumed the pseudonym by which he became known. The name Arshile is derived from Achilles, the brooding Achaean hero of the Iliad. The name Gorky (Russian for “the bitter one”) is derived from that of the writer Maksim Gorky.
After studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gorky enthusiastically entered into the Bohemian life of Greenwich Village in New York City, occasionally passing himself off as a successful Russian portraitist who had studied in Paris and experimented with Automatism. From 1926 to 1931 he taught at the Grand Central School of Art. Early in his career, he hit on the idea of becoming a great painter by subjecting himself to long apprenticeships, painting in the style of such artists as Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso. His aim was never merely to imitate the work of others, however, but to assimilate fully their aesthetic vision and then move beyond it.
Gorky remained stylistically unable to move beyond the work of his mentors until about 1939, when he met the Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. The Surrealists’ idea that art is the expression of the artist’s unconscious enabled Gorky to discover his personal idiom, which he pursued the last eight years of his life. In such works as “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb” (1944) and “How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life” (1944), biomorphic forms that suggest plants or human viscera float over an indeterminate background of melting colours. The erotic significance of the loosely painted forms and elegant, fine black lines is often made explicit in such titles as “The Diary of a Seducer” (1945) and “The Betrothal II” (1947). The years that saw Gorky finally emerge as one of the most important painters in the United States were marked by personal tragedy, however. In early 1946 he lost many of his paintings in a studio fire, and soon after he underwent an operation for cancer. In June 1948 his neck was broken in an automobile accident and he lost the use of his painting hand. His wife left him the following month, and shortly thereafter he hanged himself.
Franz Jozef Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys. He attended Boston University, and later taught at a number of institutions including Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.[1] He spent summers from 1956-62 painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts and died in New York City of a rheumatic heart disease. He was married to Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer.
In the heart of darkness, where shadows dance and light flickers, lies a realm untouched by time. "Whispers in the Shadows" unveils a world where beauty intertwines with the surreal, and each image serves as a gateway to the enigmatic depths of the human psyche. Inspired by the haunting works of Yoshitaka Amano and Zdzisław Beksiński, this collection is a tapestry of dreams and nightmares, woven with the threads of abstract expressionism. Here, a Swedish girl becomes the vessel of our deepest fears and fascinations, her smile a paradox amidst the brooding landscape of dark grays, blacks, and golds.
Poem
In the realm where night whispers linger,
A Swedish maiden smiles, a spectral figure.
In hues of gold, black, and sorrow's gray,
She dances with shadows, in eternal play.
Amidst the canvases of Amano's dream,
And Beksiński's nightmarish scream,
Her eyes hold stories untold,
In this world, hauntingly bold.
In the echo of each brushstroke's fall,
She whispers secrets, hidden to all.
A blend of beauty, fear, and art's embrace,
In this gallery of the dark, her ethereal place.
Haiku
Shadowed smile gleams,
In gold and gray dreams she weaves,
Silent whispers breathe.
Oil and pencil on textured wove paper, mounted on cardboard; 54.9 x 35.9 cm.
Russian painter and printmaker, active in Germany. When he was ten, his family moved to Moscow. Following family tradition, he was originally educated for a military career, attending cadet school, and, later, the Alexander Military School in Moscow. However, while still a cadet, he became interested in painting. At the age of 16, he visited the Moscow World Exposition, which had a profound influence on him. He subsequently spent all of his leisure time at the Tret’yakov State Gallery, Moscow. In 1884 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Samogita Infantry–Grenadier’s Regiment, based in Moscow. In 1889 he transferred to a regiment in St Petersburg, and later enrolled in the Academy of Art (1889–96), where he was a student of Il’ya Repin. Indeed his works of this period reflected some of the conventions of Realism (e.g. W. W. Mathé Working, 1892; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). Seeking to escape the limitations on expression exhorted by the Russian art establishment, in 1896 Jawlensky and his colleagues Igor Grabar, Dmitry Kardovsky and marianne Werefkin moved to Munich to study with Anton Ažbe. Here he made the acquaintance of another expatriate Russian artist, Vasily Kandinsky. In Munich Jawlensky began his lasting experimentation in the combination of colour, line, and form to express his innermost self (e.g. Hyacinth, c. 1902; Munich, Lenbachhaus).
In the early years of the 20th century, backed by the considerable wealth of his companion Werefkin, Jawlensky spent his summers travelling throughout Europe, including France, where his works were exhibited in Paris with the Fauves at the Salon d’Automne of 1905. Travelling exposed him to a diverse range of artists, techniques, and artistic theories during a formative stage in his own career as a painter. His work, initially characterized by simplified forms, flat areas of colour and heavy black outlines, was in many ways a synthesis of the myriad influences to which he was exposed. As well as the influence of Russian icons and folk art, Ažbe imparted a sense of the importance of line and colour. In Paris, Jawlensky became familiar with the works of Vincent van Gogh, and some of his paintings reflect elements of van Gogh’s technique and approach to his subject-matter (e.g. Village in Bayern (Wasserburg), 1907; Wiesbaden, Mus. Wiesbaden). In particular his symbolic and expressive use of bright colour was more characteristic of van Gogh and Paul Gauguin than of the German Expressionists, with whom he had the greatest contact. In 1905 Jawlensky visited Ferdinand Hodler, and two years later he began his long friendship with Jan Verkade and met Paul Sérusier. Together, Verkade and Sérusier transmitted to Jawlensky both practical and theoretical elements of the work of the Nabis, and Synthetist principles of art. The Theosophy and mysticism of the Nabis, with their emphasis on the importance of the soul, struck a responsive chord in Jawlensky, who sought in his art to mirror his own inner being. The combination of technique and spirituality characteristic of these movements, when linked to Jawlensky’s own experience and emerging style, resulted in a period of enormous creativity and productivity.
Between 1908 and 1910 Jawlensky and Werefkin spent summers in the Bavarian Alps with Kandinsky and his companion Gabriele Münter. Here, through painting landscapes of their mountainous surroundings (e.g. Jawlensky’s Summer Evening in Murnau, 1908–9; Munich, Lenbachhaus), they experimented with one another’s techniques and discussed the theoretical bases of their art. In 1909 they helped to found the Neue künstlervereinigung münchen (NKVM). After a break-away group formed the Blaue Reiter in 1911, Jawlensky remained in the NKVM until 1912, when works by him were shown at the Blaue Reiter exhibitions. During this period he made a vital contribution to the development of Expressionism. In addition to his landscapes of this period, Jawlensky also produced many portraits. Like all of his work, his treatment of the human face and figure varied over time. In the years preceding World War I, for example, Jawlensky produced portraits of figures dressed colourfully (e.g. Schokko with a Wide-brimmed Hat, 1910) or even exotically (e.g. Barbarian Princess, 1912; Hagen, Osthaus Mus.). However, following a trip to the Baltic coast, and renewed contact with Henri Matisse in 1911 and Emil Nolde in 1912, Jawlensky turned increasingly to the expressive use of colour and form alone in his portraits. He often stripped from his art the distraction of brightly coloured apparel to emphasize the individual depicted and the artist’s own underlying state of mind (e.g. Head of a Woman, 1912; Berlin, Alte N.G.).
This dynamic period in Jawlensky’s life and art was abruptly cut short by the outbreak of World War I. Expelled from Germany in 1914, he moved to Switzerland. Here he began Variations, a cycle of landscape paintings of the view from his window at isolated St Prex on Lake Geneva. The works in this series became increasingly abstract and were continued long after he had left St Prex (e.g. Variation, 1916; and Variation No. 84, 1921; both Wiesbaden, Mus. Wiesbaden). In ill-health he spent the end of the war in Ascona. While in St Prex, Jawlensky had first met Galka Scheyer, a young art student who was captivated by his works. Scheyer’s expressions of admiration and support reinvigorated Jawlensky’s art and (with less success) his finances, first by embracing his theoretical and stylistic tenets, and later by promoting his work in Europe and the USA.
After a hiatus in experimentation with the human form, Jawlensky produced perhaps his best-known series, the Mystical Heads (1917–19), and the Saviour’s Faces (1918–20), which are reminiscent of the traditional Russian Orthodox icons of his childhood. In these works he attempted to further reduce conventional portraiture to abstract line, form and, especially, colour (e.g. Head of a Girl, 1918; Ascona, Mus. Com. A. Mod.; and Christ, 1920; Long Beach, CA, Mus. A.). In 1921 he began another cycle in the same vein, his Abstract (sometimes called Constructivist) Heads (1921–35), for example Abstract Head: Red Light (1930; Wiesbaden, Mus. Wiesbaden). His graphic art also included highly simplified, almost geometric heads, such as the lithograph Head II (1921–2; Wiesbaden, Mus. Wiesbaden).
In 1922, after marrying Werefkin’s former maid Hélène Nesnakomoff, the mother of his only son, Andreas, born before their marriage, Jawlensky took up residence in Wiesbaden. In 1924 he organized the Blue four, whose works, thanks to Scheyer’s tireless promotion, were jointly exhibited in Germany and the USA. From 1929 Jawlensky suffered from a crippling arthritis that severely limited his creative activity. During this final period of his life he endured not only poor health and near poverty but the threat of official persecution as well. In 1933 the Nazis forbade the display of his ‘degenerate’ works. Nevertheless he continued his series of increasingly abstract faces, producing more than 1000 works in the Meditations series (1934–7), which included examples of abstract landscapes and still-lifes, as well as portraits. These series represented further variations on the face broken down into its component parts, using geometric shapes, line and colour to convey the mood of the painting and, hence, that of the painter himself. Jawlensky’s state of mind is vividly reflected in these works, as he adopted an increasingly dark, brooding palette (e.g. Large Meditation III, No. 16, 1937; Wiesbaden, Mus. Wiesbaden). By 1937, when his physical condition forced him to cease painting altogether, these faces had been deconstructed to their most basic form: a cross forming the expressive brow, nose and mouth of the subject, on a richly coloured background (e.g. Meditation, 1937; Zurich, Ksthaus). No longer able to use art as a means of conveying his innermost self, Jawlensky began to dictate his memoirs in 1938.
Edward Kasinec, From Grove Art Online
Natural sponges, pebbles and dry blue pigment in synthetic resin on panel; 200 x 165 cm
Yves Klein was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. New York critics of Klein's time classify him as neo-Dada, but other critics, such as Thomas McEvilley in 1982 have since classified Klein as an early, though enigmatic, postmodernist.
He was the son of the Dutch-born painter Fred Klein (b 1898), whose work was representational, and Marie Raymond (b 1908), who developed a reputation in the 1950s as an abstract artist, and whose abstraction was influential on the development of her son’s work. Although he had had no formal art training, he was already making his first serious attempts at painting by 1946 and showing his interest in the absoluteness of color by formulating his first theories about monochrome. In 1946 he befriended Arman, with whom he was later to be associated in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, and the writer Claude Pascal, whom he met at a judo class. Together they developed their interest in esoteric writing and East Asian religions. Klein became a student of the Rosicrucian Fellowship in 1946 and was influenced both by its mystical philosophy and by judo. In 1952–3 he traveled with Pascal and Arman to Japan, where he studied the art of judo and the spiritual attitude associated with it, gaining the black belt ‘fourth dan’ at the Kodokan Institute in Tokyo. He worked as a judo teacher in Madrid in 1954 and in Paris from 1955 to 1959.
Alongside works by Andy Warhol and Willem De Kooning, Yves Klein's painting RE 46 (1960) was among the top-five sellers at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in May 2006. His monochromatic blue sponge painting sold for $4,720,000. Previously, his painting RE I (1958) had sold for $6,716,000 at Christie's New York in November 2000.[16] The Brisbane band Yves Klein Blue are also named after one of the artist's accomplishments. In 2008 MG 9 (1962), a monochromatic gold painting, sold for $21,000,000 at Christie's.