Oil on canvas; 276.2 x 260.7 cm.

“I can imagine an art that would have an innocuous surface where you don’t see anything at all of interest; you wouldn’t dream of looking at it with any idea that it could knock you over or have any power or anything, and then slowly you can begin to read into it all kinds of wonderful, imaginative things that you can see in it, and that could be a very marvelous form of art.” *

Born Rachmiel Resnick in 1917, Milton Resnick spent his childhood in the Ukraine, where he and his family were threatened by anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War. The family fled first to Cuba and then to Brooklyn in 1922. He initially studied architectural drafting and lettering at a trade school, but could not find work when he finished school in the midst of the Depression in 1932. The following year, he enrolled in the fine arts program at the American Artist’s School, where he met Ad Reinhardt. In 1937, he met Willem de Kooning, who became a close friend, and in 1938, he joined the WPA. Resnick’s artistic pursuits were interrupted in 1940, when he was drafted into the army. When Resnick returned to New York after his discharge in 1945, he resumed painting and began meeting with de Kooning, Kline, Arshile Gorky, and other artists at the Waldorf Cafeteria for discussions about art and abstraction. From 1946 to 1948, Resnick lived in Paris, where he met Constantin Brancusi, Jean Hélion, and Tristan Tzara. He returned to New York, and in 1949, he was one of the founding members of the Club. That same year, Resnick was supposed to have his first solo exhibition, but the dealer cancelled it, causing a major setback to his career. In 1955, the Poindexter Gallery mounted his debut exhibition, but as a result of this six-year delay, Resnick has often been mislabeled a second-generation abstract expressionist.†

Resnick was a constant presence on the abstract expressionism scene, despite his ambivalence about being called an abstract expressionist. In 1951, he participated in the Ninth Street Show; his work was exhibited at the Stable Gallery; and in 1957, the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum selected his work for inclusion in the 1957 Annual Exhibition and Artists of the New York School, respectively. In 1959, he began to increase the scale of his work, creating massive paintings of small, thick gestures that covered the wall-sized canvases, forming a composition of all-over abstraction. Two years later, he started work on his famous New Bride (1961-1963), an abstraction of thick white impasto, with flecks of pale color, painted on a nine-by-seventeen-foot canvas. It took Resnick two years to build up the surface of the painting, and this became the first of the impasto monochromes for which he is best known.

Resnick continued to work in an abstract style until the late 1980s, when he started creating a series of gouaches featuring simplified human forms suspended in a field of brushstrokes and color. These isolated, abstracted figures continued in his art of the 1990s. Painted in acrylic and oil in addition to gouache, these figures are often alone, and even when Resnick painted them in pairs, each figure remains isolated, close to but unable to make contact with the other. From 2001 until his death in 2004, Resnick created his “X-Space” paintings, exploring the relationship between color, line, and space from a variety of angles. Regardless of the scale of his paintings or their degree of abstraction, Resnick’s gestural brushstrokes and his fascination with the textural and spatial aspects of art remained constant throughout his life.

* Geoffrey Dorfman, "Milton Resnick: In Memoriam," artcritical.com, March 2005 (accessed March 2009).

† David Cohen, “Milton Resnick Was an AbEx Pioneer,” New York Sun, May 29, 2008. www.nysun.com/arts/milton-resnick-was-an-abex-pioneer/78823/ (accessed February 2009).

Homage to Jackson Pollock.

View On Black

Digital Painting

Oil on canvas; 51 x 33 5/16 in.

František Kupka was a Czech painter and graphic artist. He was a pioneer and co-founder of the early phases of the abstract art movement and Orphic cubism (Orphism). Kupka's abstract works arose from a base of realism, but later evolved into pure abstract art. He was born in Opočno, eastern Bohemia (now Czech Republic) in 1871. From 1889 to 1892, he studied at the Prague Art Academy. At this time, he painted historical and patriotic themes. Kupka enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he concentrated on symbolic and allegorical subjects. He was influenced by the painter and social reformer Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851-1913) and his naturistic life-style. Kupka exhibited at the Kunstverein, Vienna, in 1894. His involvement with theosophy and Eastern philosophy dates from this period. By spring 1894, Kupka had settled in Paris; there he attended the Académie Julian briefly and then studied with Jean-Pierre Laurens at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Kupka worked as an illustrator of books and posters and, during his early years in Paris, became known for his satirical drawings for newspapers and magazines. In 1906, he settled in Puteaux, a suburb of Paris, and that same year exhibited for the first time at the Salon d'Automne. Kupka was deeply impressed by the first Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 in Le Figaro. Kupka’s 1909 painting Piano Keyboard/Lake marked a break in his representational style. His work became increasingly abstract around 1910–11, reflecting his theories of motion, color, and the relationship between music and painting (orphism). In 1911, he attended meetings of the Puteaux Group (Section d'Or). In 1912, he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in the Cubist room, although he did not wish to be identified with any movement. Creation in the Plastic Arts, a book Kupka completed in 1913, was published in Prague in 1923.

In 1931, he was a founding member of Abstraction-Création. In 1936, his work was included in the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in an important show with another excellent Czech painter Alphonse Mucha at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. A retrospective of his work took place at the Galerie Mánes in Prague in 1946. The same year, Kupka participated in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, where he continued to exhibit regularly until his death. During the early 1950s, he gained general recognition and had several solo shows in New York.

Kupka had a strong interest in color theory. His decadent 1907 self-portrait The Yellow Scale prefigures his abstract emphasis on color. Around 1910 he began developing his own color wheels, adapting a format previously explored by Sir Isaac Newton and Hermann von Helmholtz. This work in turn led Kupka to execute a series of paintings he called "Discs of Newton" (1911-12). Kupka was interested in freeing colors from descriptive associations. His work in this area is thought to have influenced other artists like Robert Delaunay.

Pigment on paper laid down on canvas; 107.5 x 74.5 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.

by artist Arnold Chao of arnisto.com

36" x 48"

oil on canvas

display view at www.flickr.com/photos/arnisto/4344822572/

acrylic, colourfix primer, graphite. soluble graphite, soluble crayon, ink and marble dust on fabriano paper

25.2 x 32.6 cm

Oil on canvas; 200.7 x 170.2 cm.

Kirkeby has worked in a variety of media, including painting and sculpture, documentary film, and artist's books, and has also written poetry, art criticism, and travel essays. Although he knew at an early age that he wanted to be an artist, he first studied geology at the University of Copenhagen, graduating in 1964. He participated in geological fieldwork in Greenland on numerous occasions between 1958 and 1962, studying rock formations in the morning and sketching them during his free time in the afternoon.

In 1962, Kirkeby enrolled in the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen and began to exhibit his art in 1964. He was a member of the Fluxus group, a loosely organized, international group of avant-garde artists who worked in a wide range of media in the 1960s and '70s, emphasizing improvisation, everyday experience, and audience involvement. He was also influenced by other major artistic movements of those decades, including Pop Art, Performance Art, and Minimalism.

Kirkeby is most recognized for his large, painterly abstractions, which are often based on the Scandinavian landscape. Mysuseter, the title of this painting, refers to a village located in the Rondane region of Norway, where the landscape contains imposing mountain peaks, idyllic lakes, and densely wooded plains. His work has been compared to the Neo-Expressionist painting of such German artists as Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, due to its vigorous brushwork and emotive use of color. He has also been called an heir to the Northern Romantic tradition of the nineteenth century; like Casper David Friedrich, his landscapes convey a sense of human insignificance in the face of nature's sublime powers.

Ink, acrylic marker and collage. 9.75" x 6.75" 2017 www.saatchiart.com/art/Collage-Research-and-Development/2...

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.

He said “Everybody is talented.” As a teacher, Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy lived by these words. As a painter and photographer he demonstrated his own talent. His vision of a nonrepresentational art consisting of pure visual fundamentals—color, texture, light, and equilibrium of forms—was immensely influential in both the fine and applied arts.

Oil on canvas 91.8 x 59.7 cm.

Fernand Léger was born at Argentan, France. He began his career as a an artist by serving an apprenticeship in architecture in Caen and working as a architectural draughtsman. In 1900 Léger went to Paris and was admitted to the École des Arts Décoratifs in 1903 and also attended the Académie Julian. The first profound influence on Léger's work came from Cézanne, whose pictures Léger encountered at the large-scale Cézanne exhibition at the 1907 Salon d'Automne.

Léger became friends with Delaunay and maintained ties with great artists, including Matisse, Rousseau, Apollinaire and leading exponents of Cubism. From 1909 Léger himself developed a quirky Cubist style, distinguished by reduction to the simplest basic forms and formal austerity linked with a pure, sharply contrasting palette by 1913-14. As a painter Fernand Léger exerted an enormous influence on the development of Cubism, Constructivism and the modern advertising poster as well as various forms of applied art.

From 1911 until 1912 Léger belonged to the Section d'Or group. During the first world war Léger came into contact with modern technology, notably cannon. The superhuman powers and precise beauty of ordnance enthralled him. By 1920, influenced by the persuasive assurance radiated by Purism and the form of retro Neo-Classicism practiced by Picasso and others, Léger had achieved a mechanistic classicism, a precise, geometrically and harshly definitive monumental rendering of modern objects such as cog-wheels and screws, with the human figure incorporated as an equally machine-like being. Surrealismus also left its mark on Fernand Léger in the 1930s, loosening up his style and making it more curvilinear. Léger taught at Yale University and at Mills College in California from 1940 until 1945. By now his dominant motifs were drawn from the workplace and were post-Cubist in form, combined with the representational clarity of Realism.

#art #artist #painting #artwork #painter #artistic #artsy #visionary #express #creatives #creativeart #colorsplash #paint #painted #acrylics #acrylic #canvas #canvasart #brush #abstractart #abstractexpressionism #abstractpainting #abstract #abstraction #abstractartist #dinosaur #pond #wave #duck #swirl

Mechakucha → The Ultimate Dissonance/ The Extreme Harmony

めちゃくちゃ (2019) アルシュ紙300gにアクリル絵具 760x560mm

Oil, gouache, and plaster on canvas; 106.4 x 170.2 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.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock

Untitled

Mixed media on paper

27.5 by 39.5 in.

Courtesy of Lohin-Geduld Gallery, New York.

www.artnet.com/gallery/423885474/lohin-geduld-gallery.htm... Carone

Frank Helmut Auerbach is a German-born British painter. Auerbach was born in Berlin. His parents sent him to England in 1939 to escape the Nazis as part of the Kindertransport programme. The family was jewish; his parents subsequently died in a concentration camp).

Auerbach does not prepare underpaintings, nor does he use outline sketches for portraits. In contrast, he sketches landscapes in the field and brings the sketches back to the studio, sometimes using as many as 200 sketches for a single painting.

His work might broadly be described as expressionist. Many of his paintings display an extremely thick impasto, something which he was criticized for at his 1956 Beaux Arts solo show. The impasto, which grew even heavier over the next decade is sometimes so heavy that the paint seems to have been sculpted rather than brushed on.

Acrylic

Abstract acrylic painting by Matthias Schickhofer.

Jean Fautrier was a French painter and sculptor. He was one of the most important practitioners of Tachisme. He was born in Paris and studied in London at the Royal Academy of Art and the Slade School. He first exhibited his paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1922 and at the Fabre Gallery in 1923. In 1927, he painted a series of pictures (still lifes, nudes, landscapes) in which black dominates, and in 1928 he began work on a series of engravings. Until 1933 he divided his efforts between sculpture and painting; he then spent five years as a ski instructor in Savoy.

Fautrier resumed painting in 1937, and in 1943 made his twenty-second and last sculpture. The same year, stopped by the German gestapo, he fled Paris and found refuge in Châtenay-Malabry, where he began work on the project of the Otages. These paintings were exhibited in 1945 with the Drouin gallery. In the years that followed, Fautrier worked on the illustration of several works. His late work is abstract, generally small in scale, often combining mixed media on paper. He died in Châtenay-Malabry in 1964.

Acrylic on canvas; 149.9 x 200.7 cm.

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker, best known for his development of art brut (“raw art”). As an art student in Paris, Dubuffet demonstrated a facility for academic painting. In 1924, however, he gave up his painting, and by 1930 was making a living as a wine merchant. He did not return to a full-time art career until the early 1940s.

After World War II, as one of the leading artists of the School of Paris, he developed the techniques and philosophy of art brut. Derived from Dubuffet’s studies of the art of children and of the mentally ill, art brut is intended to achieve immediacy and vitality of expression not found in self-conscious, academic art. To reflect these qualities, Dubuffet often used crude ideographic images incised into a rough impasto surface made up of such materials as tar, gravel, cinders, ashes, and sand bound with varnish and glue. His drawings and paintings are by turns childlike and obsessive, and their unfinished appearance excited much controversy.

During the 1960s Dubuffet experimented with musical composition and the creation of architectural environments. In various graphic and sculptural mediums he continued to explore the potentials of art brut. In his later years he also created several large sculptures of black-and-white painted fiberglass for various public spaces.

Myst Held Forms (1959)

Oil on canvas

15 by 10 in.

See more biographical information at:

www.artnet.com/Artists/ArtistHomePage.aspx?artist_id=1066...

Image courtesy of McCormick Gallery, Chicago

www.thomasmccormick.com/

Processed with Snapseed.

Oil on canvas.

Italian painter and printmaker. Born at Carpignano Sesia (Novara). Moved to Milan in 1941 and studied painting at the Brera Academy under Funi and Carr-32; became friendly with Cassinari and Morlotti. Joined the groups Numero and Pittura, and helped to edit their periodicals. Published etchings illustrating poems by Cesare Pavese 1947; first one-man exhibition at the Galleria della Bottega, Novara, 1948. After naturalistic beginnings, evolved c.1950-1 an abstract style influenced by the colours and light of Bonnard and by the structure of the Cubist pictures of Braque. Took studies from nature as his starting-point, but tried to capture the essence of natural forms bathed in light. Spent part of each year in the countryside of Piedmont, from which he drew inspiration. After 1960 his work started to become more figurative, with paintings of still life and shadowy nudes in interiors related to de Sta-21l and Bacon. Lives in Milan.

Published in:

Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.3

Abstract design by flan.

Available in (disponible en):

A2/A3/A3 Poster

Canvas [Different sizes]

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Jean Arp was an abstract painter and sculptor. He was a leading light in the Dada movement.

This is a spontaneous Lyrical abstract painting. The vibrant and happy colors will create a very energizing ambiance.

Emergence the process of being visible after being concealed. The beginning to new ideas and to a welcome change.

Oil on canvas.

Georges Braque was the son of a painting contractor who was also a Sunday painter. He had his first art lessons from his father. Braque then studied at the school of Fine Arts in Le Havre before going to Paris, where he studied with Bonnat and discovered African, Egyptian, and Greek sculpture at the Louvre. Braque was also influenced by the Impressionists and by his contemporaries, Matisse and Derain, whose Fauve movement he joined in about 1905. Even in this period, his works showed characteristics of his later styles, for he painted some works in monochrome, using angles as well as curves, with a flatter, more transparent pigment than that of his colleagues. By 1907, the architectural influence of Cezanne had asserted itself and Braque, with Picasso, founded the Cubist movement. He began to paint in muted colors and in the geometrical patterns, inverted perspective, and overlapping volumes associated with Cubism. Picasso and Braque worked closely together, until the outbreak of World War I, sometimes producing works so similar that the two artists themselves could not tell which one had painted. They also cooperated on both the analytical and synthetic stages of Cubism.

Braque was mobilized into the French Army in 1914, and a head wound he received in 1915 made him temporarily blind so that he could not paint again until 1917. He began to develop a new and more personal style, using a brighter palette and freer manner that is less angular and more luminous. By 1931 he had found a marvelous balance between intelligence and sensitivity, technique and inspiration. Braque painted a world that combines harmonious shadings of color, sinuous line, and more rounded form, with the multiple points of view and inverted space of Cubism. The most ordinary dull colors became resonant on his canvases: white is translucent; black, full of light. The resulting landscapes, figure paintings, and still lives, display lucidity, intellectuality, and restrained emotion. These qualities prompted the French government to proclaim him the "most French of all French artists of his generation."

Oil on canvas; 121 x 90.1 cm.

Mark Rothko, original name Marcus Rothkovitch, American painter whose works introduced contemplative introspection into the melodramatic post-World War II Abstract Expressionist school; his use of colour as the sole means of expression led to the development of Colour Field Painting.

In 1913 Rothko’s family emigrated from Russia to the U.S., where they settled in Portland, Ore. During his youth he was preoccupied with politics and social issues. He entered Yale University in 1921, intending to become a labour leader, but dropped out after two years and wandered about the U.S. In 1925 he settled in New York City and took up painting. Although he studied briefly under the painter Max Weber, he was essentially self-taught.

Rothko first worked in a realistic style that culminated in his Subway series of the late 1930s, showing the loneliness of persons in drab urban environments. This gave way in the early 1940s to the semi-abstract biomorphic forms of the ritualistic Baptismal Scene (1945). By 1948, however, he had arrived at a highly personal form of Abstract Expressionism. Unlike many of his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Rothko never relied on such dramatic techniques as violent brushstrokes or the dripping and splattering of paint. Instead, his virtually gestureless paintings achieved their effects by juxtaposing large areas of melting colours that seemingly float parallel to the picture plane in an indeterminate, atmospheric space.

Rothko spent the rest of his life refining this basic style through continuous simplification. He restricted his designs to two or three “soft-edged” rectangles that nearly filled the wall-sized vertical formats like monumental abstract icons. Despite their large size, however, his paintings derived a remarkable sense of intimacy from the play of nuances within local colour.

From 1958 to 1966 Rothko worked intermittently on a series of 14 immense canvases (the largest was about 11 × 15 feet [3 × 5 metres]) eventually placed in a nondenominational chapel in Houston, Texas, called, after his death, the Rothko Chapel. These paintings were virtual monochromes of darkly glowing browns, maroons, reds, and blacks. Their sombre intensity reveals the deep mysticism of Rothko’s later years. Plagued by ill health and the conviction that he had been forgotten by those artists who had learned most from his painting, he committed suicide.

After his death, the execution of Rothko’s will provoked one of the most spectacular and complex court cases in the history of modern art, lasting for 11 years (1972–82). The misanthropic Rothko had hoarded his works, numbering 798 paintings, as well as many sketches and drawings. His daughter, Kate Rothko, accused the executors of the estate (Bernard J. Reis, Theodoros Stamos, and Morton Levine) and Frank Lloyd, owner of Marlborough Galleries in New York City, of conspiracy and conflict of interest in selling the works—in effect, of enriching themselves. The courts decided against the executors and Lloyd, who were heavily fined. Lloyd was tried separately and convicted on criminal charges of tampering with evidence. In 1979 a new board of the Mark Rothko Foundation was established, and all the works in the estate were divided between the artist’s two children and the Foundation. In 1984 the Foundation’s share of works was distributed to 19 museums in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Israel; the best and the largest proportion went to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Acrylic on Canvas Collab

Oil and sand on canvas; 152.4 x 152.4 cm.

Gyorgy Kepes, Hungarian-born American painter, designer, photographer, teacher, and writer who had considerable influence on many areas of design.

Shortly after his graduation in 1928 from the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Budapest, Kepes experimented with photograms, photographic prints made by placing objects on sensitized paper and exposing the paper to light. Later, he made prints he called “photo-drawings,” in which he applied paint to a glass plate that he then used as though it were a negative.

From 1930 to 1936 Kepes worked in Berlin and London, designing for motion pictures, stage productions, and commercial exhibitions. In 1937 he went to the United States to head the light and colour department of the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge in 1946, where he taught visual design until 1974. In 1967 Kepes founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, a community that would unite the work of artists and designers with that of architects, engineers, city planners, and scientists; he served as director until 1972. His writings include Language of Vision (1944) and The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956).

Mark Rothko, No. 3/No. 13, 1949, oil on canvas, 216.5 x 164.8 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)

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Oil on canvas; 73 x 100 cm.

Hans Hartung was a French painter of German origins, one of the leading European exponents of a completely abstract style of painting. He became particularly well known for his carefully composed, almost calligraphic arrangements of black lines on colored backgrounds.

Hartung received conventional training at art academies in Leipzig and Dresden, but even as a young man he made inkblot abstractions. An early influence was the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who also had eschewed recognizable objects. In 1931 Hartung had a one-man exhibition in Dresden, but success was not forthcoming. Sick and short of funds, he spent the next three years on Minorca. He returned to Germany but, abhorring Nazism, settled in Paris in 1935; he became a French citizen in 1946. In World War II he served with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa and Alsatia, where he was seriously wounded. His service was interrupted by confinement in a Spanish concentration camp, from which he was released as a result of U.S. intervention.

Hartung’s mature style, which involved swirling, energetic linear motifs, found an eager public after the war. A successful showing of his work in Paris (1947) was followed by exhibits elsewhere in Europe and in the United States, Japan, and Latin America. In 1960 he was awarded the Grand Prix of the Venice Biennale, where an entire room of the French Pavilion was devoted to his work. He had a decisive influence on the postwar generation of abstract painters in Europe. Hartung’s later works became progressively calmer and more stable. Many of his works are titled by letters and numbers.

via Instagram ift.tt/2QregAu

Oil on welded iron on canvas; 200 x 195.5 cm.

Alberto Burri was an Italian abstract painter and sculptor. Città di Castello has memorialized him with a large permanent museum of his works. He earned a medical degree in 1940 from the University of Perugia and was a military physician during World War II. After his unit was captured in North Africa, he was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas in 1944, where he began to paint. After his release in 1946, Burri moved to Rome; his first solo show was at the Galleria La Margherita in 1947.

Burri soon turned to abstraction and unorthodox materials, making collages with pumice, tar, and burlap, and started a series of canvases that bulged into the 3rd dimension. His work is related to European Tachisme, American Abstract expressionism, and Lyrical Abstraction. In the mid-1950s, Burri began producing charred wood and burlap works, then welded iron sheets. In the early 1960s he was burning plastic, and in the early 1970s started his "cracked" paintings, or cretti. He created a series of works in the industrial material, Cellotex, from 1979 through the 1990s.

In the 1980s, Burri created a form of land art project on the town of Gibellina in Sicily. The town was abandoned following an earthquake in 1968, with the inhabitants being rehoused in a newly built town 18 km away. Burri covered most of the old town, an area roughly 300 metres by 400 metres, with white concrete. He called this the Grande Cretto.

Burri was awarded the Italian Order of Merit in 1994.

"Jazzy shadows" by Fateh Avtar Singh

Part of the 1950's New York School of Abstract Expressionists

Oil on canvas; 99.7 x 114.3 cm.

“I can imagine an art that would have an innocuous surface where you don’t see anything at all of interest; you wouldn’t dream of looking at it with any idea that it could knock you over or have any power or anything, and then slowly you can begin to read into it all kinds of wonderful, imaginative things that you can see in it, and that could be a very marvelous form of art.” *

Born Rachmiel Resnick in 1917, Milton Resnick spent his childhood in the Ukraine, where he and his family were threatened by anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War. The family fled first to Cuba and then to Brooklyn in 1922. He initially studied architectural drafting and lettering at a trade school, but could not find work when he finished school in the midst of the Depression in 1932. The following year, he enrolled in the fine arts program at the American Artist’s School, where he met Ad Reinhardt. In 1937, he met Willem de Kooning, who became a close friend, and in 1938, he joined the WPA. Resnick’s artistic pursuits were interrupted in 1940, when he was drafted into the army. When Resnick returned to New York after his discharge in 1945, he resumed painting and began meeting with de Kooning, Kline, Arshile Gorky, and other artists at the Waldorf Cafeteria for discussions about art and abstraction. From 1946 to 1948, Resnick lived in Paris, where he met Constantin Brancusi, Jean Hélion, and Tristan Tzara. He returned to New York, and in 1949, he was one of the founding members of the Club. That same year, Resnick was supposed to have his first solo exhibition, but the dealer cancelled it, causing a major setback to his career. In 1955, the Poindexter Gallery mounted his debut exhibition, but as a result of this six-year delay, Resnick has often been mislabeled a second-generation abstract expressionist.†

Resnick was a constant presence on the abstract expressionism scene, despite his ambivalence about being called an abstract expressionist. In 1951, he participated in the Ninth Street Show; his work was exhibited at the Stable Gallery; and in 1957, the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum selected his work for inclusion in the 1957 Annual Exhibition and Artists of the New York School, respectively. In 1959, he began to increase the scale of his work, creating massive paintings of small, thick gestures that covered the wall-sized canvases, forming a composition of all-over abstraction. Two years later, he started work on his famous New Bride (1961-1963), an abstraction of thick white impasto, with flecks of pale color, painted on a nine-by-seventeen-foot canvas. It took Resnick two years to build up the surface of the painting, and this became the first of the impasto monochromes for which he is best known.

Resnick continued to work in an abstract style until the late 1980s, when he started creating a series of gouaches featuring simplified human forms suspended in a field of brushstrokes and color. These isolated, abstracted figures continued in his art of the 1990s. Painted in acrylic and oil in addition to gouache, these figures are often alone, and even when Resnick painted them in pairs, each figure remains isolated, close to but unable to make contact with the other. From 2001 until his death in 2004, Resnick created his “X-Space” paintings, exploring the relationship between color, line, and space from a variety of angles. Regardless of the scale of his paintings or their degree of abstraction, Resnick’s gestural brushstrokes and his fascination with the textural and spatial aspects of art remained constant throughout his life.

* Geoffrey Dorfman, "Milton Resnick: In Memoriam," artcritical.com, March 2005 (accessed March 2009).

† David Cohen, “Milton Resnick Was an AbEx Pioneer,” New York Sun, May 29, 2008. www.nysun.com/arts/milton-resnick-was-an-abex-pioneer/78823/ (accessed February 2009).