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Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was an abstract expressionist artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to variously as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School. Other painters that developed this school of painting include Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston and Clyfford Still among others.
A project inspired by Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock, Cyro Totku, and Kilford.
Clingfilm and layering.
Max Liberman was also an accomplished abstract sculptor. He is most well know for his large outdoor works.
Constant attended the Kunstnijverheidsschool and the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. He met Asger Jorn in Paris in 1946. After this meeting fantastic beasts and frightening animal and human figures appeared in his paintings. He held his first one-man exhibition in Amsterdam in 1947. In the following year he was co-founder of the Dutch Experimental Group and also of CoBrA. Together with Christian Dotremont he was the leading theoretician of CoBrA. In the work that he produced during the CoBrA years we see the same sort of figures derived from children's drawings as with Karel Appel, in rough lines and deliberately clumsy forms.
In 1950 Constant settled in Paris. In this period he produced his "war paintings," filled by the remains of a destroyed world in which helpless people stretch out their hands to heaven. In the late 1950s Constant developed his ideas about the ideal city, "New Babylon," in which people freed from work, "homo ludens," would be able to develop their creativity. He took part in the 1956 conference "Mouvement pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste" and in 1957 he was one of the co-founders of the "Situationist International." From the 1970s onwards he concentrated more on painting, water colors and drawings, with the work of the old masters forming a source of inspiration. Constant is remembered as one of the best post-war painters The Netherlands produced.
detail of "Picture with an Archer"
1909, oil on canvas, by
Vasily Kandinsky
Gift and bequest of Louise Reinhardt Smith, 1959
Thanks, Louise!
Oil on canvas; 94 x 76 cm.
Esteban Vicente Pérez was an American painter born in Turégano, Spain. He was one of the first generation of New York School abstract expressionists.
Esteban Vicente was born in Turégano, Spain on January 20, 1903. His mother, Sofia Pérez y Álvarez came from an Asturian family and was born in Valladolid. His father, Toribio Vicente Ruiz, came from a military family near Salamanca and was an army officer. Esteban Vicente had two sisters and three brothers. He was the third child and second son. Vicente's father resigned his commission and moved his family to the capital, Madrid, where he worked as a buildings administrator for the Banco de España so that the children could be educated at good Jesuit schools. Vicente was taken to the Museo del Prado by his father, an art enthusiast, almost every Sunday from the time he was four years old and began to draw when he was sixteen. He was expected to follow family tradition and join the army. After three months in military school he decided to become an artist.
Vicente enrolled at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 1921 intending to study sculpture. He completed his training in 1924. Commenting on his experience at the Academy he said "It doesn't give you any ideas about anything. It gives you tools, and teaches you about materials. Academic training is safe. It prepares you to be against."
He had his first one-man exhibition in Madrid in 1928, after which he left for Paris and did not return to Spain until 1930. In 1935 he married Estelle Charney, an American whom he had met in Paris.[2] After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 Vicente, supporting the Loyalist forces, painted camouflage in the mountains outside Madrid for a few months. Later that year he and his wife moved to New York. The (Loyalist) Spanish Ambassador to the U.S. set him up as a Vice Consul in Philadelphia, a position which supported his family for three years. Vicente had ample time to continue with his art and had his first one-man show in New York at the Kleeman Gallery in 1937. After the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939 he returned to New York City. During World War II he supported himself with portrait commissions and by teaching Spanish. A 1945 exhibition in Puerto Rico led in 1946 to a position at the University of Puerto Rico teaching painting. After his return to New York in 1947 he established relationships with most of the members of the nascent New York School, participating in their seminal exhibitions at the Kootz Gallery in 1950, in the 9th Street Art Exhibition in 1951 and in exhibitions at the Sidney Janis Gallery and Charles Egan Gallery. Subsequently he was represented by the Leo Castelli, André Emmerich[6] and Berry-Hill Galleries in New York City. He was a founding member of the New York Studio School, where he taught for 36 years. Although he never exhibited in Spain during the rule of Francisco Franco, in 1998 the Spanish government opened the Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art in Segovia.
Vicente maintained a house and studio in Bridgehampton, New York from 1964. His marriage to Estelle Charney ended in divorce in 1943. Their daughter Mercedes, died at aged six. A second marriage, to Maria Teresa Babin, also ended in divorce. Vicente died in Bridgehampton on January 10, 2001. He was survived by his third wife, Harriet Peters, whom he married in 1961.
He has been honored as a renowned artist and child advocate by a New York City Bronx School Public School 170, a Kindergarten to Second Grade school has been named the Esteban Vicente school. A family member has incorporated Art programs into the schools. Students' talents emerge as they are exposed to the culture. At PS 170 students learn about Esteban Vicente and his style, color and design. Examples of his work adorn the walls of the school.
Vicente has a museum devoted to him in Segovia, Spain, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, and a street named after him in Turégano.
In March 2011 the Grey Art Gallery at New York University exhibited Concrete Improvisations: Collages and Sculpture by Esteban Vicente. In addition to 60 paper collages, the exhibit included 20 of Vicente's small-scale assemblages called divertimentos (toys), composed from pieces of found wood and covered with white plaster, with others composed of plastic and wood with architectonic elements.
Watercolor pigment and wash on canvas; 198.1 x 192.4 cm.
Guillermo Kuitca is an Argentinean artist who was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, where he continues to work and live. Kuitca's work has been shown extensively around the globe, and is included in many important public collection, including The Tate Gallery, England; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC ; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY and The Daros Collection, Zürich, Switzerland . Kuitca represented Argentina at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recurrent themes of travel, maps, memory, and migration can be found in Kuitca’s work.
In the early and mid-1980s, Kuitca made works which incorporate theater imagery. Many paintings from this period feature figures on a stage-like platform, with titles often inspired by plays, literature and music. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kuitca began to integrate the subjects of architecture and topography in his work, often exploring the confluence of communal and private spaces. The floor plans of public institutions, such as those found in the “Tablada Suite” series, geographical maps, and genealogical charts begin to serve as important references during this period.” In 1992, Kuitca created his first works which incorporated the image of a painted bed, “often small and forlorn on the canvas.” Afterwards, the artist used the motif of an apartment floor plan, middle-class and compact, with only one bathroom. This floor plan would eventually lead to maps, theater plans and baggage carousels. Kuitca continued to explore organizational systems, in his “Neufert Suite” (1998) and “Encyclopédie” (2002) series. In his “Global Order” (2002) works, Kuitca combines a world map with architectural plans for interior spaces, “identifying borders and notions of ‘place’ as the changing products of human invention.”
Kuitca is well known “for his use of maps – particularly his transcriptions of topography onto mattresses” Kuitca says he uses the image of a map “to get lost… not to get oriented.” Stemming from his experimentation with aerial views of floor plans, Kuitca moved to maps because “he liked the way they occupy a space somewhere between the abstract and the representational.”
Kuitca’s retrospective “Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008” opened at the Miami Art Museum in 2009, and traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (19 February– 30 May 2010), New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (26 June – 19 September 2010) and will concluded at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (21 October 2010 – 9 January 2011).
Gouache on paper; 31.8 x 49.5 cm.
Since 1945 Piero Dorazio studied architecture in Rome. At the same time first abstract works were executed. In 1947 he received a scholarship from the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he contacted Modern artists, who lived in Paris. He founded the galleries "Age d'Or" in Florence and Rome to diffuse avant-garde arts in Italy.
During a one year stay in the USA he got acquainted with leading characters of Abstract Expressionism like Marc Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman. At that time he also intensively studied Kandinsky's essays, whose theory of the immaterial aspects in painting influenced him strongly. In 1959 Piero Dorazio participated in the "documenta II" in Kassel. Afterwards he accepted a teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, where Piero Dorazio founded the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1963 and was appointed professor in 1968.
In the 1960's the first compositions of ink ribbons were executed in his studio in New York, which dominated his work henceforth. After his return to Italy Dorazio moved to the former romanic cloister of Todi in Umbria. Piero Dorazio was regarded up to great age as one of the leading Italian artists of concrete color painting.
Piero Dorazio died at the age of 77 in Perugia on 17 May 2005.
Oil on canvas; 117.5 x 105 cm.
Gershon Iskowitz was born in Kielce, Poland. He began as an expressionist painter who dealt with figurative subjects and later painted the Canadian landscape in an abstract expressionist style. At the age of four he was sent to the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva where he began drawing. After a year and a half he begged his father to be allowed to return home and was given permission. He was tutored in Polish and placed in a public school. He was bullied at school and left after two and a half years. His father set up a small studio area for him in their home and allowed him to spend his time drawing and painting. At age nine he exchanged his art posters for free admission to a local cinema.
He registered at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1939. But war broke out before he began classes so he had to return to Kielce and was put to forced labor. In September 1943 the Kielce Ghetto was burned. Gershon and his brother, Yosl, were sent to Auschwitz. Gershon painted or drew at night only after every one else was asleep. He said "Why did I do it? I think it kept me alive. There was nothing to do. I had to do something in order to forget the hunger. It's very hard to explain, but in the camp painting was a necessity for survival." He was transferred to Buchenwald in 1944. Near the end of the war he tried to escape but was seriously wounded. In 1947 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and had private study with Oskar Kokoschka who painted in intense expressionistic style.
Gershon's first application to move to Canada was rejected because he had a limp. He reapplied and drew a picture for the bureaucrat in immigration. The fellow declared Gershon a genius, and approved his emigration application. In 1949 he emigrated to Canada. In 1952 he attended Artist's Workshop, Toronto until 1959–60 and began sketching trips to Markham and Uxbridge. He stopped painting scenes from his past in the mid 50's and turned to the Canadian landscape for his models. A major change in his painting style occurred in 1967 when a Canada Council grant permitted him to view the northern landscape from a helicopter. His painting became explosions of color and light.
In 1954 he had his first exhibition with the Canadian Society of Graphic Artists. He also did some part-time teaching at McKellar Lake. In 1964 he became associated with Gallery Moos, where he had many one-man exhibitions. In 1982 Gershon was honored by the AGO with a forty year retrospective of his work. A subset of the exhibition was put on display in London, England. Gershon said [painting] "... is just an extension of myself. It's a plastic interpretation of the way I think. You reflect your own vision. That's what it's all about. Art is like evolution and life, and you've got to search for life, stand on your own feet and continue. The only fear I have is before starting to paint. When I paint, I'm great, I feel great."
Oil on paper mounted on board; 66.7 x 51.1 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).
Acrylic on paper; 55.9 x 76.2 cm.
TWORKOV, JACK (1900–1982), U.S. educator, printmaker, painter. Tworkov was born in Biala, Poland and immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. He studied at Columbia University, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League. Tworkov worked as an artist for the Works Project Administration's Federal Art Project in 1935, where he met Willem de Kooning. Both men emerged as forces in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Tworkov was also one of the founders of The Club, a loose New York association of Abstract Expressionists which met to discuss matters relating to art making. Like many other Abstract Expressionists, Tworkov's early work consisted of figures and still-lifes. He also rendered images in a cubist style before adopting the visual aspects of Abstract Expressionism. As to be expected, his early work shared many stylistic characteristics with that of de Kooning. As Tworkov gained eminence along with his colleagues in the New York School representational subject matter became subsumed in abundantly textured long, dashing, diagonal brush strokes, as in his painting Blue Note from 1959. Among other influences, Tworkov also turned to the art of the marginalized Expressionist painter Chaim Soutine as a source of inspiration; in fact, Tworkov wrote an article on Soutine during the latter's 1950 show at MOMA. Tworkov achieved the illusion of vibrating and multiple fields or screens of color from a cool, restricted palette and subtle nuances of tone. Likely influenced by the Minimalists, Tworkov integrated grids and other ordering systems into his images from the 1960s onward, such as Shield (1961) and Variables II (1964–65). One of his major series of paintings, House of the Sun, refers to Ulysses, whose epic adventures suggested a variety of themes to the artist. Tworkov taught at numerous institutions: the American University, Black Mountain College (other luminaries of this period such as John Cage, Franz Kline, and Lyonel Feininger also taught here during the 1940s), Queens College, the Pratt Institute, and Yale University, where he functioned as chairman of the art department. He was a recipient of a Corcoran Gold Medal in 1963. Tworkov's art has been exhibited at numerous major museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pennsylvania Academy, and the Whitney Museum, among other venues. His work is in the collections of the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.
This gorgeous piece, which now hangs in our living room, was painted 3/10/09 by Pennsylvania artist, Lee Kaloidis. You can view more of his exceptional work at www.leekaloidis.com. Use the "all sizes" feature to see the beautiful details of this painting. Also click on his flickr link below.
Oil on canvas; 190 x 216 cm.
Gershon Iskowitz was born in Kielce, Poland. He began as an expressionist painter who dealt with figurative subjects and later painted the Canadian landscape in an abstract expressionist style. At the age of four he was sent to the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva where he began drawing. After a year and a half he begged his father to be allowed to return home and was given permission. He was tutored in Polish and placed in a public school. He was bullied at school and left after two and a half years. His father set up a small studio area for him in their home and allowed him to spend his time drawing and painting. At age nine he exchanged his art posters for free admission to a local cinema.
He registered at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1939. But war broke out before he began classes so he had to return to Kielce and was put to forced labor. In September 1943 the Kielce Ghetto was burned. Gershon and his brother, Yosl, were sent to Auschwitz. Gershon painted or drew at night only after every one else was asleep. He said "Why did I do it? I think it kept me alive. There was nothing to do. I had to do something in order to forget the hunger. It's very hard to explain, but in the camp painting was a necessity for survival." He was transferred to Buchenwald in 1944. Near the end of the war he tried to escape but was seriously wounded. In 1947 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and had private study with Oskar Kokoschka who painted in intense expressionistic style.
Gershon's first application to move to Canada was rejected because he had a limp. He reapplied and drew a picture for the bureaucrat in immigration. The fellow declared Gershon a genius, and approved his emigration application. In 1949 he emigrated to Canada. In 1952 he attended Artist's Workshop, Toronto until 1959–60 and began sketching trips to Markham and Uxbridge. He stopped painting scenes from his past in the mid 50's and turned to the Canadian landscape for his models. A major change in his painting style occurred in 1967 when a Canada Council grant permitted him to view the northern landscape from a helicopter. His painting became explosions of color and light.
In 1954 he had his first exhibition with the Canadian Society of Graphic Artists. He also did some part-time teaching at McKellar Lake. In 1964 he became associated with Gallery Moos, where he had many one-man exhibitions. In 1982 Gershon was honored by the AGO with a forty year retrospective of his work. A subset of the exhibition was put on display in London, England. Gershon said [painting] "... is just an extension of myself. It's a plastic interpretation of the way I think. You reflect your own vision. That's what it's all about. Art is like evolution and life, and you've got to search for life, stand on your own feet and continue. The only fear I have is before starting to paint. When I paint, I'm great, I feel great."
Oil on canvas; 144.5 x 204.8 cm.
Ernst Wilhelm Nay studied under Karl Hofer at the Berlin Art Academy from 1925 until 1928. His first sources of inspiration resulted from his preoccupation with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Henri Matisse as well as Caspar David Friedrich and Nicolas Poussin.
Nay's still lifes, portraits and landscapes were widely acclaimed. In 1931 Ernst Wilhelm Nay received a nine-months' study bursary to the Villa Massimo in Rome, where he began to paint in the abstract Surrealist manner. On the recommendation of the Lübeck museum director, C.G. Heise, Nay was given a work grant financed by Edvard Munch, which enabled Nay to spend time in Norway and on the Lofoten Islands in 1937. The "Fischer- und Lofotenbilder" represented a first pinnacle of achievement.
That same year, however, two of his works were shown in the notorious exhibition of "Degenerate Art" and Ernst Wilhelm Nay was forbidden to exhibit any longer. Conscripted into the German armed forces in 1940, Nay went with the infantry to France, where a French sculptor placed his studio at Nay's disposal. In the "Hekatebildern" (1945-48), featuring motifs from myth, legend and poetry, Nay worked through his war and postwar experiences.
The "Fugale Bilder" (1949-51) proclaim new beginnings in a fiery palette and entwined forms. In 1950 the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover mounted a first retrospective of Nay's work. The following year the artist moved to Cologne, where, with the "Rhythmischen Bildern" he took the final step towards entirely non-representational painting. In them he began to use color purely as figurative values. From 1955 Nay's painted "Scheibenbilder", in which round color surfaces organize subtle modulations of space and color. These are developed further in 1963-64 in what are known as the "Augenbilder". A first one-man-show in America at the Kleeman Galleries, New York, in 1955, participation in the 1956 Venice Biennale and the Kassel "documenta" (1955, 1959 and 1964) are milestones marking Nay's breakthrough on the international art scene. Nay was awarded important prizes and is represented by work in nearly all major exhibitions of German art in Germany and abroad.
Oil on canvas; 65 x 54 cm.
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.
Acrylic on Board painted by me and my friends at Thanksgiving 6 years ago! #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 #thanks #skull #heart #peace #love #skeleton #dove #grinch #christmas #chicken
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.
Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly Jr. is an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibits his paintings worldwide.
Twombly is best known for blurring the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive es—or perhaps, hundreds of years of bathroom graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge—each mark with its own history—as its proper subject. Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words.
ODC - In the Style of Aaron Siskind - Abstract Expressionism - Aaron Siskind photographed many images of peeling paint and a few of the grass. I'm taking on the grass thyme. I hope this image is correct.
I must love lying on wet surfaces. I waited for the sunrise and the sunlight to shine through the wet grass before lying on the wet grass.
Burned plastic and acrylic on panel; 143.6 x 242.8 cm.
Alberto Burri was an Italian artist known for his adventurous use of new materials. Burri was trained as a physician and began to paint only in 1944, while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas. About 1946 he moved to Rome and began to paint seriously. His early works—rags splashed in red paint to simulate blood-soaked bandages—grew directly out of his experiences as a doctor in the Italian army. He then began to produce works grouped into series according to the material used. The works of the earliest series (c. 1953) were made of coarse cloth stitched together. After 1956 he employed thin pieces of burned wood and layers of polyethylene in which holes were burned, creating a rich spatial network within the layers of plastic. The humble and sometimes crude materials used in these works contrast effectively with their elegant designs, and the easily destroyed materials form a perforated network over an impinging background field. In his series of metal works done after 1959, however, the solid material completely encloses the background field, although the metal is hammered from behind as if the imprisoned field were trying to break out.
Edwin Parker (Cy) Twombly Jr. is an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibits his paintings worldwide.
Twombly is best known for blurring the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive es—or perhaps, hundreds of years of bathroom graffiti. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge—each mark with its own history—as its proper subject. Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words.
Composition (ca. 1950-56)
Oil on canvas
20 1/4 x 16 inches
Courtesy of Spanierman Modern, New York
www.spanierman-at-easthampton.com/07_Greene/07_Greene_rev...
Swiping is an audio/visual animation composed using swipe gestures made on an iPad – a contemporary Abstract Expressionist painting that reflects on the gesture in the digital age. Each new swipe generates a colorful brush-like form that dynamically expands in 3-dimensions, accompanied by synthetic sound. Here, the gesture is not the expressive act that Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock were known for; instead it is a physical command to explore an infinite flow of digital information.
To create Swiping, thousands of gestures were recorded on an iPad and then animated using custom software. Sound by Chris Carlson (@modulationindex). Made with OpenFrameworks.
Oil on board; 67.6 x 100.0 cm.
Winifred Nicholson was an English painter and colorist who developed a personalized impressionistic style that concentrated on domestic subjects and landscapes. In her work, the two motifs are often combined in a view out of a window, featuring flowers in a vase or a jug.
Nicholson was born in Oxford. Her parents were Charles Henry Roberts and Lady Cecilia, daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. Her interest in painting started early in life. George Howard was an accomplished painter as well as a friend and patron of many distinguished artists. Nicholson began painting with Howard around age 11. She attended the Byam Shaw Art School.
Nicholson married the artist Ben Nicholson in 1920. There were three children; Kate Nicholson also became an artist. In the 1920s Winifred became a Christian Scientist, an allegiance that lasted for the rest of her life. Although it is sometimes said incorrectly that with Ben, Winifred formed part of the artist colony at St Ives, Cornwall, she was never permanently living there. Although she painted less in the abstract style than in the representational, she did experiment with her own form of abstraction in the 1930s. Influences between her and Ben were mutual, Ben often admitting he learned much about color from his first wife. After they separated, she lived half of each year during the 1930s in Paris.
After her divorce from Ben Nicholson in 1938, she spent most of the rest of her life in Cumberland, at Boothby and at Bankshead. She painted prolifically throughout her life, largely at home but also on trips to Greece and Scotland, among other places. Many of her works are still in private collections, but a number are in the Kettle's Yard art gallery, Cambridge, and several key works belong to Tate. One painting is believed to have hung at 10 Downing Street. She had a lifelong fascination for rainbow and spectrum colors and in the 1970s she made particularly strong, innovative use of such colors in many of her paintings.
Emilio Vedova was born on August 9, 1919, in Venice. Self-taught as an artist he attended for a short period the evening decoration classes at the Carmini school. About 1942 he joined the group Corrente, which also included Renato Birolli, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, and Umberto Vittorini. Vedova participated in the Resistance movement from 1943. In 1946 he collaborated with Morlotti on the manifesto Oltre Guernica in Milan and was a founding member of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti in Venice. In this period he began his Geometrie nere series, black and white paintings influenced by Cubist spatiality.
Vedova’s first solo show in the United States was held at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in New York in 1951. In the same year he was awarded the prize for young painters at the first São Paulo Bienal. In 1952 he participated in the Gruppo degli Otto. Vedova was represented at the first Documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1955 and won a Guggenheim International Award in 1956. He executed his first lithographs in 1958. In 1959 he created large L-shaped canvases, called Scontri di situazioni, which were exhibited in a black environment created by Carlo Scarpa for the exhibition Vitalità nell’arte, which opened at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and traveled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Vedova was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1960 Venice Biennale, the year in which he created moving light sets and costumes for Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza ’60. This led to the first Plurimi in 1961–63: freestanding, hinged, and painted sculpture/paintings made of wood and metal. From 1963 to 1965, Vedova worked in Berlin, at the Deutsche Akademischer Austausch Dienst, and created his best known Plurimi, the Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ‘64, presented at Documenta III, Kassel. From 1965 to 1969 (and in 1988), he succeeded Oskar Kokoschka as Director of the Internationale Sommerakademie in Salzburg. In 1965 and 1983 he traveled in the United States, where he lectured extensively. For the Italian Pavilion at Expo ’67, Montreal, he created a light-collage using glass plates to project mobile images across a large asymmetric space. Vedova taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Venice, from 1975 to 1986. Since the late 1970s, he has experimented with a variety of new techniques and formats such as the Plurimi-Binari (mobile works on steel rails), monotypes, double-sided circular panels (Dischi), and large-scale glass engraving. In 1995 he began a new series of multifaceted and manipulable painted objects called Disco-Plurimo. Vedova died in October 25, 2006, in Venice.
Antoni Tàpies is a Spanish Catalan painter. He is one of the famous artists of European abstract expressionism. He is perhaps the best-known Catalan artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau-al-Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements.
Tàpies started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an abstract expressionist, working in a style known as "Arte Povera", in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. In 1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most original contribution. One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags.
His international reputation was well established by the end of the 50s. From about 1970 (influenced by Pop art) he began incorporating more substantial objects into his paintings, such as parts of furniture. Tàpies's ideas have had worldwide influence on art, especially in the realms paintings, sculpture, etchings and lithography.