Abstract Expressionism
•
Dzubas: Untitled Tondo
• Goldberg:
One Year Tim
• Leslie: Odorless
• Mitchell:
Untitled
Abstract Expressionists were abstract artists because they had been schooled in early modern painting; they were expressionist artists because of their fervent belief in the individual gesture and in the freedom to use any means, including the human figure itself, to convey their intent. Abstract Expressionism was the first art movement with joint American and European roots, reflecting the influence of émigré artists - Max Ernst, Matta, Arshile Gorky, and Piet Mondrian, among others - who had fled war-ravaged Europe. Abstract Expressionists synthesized numerous sources from the history of modern painting, including the expressionism of Vincent van Gogh, the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, the saturated colors of Henri Matisse, and the fascination with the unconscious of the surrealists. Termed "action painting" or "American-style painting" by the critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, the movement’s most articulate advocates, Abstract Expressionism was less a style than an attitude. Of paramount importance was a fierce attachment to psychic self-expression and an abiding faith in the expressive character of the mark - Jackson Pollock’s flowing skeins of paint, Willem de Kooning’s emphatic lines and aggressive flourishes, Mark Rothko’s floating blocks of color - and in its potential for mirroring forth the whole individual, both spiritual and physical. Without realism’s semblance to the visible world, abstraction could portray as the "subject" something as indefinable as a feeling or simply the art itself. As Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb asserted, "There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing" (1943). The enduring legacy of Abstract Expressionism is the desire to capture in real, palpable terms the abstract notion of freedom. As World War II loomed on the international horizon, Abstract Expressionists emphasized the dignity of the individual, showing how the human imagination could move freely beyond ideological strictures. Their improvisational paintings were drawn from the reservoir of communicable feelings and images that resides in each human psyche.
The University of Kentucky Art Museum contains a sizable
holding of works by the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. Action
painting - de Kooning’s bold colors and heavy impasto, Pollock’s
calligraphic paintings - found passionate expression in works by Norman Bluhm,
Joan Mitchell, Michael Goldberg, Kimber Smith, and Alfred Leslie. Rothko’s
evocative murals inspired the development of color-field painting with such
artists as Theodoros Stamos, Frederic Thursz, and Friedel Dzubas, who rejected
illusions of depth and gestural brushwork in stained canvas works that emphasize
the flatness and two-dimensional nature of painting.
FRIEDEL DZUBAS American, born Germany, 1915-1994
Untitled Tondo, 1971
Acrylic on canvas, 23 1/8" diameter
University of Kentucky Art Museum. Gift of Constance Kamens. 1977.55
Associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, Friedel Dzubas was a proponent of color-field painting. (Working in New York City in the 1950s, Dzubas was close to other color-field painters Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, the latter sharing a studio with Dzubas in 1952-1953). The worked surfaces and "all-overness’ of his painted canvases suggest that surfaceness is not an attribute of color but rather that color is a property of surfaces. (That is, it is not that flatness is a definable characteristic of color but the opposite: color is characteristic of flat surfaces.) He exhibited a preference for clear, discrete, and contrasting areas of hue in thin layers. In the 1970s, he began filling surfaces with large, rounded rectangular patches of loosely painted multi-colored strokes (as if painted with a huge brush). Positioned in loose right angles, the patches vary in size, direction, and color in order to generate contours and color changes, in effect, providing pictorial "drama." Working with a quick-drying Magna paint, Dzubas shaded the color patches according to lateral extension (as opposed to being modeled in relation to contour) as a way of asserting the flatness of the canvas. Forms both define and enliven the surface; in this work, the perpetual roll of the circular format is anchored by verticals and horizontals.
MICHAEL
GOLDBERG American, born 1924
One Year Tim, 1961
Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 60"
University of Kentucky Art Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson
for the Martha Jackson Memorial Collection. 1982.3.3
Michael Goldberg, a representative of the second generation
of Abstract Expressionism, has become known for his aggressive, gestural abstractions.
In the 1950s, after studying in New York City with Hans Hofmann and José
de Creeft, Goldberg soon came under the influence of Arshile Gorky, Willem
de Kooning, Mark Rothko and other artists associated with the Eighth Street
Club, including Frank O’Hara, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell. During
these formative years of the 1950s and ‘60s, Goldberg leaned toward
a dark, rich palette and often experimented with the media, for example, mixing
oil and acrylic, or combined his paint layers with foreign matter, such as
newsprint.
ALFRED LESLIE American, born 1927
Odorless, 1962
Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 72¼"
University of Kentucky Art Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson
for the Martha Jackson Memorial Collection. 1982.3.4
Alfred Leslie has established a reputation for both monumental
figurative works and complex abstractions whose bold colors, heavy impasto,
and aggressive approach to painting signal his alliance with Abstract Expressionists.
As for the latter, he typically sets off cleanly defined, striped motifs against
freely painted areas. Many of his abstractions have the appearance and even
the technique of collage: ragged edges overlap taped contours; bright, glossy
hues contrast with matte, drab ones; and transparent layers lie beside thick
patches. This work is a rare example of his early work; a studio fire in 1966
destroyed the majority of his output from the first seventeen years of his
career.
JOAN MITCHELL American, 1926-1992
Untitled, ca. 1956
Oil on canvas, 19 1/8 x 16"
University of Kentucky Art Museum. Purchase: The National Endowment for the
Arts,
Patrons of the John Jacob Niles Benefit Concert and Friends of the Art Museum.
1980.14
Joan Mitchell moved to New York City in the late 1940s where
she met Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Frank O’Hara. The following
decade was spent in Paris, where she was close to Norman Bluhm, Paul Jenkins,
and Sam Francis. When she returned to New York, she was accepted as a promising
member of a downtown art scene that, up to then, had been known for its strong-armed
male chauvinism. Returning to Paris in the mid-50s, she spent the remainder
of her life in France, living on a secluded estate above Vétheuil,
a little town north of Paris on the Seine where Claude Monet painted. Her
paintings reveal her empathy to de Kooning’s inventive color and line.
Unlike most Abstract Expressionists, however, Mitchell resisted the notion
that painting is a matter of instinct, asserting instead that painting is
a willed act rather than the result of chance effect. Her works of the 1950s
are tense and feverish, a busy network of disconnected, vividly colored strokes
that are densest in the center of the image and against a vague sea of flat
patches. She is said to have been inspired by an "inner landscape,"
the distilled sensations from a remembered landscape: scanning vision; light
contrast; the loose sensations linking the image in the mind’s eye to
the interpretation on canvas.
