Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the
Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, oil and pastel on
canvas, triptych on wood fiberboard, each 37 x 29
inches. The crucifixion was for Bacon a symbol of
humanity’s sadism. (right) Picasso, On the Beach
(La Baignade) 1937. Picasso was a crucial source
and personally encouraged Bacon.
Francis Bacon (British, 1909 -1992),
(left) Painting, 1946, oil and pastel on
linen, 6' 6" x 52”, MoMA, NYC
The black umbrella was the symbol of
British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain, and his policy of Nazi
appeasement before WWII.
“An attempt to remake the
violence of reality itself” (Bacon)
Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 5 x 4 ft,
1953; (right top) source: Velazquez, Pope Innocent X, 1650; (right below) a
still from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, The Battleship Potemkin, Odessa
steps sequence
Francis Bacon, Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef (Study after Velasquez),
4’3” x 4’, oil on canvas, 1954, Art Institute Chicago
(left) Francis Bacon, Three Studies of figures on Beds, 1972, oil and pastel
on canvas, triptych, each panel 6’6” x 4’ 10”
(right) source: Eadweard Muybridge, photograph from The Human Figure
in Motion, 1887
Sotheby’s May 14, 2008, a 1976 Francis Bacon Triptych sells for $86,281,000:
from existential anguish and social disaster to prize art market commodity
American Abstract
Expressionism
Two modes:
- gestural abstraction (Action Painting)
- chromatic abstraction (“Sublime” or
“Color Field” painting)
“The Irascibles” (Abstract Expressionists), Life Magazine cover story, 1951
Theodoros Stamos, Jimmy
Ernst, Barnett Newman,
James Brooks, Mark Rothko,
Richard Pousette-Dart,
William Baziotes, Jackson
Pollock, Clyfford Still, Robert
Motherwell, Bradley Walker
Tomlin, Willem de Kooning,
Adolph Gottlieb, Ad
Reinhardt, Hedda Sterne
Post WW II: New York becomes the capital of the art world
(left) Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) painting, 1950
(right) Willem de Kooning (1904–97) early study for Woman I, 1951
“Action Painting”
Willem de Kooning, Still Life, charcoal drawing, c.1921, student work in
Rotterdam. In 1926 De Kooning stowed away on a ship to the US – an illegal
immigrant!
De Kooning in his studio on West 22nd street in 1937
De Kooning, Elaine Fried (Elaine de Kooning), pencil drawing, c1940 – 1941
Willem de Kooning, Orestes, 1947
compare (right) Arshile Gorky, biomorphic
surrealist cubism, 1936-7
Gorky and de Kooning in Gorky’s
Studio, c. 1937
Willem de Kooning (American, born The Netherlands, 1904–1997)
(left) Woman, 1940, oil and charcoal on canvas, 46 x 32 in.
(right) De Kooning, The Painter, 1940
(left) Willem de Kooning, Pink Angels, c. 1945, oil and charcoal on canvas
(right) Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), The Rape of the Daughters of
Leucippus, 1618
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-2
http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/278/3106
“Venus” of Willendorf, limestone painted with ochre, 4 3/4 inches, 24,000
to 22,000 BCE
De Kooning, Gotham News, 1955
“Action Painting” – Abstract Expressionism
De Kooning, detail below of upper right (signature)
corner of Gotham News, 1955, oil on canvas
Action Painting
De Kooning in studio, Springs, NY, 1960s
Jackson Pollock (American, 1912-1956) painting in Springs NY studio, 1950
Action Painting – American Abstract Expressionism
“I believe the easel picture to be a dying form.” (Guggenheim
Application, 1947)
James Dean in
Rebel Without a
Cause, 1955
8 August 1949 issue of Life magazine:
first artist to become a media celebrity
Lee Krasner (American, 1908 -1984) in New York studio, mid-1930s
Blue Painting, 1946, oil on canvas, 28 x 36” Met Pollock in 1942; married
him in 1945.
Pollock, Going West, 1934-35 ; compare: Thomas Hart Benton, The Ballad
of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934, Oil/tempera/canvas
(left) Pollock, Flame, 1934, and (below left) Naked Man with a Knife, 1938,
o/c, 50 x 36”
Compare (right) David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexican, 1896–1975), Collective
Suicide, 1935, enamel on wood with applied sections, 49" x 6‘ (“Il Duco”)
Pollock, Pasiphae, 1943; compare André Masson, Pasiphae, 1943
Surrealism (subjective mythos and automatism)
and Jungian psychoanalysis: the collective unconscious
Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943, SFMoMA
Jackson Pollock, Mural, 19'10" x 8‘1“, 1943
commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim
Jackson Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947, oil on canvas with nails, tacks,
buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc., 50 7/8 x 30 1/8,“ MoMA.
Partly poured and partly conventionally-painted (vertical) abstraction.
Hans Namuth, photographs and film stills of Pollock Painting, 1951
Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist),1950, oil, enamel, and
aluminum on canvas, 7 ft 3 in x 9 ft 10 in, National Gallery of Art
Navajo sand painting, a spiritual / healing practice; compare to “Action
Painting”: the automatist, performance methods of Jackson Pollock
“I feel nearer, more part of the painting. . . . This is akin to the method of
Indian sand painters of the West"
- Pollock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrVE-WQBcYQ
Pollock created "drip" paintings for only a few years 1947-51
American Abstract Expressionist
Chromatic Expressionism
Painters of the Sublime
Barnett Newman & Mark Rothko
Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774 -1840), Monk by the Seashore,
1809-10, German Romantic Sublime
Wassily Kandinsky (Russian 1866-1944) Composition IV, 1911, oil on
canvas, showing objective forms “veiled” and “dissolved” as a way to move
the viewer from material to spiritual consciousness.
Kandinsky’s internationally influential theoretical text, Concerning the
Spiritual in Art, was published in 1911
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930, o/c, 20 x 20”
Neo-Plasticism – dynamic equilibrium (without symetry) of opposites
symbolizes reconciliation of universal dualities
Barnett Newman (1905-1970), Pagan Void, 1946, oil on canvas, 33 x 38”
At this point the artist destroys all previous works. “The Ideographic Picture”
Barnett Newman, Genesis -- The Break, 1946, oil on canvas, 24 x 27” (c.61
x 69 cm), Dia Center for the Arts
Barnett Newman, Onement I (1948), 27
by 16”, oil on canvas and oil on masking
tape on canvas; (below) Kasimir
Malevich, Black Square, 1915, oil on
canvas, 32” square. Russian Suprematism
Barnett Newman Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Man, Heroic, Sublime) 1950-51,
o/c, 8 x 18 ft
“We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association,
nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of
Western European painting.”
Barnett Newman and an unidentified viewer with Cathedra in Newman's
studio, 1958.
Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1971, Cor-Ten steel, one of four copies,
Rothko Chapel, Houston
Barnett Newman, Broken
Obelisk, MoMA, New York,
2008.
Mark Rothko (American b. Marcus Rothkowitz, Lithuania 1903 -1970)
(left) Self-Portrait, o/c, 32/25”, 1936;
(right) Entrance to Subway [Subway Scene], o/c, 1938
"Art Must be Tragic and Timeless"
Surrealism and myth
Mark Rothko, Omen of the Eagle, 1942
In a 1943 letter to the New
York Times co-written with
Barnett Newman, Rothko
wrote:
“It is a widely accepted notion
among painters that it does
not matter what one paints, as
long as it is well painted. This
is the essence of academicism.
There is no such thing as a
good painting about nothing.
We assert that the subject is
crucial and only that subject
matter is valid which is tragic
and timeless. That is why we
profess a spiritual kinship with
primitive and archaic art."
Biomorphic Surrealism and automatism
"It was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my
purposes....But a time came when none of us could use the figure
without mutilating it.“
Mark Rothko, (left) Sea Fantasy, 1946; (right) Untitled, 1944/1945
Rothko, (left) Number 7, 1947-48; (right) No. 15 Multiform,1949
Mark Rothko, Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown), 1952; West 53rd St.
studio, NYC, 1952
"The people who weep before my pictures are having the same
religious experience I had when I painted them."
Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960, o/c, 114 x 105 in. SFMoMA
Rothko Chapel suite of paintings, 1965-66, De Menil Collection, Houston,
Texas, 1970, Chapel architect, Philip Johnson
“I wanted to paint both the finite and the infinite….
I was always looking for something more.”
- Mark Rothko
Alfred Molina in the currently running play, Red, about the ethics of
accepting the Four Seasons commission for the Seagram building in 1959 for a
series of mural-sized paintings. He turned down the commission after having
dinner in the restaurant with his wife, famously saying,“Anybody who will eat
that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine,”
David Smith (American, 1906 -1965) at “Terminal Iron Works, Boiler-Tube
Makers and Ship-Deck.” (Brooklyn NYC), iron-welding workshop used as
Smith’s studio between 1933-1940
David Smith, series of 15 bronze medals inspired by Nazi war medals he had
seen in Europe. (top left) Untitled Study, 1939, pencil on paper, 11 in.
(top center) Medal for Dishonor: Private Law and Order Leagues, 1939
1939-1952: Picasso’s Guernica on view in NYC before travelling
to LA, SF, and every major US city
Exhibition Catalogue: "Medals for Dishonor by David Smith"
Willard Gallery, New York, November 1940. cover and page, text and design
by Smith
David Smith, (left) Jurassic Bird, painted steel, 1945
(right top) Specter of Profit, 1946 steel and stainless steel with
(right below) Smith’s notebook sketches from the Museum of Natural History
(left) DavidSmith, Australia, 1951, painted steel, 6' 7 x 8'12" x 16"
(on cinder block base) “drawing in space” (2-dimensionality)
(right) Julio Gonzalez (Spanish, 1876-1942), Woman Combing Her Hair,
1932;
(below center) Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973), Head of a Woman, 1933
David Smith, "drawing in space“ welding, construction, assemblage process
Surrealist & Action Painting automatism, spontaneity
(right) Compare Picasso studio, 1912 with constructed guitar (first
constructed sculpture)
Compare David Smith with RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVIST sculptors
(left) Third Obmokhu (student) exhibition, Moscow, 1920
Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, model completed in
1920
Smith, Voltri XVII, 1962
95 in. H
Smith, Tanktotems (series), 1952-60; (center top) Picasso, Bull’s Head, 1943;
(center below) photo of boiler tank tops c.1952) – anthropomorphism, foundmaterials assemblage welding.
http://whitney.org/WatchAndListen/Artists?context=&context_id=&play_id=542
Note color
David Smith, Zig IV, painted steel, 1963
[“Zig” references “ziggurat,” the ancient Mesopotamia structure]
Note the integration of surface and
Space – 2D/3D
Voltri series, 1962, 27 welded sculptures
in 30 days
David Smith, Cubi XVII, 1963,
stainless steel (not found metal)
industrially fabricated
Detail showing polished surface “gesture”
Smith surveying his “personages”
at Bolton landing, upstate NY, 1963
Smith died 2 years later in a pickup truck crash.
The “Tragic Generation”
David Smith, Cubi sculpture at NYC Guggenheim, 2006 exhibition