Abstract Art Slide Outline
Abstract Expressionism
William de Kooning
-Dutch-born, American painter
-Work characterized by energetic brushstrokes and twisted figures
-From the time he was 12 he received classical instruction in drawing and
painting.
-He immigrated to the US 1926 at the age of 22 and settled in NYC
-used mistakes to his advantage (newspaper print on paintings)
Jackson Pollock
-American, born in Cody WY, moved to NYC in 1930
-His early paintings are realistic in style
-as his career progressed however he rejected this representational
approach to subject matter and focused on movement, rhythm, and color.
-large scale canvases, dripping, sweeping colors are characteristic Pollock.
Cubism
Pablo Picasso
-Spanish, born Pablo Ruiz, but took his mother’s name
-Rebel from the start, as a teenager he would hang out at the cafes
of Barcelona where the intellectuals gathered to debate and discuss
politics, philosophy, and art.
-As he aged his art became progressively more abstract. He painted
a portrait of Gertrude Stein once. A severe mask-like face with her
features compressed in a restricted space. It is said that she complained
“But I don’t look at all like that.” He said “You will Gertrude, you will.”
George Braque
-French.
-with Picasso he originated the cubist movement
-he was originally apprenticed as a house painter which was his
father’s occupation
-he enlisted in the French army in 1914 and was seriously wounded
Paul Klee
-Swiss painter
-at 19 he moved to munich where he studied art
-much of his artwork was done in pencil and black and white until a trip to
Africa in 1914 inspired him to start using color
-afflicted with a skin and muscular disease which affected his art.
it became more gloomy and brooding
Fernand Leger
-French, born into a peasant family
-served a two year apprenticeship as an architect.
-his later works are based on his experiences in WWI. he began to use
many symbols from the industrial world and to depict his objects and
people as machine-like forms…robots.
Dada
Joan Miro
-Spanish
-at 14 he attended a business college and attended an art school in the
same city.
-after 3 years of study he took a position as a clerk and had a nervous
breakdown. he abandoned business to become an artist
-his works are fantasy, dream-like, fanciful
Marcel Duchamp
-French-born American artist
-work had a major impact on the direction of 20th-century art. By
presenting unaltered, everyday objects as sculpture, Duchamp radically
changed the course of modern art.
-Duchamp enjoyed a comfortable childhood in a family unusually
sympathetic to the arts: his grandfather was an engraver, and three of his
five siblings (Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jacques Villon, and Suzanne
Valadon) became artists
-most notoriously a urinal submitted collaboratively with American artist
Joseph Stella to a 1917 New York City exhibition of the Society of
Independent Artists. Entitled Fountain (1917, original lost) and signed
with the pseudonym R. Mutt, Duchamp wrote of it soon after, "Whether
Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance.
He CHOSE it," and thereby "created a new thought for that object."
Jack Levine
-American painter born in Massachussetts
-trained originally at the jewish welfare center and later at the
boston museum of fine arts.
-In 1935 Levine joined the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal
Art Project. He set up his studio in the slums of Boston, where he painted
the…
Expressionism
Earnst Kirchner
-German
-frantic, rapidly developing artist
-his bold lines and clashing colors create a sense of violent emotion.
-WWI he volunteered for the army but could not stand the discipline
and subordination. he suffered a nervous breakdown. he was moved
to a sanitarium where he continued his artwork.
-His work in the late 1920s became increasingly abstract as he attempted
to solve theoretical questions. The Nazis deemed him a degenerate artist
and confiscated 600 of his paintings. Soon afterward, he committed
suicide.
Edvard Munch
-Norwegian artist, whose brooding, anguished paintings and graphic
works, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the
development of expressionism.
-Munch began painting at the age of 17
-Perhaps the best known of all Munch's work is The Scream (1893,
Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo). This, and the harrowing The Sick Child (18811886, Nasjonalgalleriet), reflect Munch's childhood trauma, occasioned by
the death of his mother and sister from tuberculosis.
Fransisco Goya
-innovative Spanish painter and etcher
-Goya was born in the small Aragonese town of Fuendetodos (near
Zaragoza) on March 30, 1746. His father was a painter and a gilder of
altarpieces, and his mother was descended from a family of minor
Aragonese nobility. Facts of Goya's childhood are scarce
-Goya's formal artistic education commenced when, at the age of 14, he
was apprenticed to a local master, José Luzan, a competent although littleknown painter in whose studio Goya spent four years.
-In the winter of 1792, while on a visit to southern Spain, Goya contracted
a serious disease that left him totally deaf and marked a turning point in
his career.
-A mood of pessimism entered Goya's work
Fauvism
Henri Matisse
-French artist
-master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression.
-Matisse was born in Le Cateau in northern France on December 31, 1869.
The son of a middle-class family, he studied and began to practice law. In
1890, however, while recovering slowly from an attack of appendicitis, he
became intrigued by the practice of painting.
-In 1892, having given up his law career, he went to Paris to study art
formally.
-He started his career with a more naturalistic approach to art but as he
experimented gained a reputation as a rebel in the art world
George Rouault
-French artist, born in a cellar in paris while the city was under attack
-known for his somber portraits of sorrowful kings and clowns and for his
images of Christ. He is often considered the greatest modern religious
painter.
-Rouault was apprenticed to a maker of stained glass originally
Hard Edge
Frank Stella
-American painter, born in Malden, Massachusetts
-painting as an entity in its own right—a painted surface—rather than as a
representation of an object or an embodiment of a state of mind.
-Stella's first exhibited works in this mode were the so-called pinstripe, or
black paintings: wide black stripes separated by narrow strips of bare
canvas. It was this style that paved the way for minimalism. Later, in the
1960s, he experimented with bright colors and oddly shaped canvases.
Kenneth Noland
-American painter
-used geometric motifs and irregularly shaped canvases
Minimal
Ronald Bladen
Barnett Newman
-American painter
-He is best known for his simplified canvases in which a large block of
color, or color-field, is broken by one or more vertical lines.
-Newman attempted to create a sense of tension on the canvas
-Newman also exploited the impact of the size of his canvases; some of
his works were so large that they filled the viewer's field of vision.
Non-objective art
Vasily Kandinsky
-Russian painter
-Born in Moscow, December 4, 1866, Kandinsky studied at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, from 1896 to 1900
-His early paintings were executed in a naturalistic style, but in 1909, after
a trip to Paris during which he was highly impressed by the works of the
fauves and postimpressionists, his paintings became more highly colored
and loosely organized.
-Around 1913 he began working on paintings that came to be considered
the first totally abstract works in modern art; they made no reference to
objects of the physical world and derived their inspiration
Jackson Pollock
Op art
Agam
Yaacov Gipstein
- pioneer and leading exponent of optical and kinetic art, best known for
his three-dimensional paintings and sculptures.
-Agam was the son of a Russian rabbi. He grew up in an early Jewish
settlement and did not begin his formal schooling until age 13. Having
learned to draw at an early age, he studied art in Jerusalem…
Piet Mondrian
-
Dutch painter, who carried abstraction to its furthest limits
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Through radical simplification of composition and color, he sought to
expose the basic principles that underlie all appearances.
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Born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, on March 7, 1872, and originally
named Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Mondrian embarked on an artistic
career over his family's objections, studying at the Amsterdam
Academy of Fine Arts.
Pop art
Frank Oldenberg
Surrealism
Salvador Dali
-
Spanish painter, writer, and member of the surrealist movement
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He was born in Figueras, Catalonia, and educated at the School of Fine
Arts, Madrid.
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Dalí's paintings from this period depict dream imagery and everyday
objects in unexpected forms, such as the famous limp watches in The
Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York
City).
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His later paintings, often on religious themes, are more classical in
style.