Abstract Expressionism Essay Research Paper

Abstract Expressionism Essay, Research Paper

“What about the reality of the everyday world and the realityof painting. They are not the same realities. What is thiscreative thing that you have struggled to get and where did itcome from. What reference or value does it have, outside of thepainting itself.” Ad Reinhardt, in a group discussion at Studio35, in 1950. My essay starts with the origin and the birth of this greatexpression in the twentieth century. This movement not onlytouched painting, it had an affect on various aspects of art-poetry, architecture, theater, film, photography. Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian areconsidered to be the pioneer artists to have achieved a trulyabstract visual language in painting. Although they workedindependently, these artists were united by a belief thatabstract painting was capable of evoking a spiritual experience.A central figure of German Expressionism, Kandinsky, in 1911,began to paint densely layered composition of free-floating linesand areas of color, with the intention to reveal his desire toinstill visual form with the properties of music. By 1915,Malevich had invented a new, abstract visual set of paintingsconsisting of one or more colored geometric shapes on a whitefield. He visualized a state of feeling, and a sense of blissand wonder. Mondrian took a different approach with tightergeometric orientation and stricter compositional order. He wasalso inspired by landscape but he interpreted it as a series ofinterlocking vertical and horizontal lines. It would be hard to advance any definition of abstractexpressionism without taking into account the vast and variedcultural and historical happenings that led to its birth. Thisartistic movement evolved over a long time. As we look closelyat any of the members of the generation identified with abstractexpressionism, their biographies reveal the whole experience ofthis artistic adventure. It was an odd reaction of the newAmerica from the old Europe. For more than half a century, thegeneral European public had been bombarded of a variety of artexercises. But new wave of artists in Europe and United Statessaw in change in its future. Abstract was a natural evolution.It would finally liberate artists from the claims of traditionand lift art to the next level of heights. When the economic andideological interests began to fade away, a fresh form ofthinking evolved. It was not just people’s mental habits thatchanged the way of life, it was also the ways of life thatchanged people’s mental habits. The developments in science and technology over thetwentieth century have been accompanied by an unprecedented newforms and means of communications. Born at the beginning of thetwentieth century, the artists whom we link together under thename Abstract Expressionists were also the product of the sametension that produced the forms, formations and deformations oftheir history. It was then, the tension became an art. Willemde Kooning was born in 1904, Arshile Gorky again in 1904, AdolfGottlieb in 1903, Hans Hoffman in 1880, Barnett Newman in 1905,Mark Rothko in 1903, Clifford Still in 1904, Jackson Pollock in1912, Ad Reinhardt in 1913 and Robert Motherwell in 1915. Theseartists’ initial biographies were programmed around the peoplewho were still living according to the principles set down in thenineteenth century. What artists like Pollock, de Kooning,Kline, Motherwell and others were able to realize in the lateforties and early fifties went far beyond the possibilities thatwere opened up by recent influences. The artists ranged fromthirty to forty-two years old then and were coming into themature periods of their lives and were expressing the maturity ofthe art. The economic and cultural circumstances in the UnitedStates conditioned and defined their art- the crash of 1929, theelection of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, the American stance ofneutrality towards World War II until December 1940. The term “Abstract Expressionism” is misleading. On itsfirst appearance, it seemed like any genuine innovative style,breaking away with the past in a radical manner. By a clearerunderstanding it revealed that Abstract Expressionism flourisheddue to some reliable understanding of the painters’ formal andtechnical concerns and their relationship to previous art.Unlike European tradition, American art had no classical roots.In the mainstream America art has not been monumental anddecorative, but basically popular and realistic. After givingprimary debt of the Abstract Expressionism to the European art,the artists managed to preserve some unique and compellingqualities of American expression. These included boldness ofimagery, directness of technique, stress on the materialphysicality of medium and surface, and sincerity of statement.

Abstraction embodied the intellectual achievement andadventurous outlook of the twentieth century, along with othertechnological breakthroughs. Evolving after photography hadproven its ability to capture appearances, abstract expressionismin every walk of art conveyed that could not be captured througha set of lens. It gave complete freedom from conventionalconcerns and restrains, which led to unobstructed expressivenessand individual exhalation. Even though the work may seemspontaneous, abstract artists employed highly calculated methods. The relationship between abstract art and modernarchitecture was particularly strong. Many painters paid homageto architect