SOME TERMS FOR TODAY’S CLASS Action Painting (pertains to Pollock and De Kooning) Allover or Overall Abstraction (pertains to Pollock) Gestural painting (pertains to Pollock and especially De Kooning) Color Field painting (pertains to Rothko) Hard Edge painting (pertains to Kelly and Stella)

1942 Group Photo of European Expatriate Artists in New York Front :Matta, Zadkine, Tanguy, Ernst, Chagall, and Léger Back :Breton, Mondrian, Masson, Ozenfant, Lipchitz, Tchelitchev, Seligmann, and Berman

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950

Pollock, 1950 Kandinsky, 1913 Relationship between Abstract Expressionism and early 20th- century abstract painting

Pollock, 1950 Masson, 1926 Relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism

Woman standing in front of Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Size matters...

Autumn Rhythm Photograph of Pollock at work Action Painting: Term coined by the critic Harold Rosenberg, who thought of the canvas as an arena in which violent and heroic actions were performed by artistic warriors

Autumn Rhythm and details

Allover or Overall Abstraction A term applied to the works of Pollock, in which there are no distinct shapes. Rather, his open, interpenetrating lines form an “overall” field in which every area of the canvas is of equal value, and no single object stands out from the total “mass image.”

Pollock: “I try to stay away from any recognizable image; if it creeps in, I try to do away with it.... My concern is with the rhythms of nature”—that is, with capturing the underlying dynamism of nature, like “the way the ocean moves.” Pollock: “I am nature.”

Note the textbook’s suggestive analogy: “From its position on a wall the work looms above us like a wave about to crash.”

Willem De Kooning, Composition, 1955 Pollock, detail of Autumn Rhythm

De Kooning, Composition Detail of a similar painting by De Kooning—note the “gestural” brushstrokes

Two paintings by De Kooning Composition, 1955Woman I,

De Kooning, Woman I, Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905

Woman I So-called Venus of Willendorf, a prehistoric fertility object

Woman I 1950s ads for Camel cigarettes

Woman I Jayne Mansfield, 1956

Woman I De Kooning’s woman reflects the age-old cultural ambivalence between reverence for and fear of the power of the feminine.

Two “Color Field” paintings by Rothko No. 61 (Rust and Blue), 1953 Orange and Yellow, 1956

Color Field painting (Abstract Expressionism) vs. Hard Edge painting (Minimal Art) Rothko, 1957 Ellsworth Kelly, Red Blue Green, 1963

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM De Kooning, 1955 Kelly, Red Blue Green, 1963 Here the contrasts between Abstract Expressionism and Minimal Art—between gestural painting and Hard Edge painting—are more obvious. vs. MINIMAL ART

Detail of De Kooning Detail of Kelly

Kelly, Red Blue Green, 1963 Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930 Relationship between Minimal Art and early 20th-century abstract painting— not to Kandinsky but to Mondrian

Frank Stella, Empress of India (from Stella’s “Notched-V” series), 1965 Prof. Z. and Empress of India

Frank Stella, Empress of India “A sword in the heart of Abstract Expressionism” Stella Pollock

Frank Stella, Empress of India Stella: “My paintings are based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.... What you see is what you see.”

Empress of India Detail

Empress of India from the side

Empress of India The art critic Michael Fried noted a new feature of Stella’s “shaped canvases”: “The overall shape,” he observed, “echoes the internal form.” Thus, Stella closed the gap between what Fried called the “literal shape” of the painting and its “depicted shape,” thereby achieving a new unity.

David Smith, 3 sculptures from the Cubi series Smith’s Cubi series consists of 28 stainless steel sculptures made between 1961 and Another piece from the Cubi series MINIMALIST SCULPTURE

Sculpture from Cubi series Detail A new type of sculpture: not carved (like wood or stone), modeled (like clay), or cast (like bronze), but “assembled” from pieces of sheet metal welded together

Sculpture from Cubi series Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968 (Far more “minimalist” than Smith’s work)

Donald Judd, Untitled, 1968 Frank Stella, Empress of India, 1965

Untitled, 1968 Untitled, 1969 Donald Judd Note: Works like the one on the right are known as “stacks.”

Untitled, 1969 Judd’s “stacks” are always composed of single units – usually ten of them – with identical dimensions, placed one above another on the wall. The intervening spaces have the same dimensions. Therefore, solids and voids are identical, and there is a unity somewhat similar to that of Stella’s shaped canvases. In addition, the distance between the floor and the lowermost unit is the same and, ideally, so is the distance between the topmost unit and the ceiling (though this is not always possible).

A good example of a Judd “stack” not far from where I live: in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas

MZ and a similar “stack” by Judd