The New York School

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936 1929: Stock Market Crash 1934 Public Works of Art Project 1935: WPA begins the Federal Art Project FSA commissions documentary photographers like Lange and Evans Barnett Newman: “I paid a severe price for not being on the project with the other guys; in their eyes I wasn’t a painter; I didn’t have the label.”

New spaces to see avant-garde art: Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery

Large scale and POLITICAL avant-garde abstraction: Picasso, Guernica, 1937

European artists emigrate with the expectation that there will be community among artists, and then build it when they find it does not yet exist in New York Closerie des Lilas, famous café in the Montmartre that had been home to successive generations of avant-garde artists since the 19th century Symbolists

Surrealism: Andre Masson, Battle of the Fishes, 1926 Breton’s definition of Surrealism: “Pure psychic automatism by which one intends to express verbally, in writing, or by other method, the real functioning of the mind. Dictation by thought, in the absence if any control exercised by reason and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.”

Regionalism: Grant Wood, Fall Plowing, 1931

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

Thomas Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932

Mexican Muralists like Diego Rivera provided a model for indigenous symbolism, large scale, and political content

Jackson Pollock, Male and Female, 1942

Other formal Influences on the New York School: Cubism, Expressionism, Neo-plasticism, and biomorphic abstraction

Action Painting: De Kooning, Pollock, and Others

Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman, 1940

Detail of Seated Woman

De Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945

De Kooning, Excavation, 1950

Willem De Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52

Woman I and Venus of Willendorf

Alabaster “prayer” statues, c. 2700 BCE, Tell Asmar, Iraq.

Comparison of eyes

Thomas Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932

Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-38

Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-38

Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-38 JMW Turner, Hannibal Crossing the Alps, 1812 Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-38

Jackson Pollock, Blue (Moby-Dick), 1943 “The American Vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville’s Ishmael took to the sea.” -Harold Rosenberg

Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943

Haida Totem Pole and Pollock’s Guardians

Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, detail, 1943

Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, detail, 1943

Navajo Sandpainting and Pollock working

Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947, with detail Video of Pollock, 1951 Pollock regularly added whatever was in his studio to the painting: nails, tacks, buttons, keys, cigarette butts, glass, combs, and matches often show up coated in paint and adhered to the surface by a sticky web. He also often added sand and glass to his paint to thicken it.

Pollock, Number 1, 1948

Detail of Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 showing handprints

Pollock painting on glass from session with Hans Namuth, 1950

Hans Namuth, Photo of Jackson Pollock, 1950

Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

Natural fractals in a Broccoflower

Pollock, Blue Poles, 1953

Detail of Blue Poles

Color Field: Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman

Mark Rothko, Iphigenia, 1943

Mark Rothko, No. 21, 1947

Excerpt from a letter to the New York Times by Rothko: “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”

Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960 (at SFMOMA) “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.”

View of the Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX, 1965-66

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Seashore, 1809-10

Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51

Barnett Newman, Stations of the Cross—Lema Sabachtani, 1958-66 series of 14 paintings

Newman, Stations of the Cross, 1958-66

Third Station “I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time, of his connection to others who are also separate” -Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman, Fifth Station, from Stations of the Cross

Newman, Fourteenth Station