1. 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)

2. 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

3. Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950

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

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

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

7. 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

8. Autumn Rhythm and details

9. 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.”

10. 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.”

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

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

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

14. Two paintings by De Kooning Composition, 1955Woman I, 1950-52

15. De Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52 Matisse, Woman with a Hat, 1905

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

17. Woman I 1950s ads for Camel cigarettes

18. Woman I Jayne Mansfield, 1956

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

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

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

22. 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

23. Detail of De Kooning Detail of Kelly

24. 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

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

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

27. 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.”

28. Empress of India Detail

29. Empress of India from the side

30. 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.

31. David Smith, 3 sculptures from the Cubi series Smith’s Cubi series consists of 28 stainless steel sculptures made between 1961 and 1965. Another piece from the Cubi series MINIMALIST SCULPTURE

32. 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

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

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

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

36. 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).

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

38. MZ and a similar “stack” by Judd