1. The New York School

2. 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.”

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

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

5. 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

6. 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.”

7. Regionalism: Grant Wood, Fall Plowing, 1931

8. Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

9. Thomas Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932

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

11. Jackson Pollock, Male and Female, 1942

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

13. Action Painting: De Kooning, Pollock, and Others

14. Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman, 1940

15. Detail of Seated Woman

16. De Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945

17. De Kooning, Excavation, 1950

20. Willem De Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52

21. Woman I and Venus of Willendorf

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

23. Comparison of eyes

24. Thomas Hart Benton, Arts of the West, 1932

25. Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-38

26. Jackson Pollock, Going West, 1934-38

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

28. 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

29. Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943

30. Haida Totem Pole and Pollock’s Guardians

31. Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, detail, 1943

32. Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, detail, 1943

33. Navajo Sandpainting and Pollock working

34. 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.

35. Pollock, Number 1, 1948

36. Detail of Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 showing handprints

37. Pollock painting on glass from session with Hans Namuth, 1950

38. Hans Namuth, Photo of Jackson Pollock, 1950

39. Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

40. Natural fractals in a Broccoflower

41. Pollock, Blue Poles, 1953

42. Detail of Blue Poles

43. Color Field: Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman

44. Mark Rothko, Iphigenia, 1943

45. Mark Rothko, No. 21, 1947

46. 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.”

47. 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.”

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

49. Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

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

51. Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51

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

53. Newman, Stations of the Cross, 1958-66

54. 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

55. Barnett Newman, Fifth Station, from Stations of the Cross

56. Newman, Fourteenth Station