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. Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery

4. Picasso, Guernica, 1937

5. 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. Andre Masson, Automatic Drawing, 1927
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. Grant Wood, Fall Plowing, 1931

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

9. Jackson Pollock, Male and Female, 1942

10. Formal Influences on the New York School:

11. Hans Hoffman, Effervescence, 1944

12. Hans Hoffman, Smaragd, Red, and Germinating Yellow, 1959

13. Hans Hoffman, Ignotium Per Ignotus, 1963

14. Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, 1926-29

15. Arshile Gorky, Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, 1931-32

16. Arshile Gorky, Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, and Giorgio de Chirico, Hector and Andromache, 1917

17. Arshile Gorky, Nighttime, Enigma, and Nostalgia, 1931-32 and Miro, Nocturne, 1935

18. Arshile Gorky, Gardens at Sochi, 1943

19. Arshile Gorky, The Liver is the Cock’s Comb, 1944

20. Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman, 1940

21. Detail of Seated Woman

22. De Kooning, Pink Angels, 1945

23. De Kooning, Excavation, 1950

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

27. Woman I and Venus of Willendorf

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

29. Comparison of eyes

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

32. Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943

33. Haida Totem Pole and Pollock’s Guardians

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

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

36. Navajo Sandpainting and Pollock working

37. Pollock, Full Fathom Five, 1947

38. Extreme close-up detail of Full Fathom Five
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.

39. Pollock, Number 1, 1948

41. Pollock, Number Four, 1948

43. Hans Namuth, Photo of Jackson Pollock, 1950

44. Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

45. Natural fractals in a Broccoflower

46. Pollock, Blue Poles, 1953

47. Detail of Blue Poles

48. Lee Krasner, Little Images Series

49. Lee Krasner, Noon, 1947

50. Mark Rothko, Iphigenia, 1943

51. Mark Rothko, No. 21, 1947

52. 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.”

53. Mark Rothko, No. 14, 1960 (at SFMOMA)

54. Rothko, Green and Tangerine on Red, 1956

55. Rothko, Untitled, 1968

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

57. Detail of a Rothko Chapel painting

58. Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

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

60. Newman, Dionysus, 1949

61. Newman, L’Errance, 1953

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

63. David Smith, Medals of Dishonor, 1939

64. David Smith, Hudson River Landscape, 1950-51