Shaken into Seeing and Hearing

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-170
Author(s):  
Ryan Dohoney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

Chapter 3 chronicles the intersection of Feldman’s and Dominique de Menil’s spiritual aesthetics. It begins by reconstructing the conditions of their first meeting: the New York City Ballet’s 1966 performance of Merce Cunningham’s Summerspace, re-choreographed for George Balanchine. It goes on to document Feldman and de Menil’s 1967 collaboration on the gallery show Six Painters at the University of St. Thomas. Through her family’s patronage, as well as Dominique’s presence as self-installed head of the art department, the University became a major presenting organization offering avant-garde cultural events in the city. Six Painters featured paintings by Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Franz Kline. Feldman was also given a residency at the university in 1967, where he lectured on abstract expressionism and his own musical aesthetics as well as presented a concert of his music.

Between creativity and death: Abstract expressionists and alcohol use disorders

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. S519-S520
Author(s):  
O. Vasiliu ◽  
D. Vasile ◽  
F. Androne ◽  
M. Patrascu ◽  
E. Morariu
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Heavy Drinking ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
Innovative Work ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Car Accident

American Expressionists were a group of American artists who valued free expression of unconscious elements, combining emotional intense expressions with anti-figurative abstract style. Their main place of creative debates was Cedar Tavern in New York City, considered by art critics an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, one of the most prominent figures of this movement, suspected of having bipolar disorder, abused alcohol during long periods of his life, for which he even underwent psychotherapy. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident while driving under influence, after decades of innovative work, during which he created a new painting method and produced compositions which are nowadays between the most expensive works of art. Mark Rothko also had periods of heavy drinking, and finally he died by cutting his arms with a razor. He is considered a genius, who created a completely new perspective over painting, and his works are also between the most expensive paintings in the world. Willem de Kooning was affected by alcoholism since his early years, and developed dementia, at least partially induced by abusive drinking. Although affected by neurocognitive disorder, he continued to produce amazingly creative paintings until his final years and in 2016 one of his works obtained the record for the most expensive painting ever sold. Using alcohol as a tool for increasing creativity risks to expose the creator to severe disorders or even death, the subject walking on a narrow line between sublimation of unconscious impulses and tragic resignation before them.Disclosure of interestThe presenting author was speaker for Bristol Myers Squibb and Servier, and participated in clinical research funded by Janssen Cilag, Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, Schering Plough, Organon, Bioline Rx, Forenap, Wyeth, Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, Dainippon Sumitomo.

Getting Rid of the Glue: The Music of the New York School

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Nicholls
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Single Group ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
Philip Guston

The term New York School is usually applied to a number of American visual artists working in and around Manhattan from the early 1940s through to the late 1950s. The group included abstract expressionists, abstract impressionists and action painters; among its leading lights were Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Franz Kline. The typical features of New York School art were innovative individual expression and a rejection of past tradition. And while this led to the development of a number of independent styles, rather than a single group style, the overall result was a characteristic American avant-garde approach to art which had much influence internationally.

Lassaw, Ibram (1913–2003)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther T. Thyssen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
New York School ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
The Family ◽  
Galactic Cluster ◽  
Brooklyn Museum

A sculptor of the New York School, Ibram Lassaw was born to Russian parents in Alexandria, Egypt. The family immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, in 1921, where Lassaw learned modeling, casting, and carving. He discovered avant-garde art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926, and continued to study sculpture at the Clay Club from 1927 to 1932. An active participant in New York modernist circles, Lassaw was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Group (1935), and The Club (1949). Lassaw’s interest in cosmic and religious themes culminated in abstract sculptures for Jewish synagogues, such as Pillar of Fire (1953) at Temple Beth El, Springfield, MA. Known for his web-like structures, Lassaw dripped, fused, and spattered metal, embracing the resulting accidental contours that accrued on his gridded designs, as in Galactic Cluster #1 (1958, Newark Museum). He wielded the oxyacetylene torch like a paintbrush and the intricately structured wires twist, turn, and redouble like skeins of paint by Jackson Pollock. His work was included in the 1959 Kassel Documenta, which showcased American Abstract Expressionism.

Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Their Jewish Issues

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 651-664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Baigell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
The Social ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
Art Critics

Clement Greenberg (1909–94) and Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) were the two art critics most closely associated with abstract expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. Neither began their careers as art critics, however. By the mid-1980s, Rosenberg had published literary essays and poems in left-wing magazines, and Greenberg's articles and reviews first appeared at the end of that decade. During the 1940s, Greenberg began to write art criticism, and Rosenberg's essays began to appear frequently in the 1950s. By that time, both had become part of the group known informally as the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Jewish and children of immigrant parents.Highly verbal, vocal, argumentative, and politically left of center, they often published in magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Although both Greenberg and Rosenberg ultimately rejected the more dogmatic and authoritarian aspects of leftist politics, they nevertheless supported the idea that society must move forward, but not necessarily by political means. Greenberg thought that such momentum could be maintained by the cultural elite, and Rosenberg, influenced by surrealism's concerns for the creative process, believed that individuals who were independent minded and creative could do the same. Both encouraged artists to turn from the social concerns that engaged many during the 1930s to apolitical, self-searching themes that came to characterize the art of the 1940s. In effect, they, especially Rosenberg, lionized the artist as an heroic individual. In the words of one historian, both “worked to find a safe haven for radical progress within the realm of individualistic culture.” And both, among the most perspicacious critics of their time, discovered, encouraged, and/or supported artists who ultimately became major figures, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Guston, Philip (1913–1980)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Pocock
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
University Of Iowa ◽  
Federal Art Project ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
The University ◽  
Washington University

American artist Philip Guston is best known for the comic-strip-inspired paintings he created during the last decade of his life. Though they prompted scathing reviews when first exhibited in 1970, Guston’s late works became a precedent for 1980s Neo-expressionism. Born Philip Goldstein to Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants in Montreal, Guston was raised in Los Angeles, where he attended the Otis Art Institute, as well as the Manual Arts High School with Jackson Pollock. Inspired by Italian Renaissance frescoes and Mexican muralism, Guston began his career painting political murals—first in California and Mexico, and later in New York as part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project. While teaching at the University of Iowa and Washington University in St Louis in the 1940s, Guston gained critical acclaim for his allegorical street scenes. In 1951, he moved to New York and began producing gestural abstractions in the manner of Willem de Kooning. His return to figuration in the late 1960s, prompted by the social and political unrest of the period, combines the iconography of his early paintings; specifically, these works feature hooded figures and brick walls, with an expressionist style marked by his signature short, thick brushstrokes.

Motherwell, Robert (1915–1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Education ◽  
Art Teacher ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Synonymous Term ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
Post War ◽  
Symbolic Content

Robert Motherwell was one of the central founding members of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s and served as its major theoretical spokesman throughout his career. The youngest figure in the New York School (a synonymous term he coined for Abstract Expressionism), Motherwell was one of the few who received a formal university education, which is reflected in his extensive series of published critical writings and his prolific activities as a book editor, lecturer and art teacher. Trained in philosophy and art history, Motherwell’s diverse intellectual interests also included modernist literature, psychoanalytic theory and radical politics, which deeply informed the symbolic content of his art. Motherwell is notable for aligning the artistic traditions of School of Paris modernism with the progressive formal and thematic concerns associated with the post-war American avant-garde. In contrast to other Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, who forged signature painting styles, Motherwell actively experimented with a variety of abstract modes and media, but is most renowned for his innovative production of collages and celebrated series of paintings the ‘‘Elegies to the Spanish Republic’’.

Bahá’u’lláh’s Influence on the New York School of Painting: The “Unapprehended Inspiration” of Newman and Rothko

1991 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-89
Author(s):  
Ross Woodman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
New York School ◽  
The World ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The City

As members of the New York School of painters, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko announced not only the passing away of an entire creation but also the bringing forth of a new one. Though unaware that they were living and painting in the City of the Covenant whose light would one day rise from darkness and decay to envelop the world even as their painting of light consciously arose from the void of a blank canvas, Newman’s and Rothko’s work may nevertheless be best understood as a powerful first evidence of what Bahá’u’lláh called “the rising Orb of Divine Revelation, from behind the veil of concealment.” Their work may yet find its true spiritual location in the spiritual city founded by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá on his visit to New York in 1912.

Charles Olson and American Modernism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Self ◽  
Instrumental Reason ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Mark Rothko

The Practice of the Self situates the work of American poet Charles Olson (1910–70) at the centre of the early postwar American avant-garde. It shows Olson to have been one of the major advocates and theorists of American modernism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; a poet who responded fully and variously to the political, ethical, and aesthetic urgencies driving innovation across contemporary American art. Reading Olson’s work alongside that of contemporaries associated with the New York Schools of painting and music (as well as the exiled Frankfurt School), the book draws on Olson’s published and unpublished writings to establish an original account of early postwar American modernism. The development of Olson’s work is seen to illustrate two primary drivers of formal innovation in the period: the evolution of a new model of political action pivoting around the radical individual and, relatedly, a powerful new critique of instrumental reason and the Enlightenment tradition. Drawing on extensive archival research and featuring readings of a wide range of artists—including, prominently, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Wolfgang Paalen, and John Cage—The Practice of the Self offers a new reading of a major American poet and an original account of the emergence of postwar American modernism.

The Theatrical Memory of Space: from Piscator and Brecht to Belgrade

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvija Jestrovic
Keyword(s):  
Postdoctoral Fellow ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

In this article, Silvija Jestrovic introduces the notion of spatial inter-performativity to discuss theatre's relationship to actual political and cultural spaces. Focusing on the Berlin of the 1920s in performances of Brecht and Piscator, then on a street procession of the Générik Vapeur troupe that took place in Belgrade in 1994, she examines how theatrical and political spaces refer to and transform one another. Silvija Jestrovic was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at York University in Toronto, and has recently taken up an appointment in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. She is currently working on a book-length project entitled Avant-Garde and the City.

Erin Espelie

2019 ◽  
pp. 275-294
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
University Of Colorado ◽  
Lanthanide Series ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Short Films ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

Artist/scientist Erin Espelie was trained at Cornell University as a biologist, but turned down opportunities to study biology at the graduate level at Harvard and MIT in order to explore the New York City theater scene, before finding her way into independent, “avant-garde” filmmaking, first exploring her interests in biology and the history of science in a series of short films, then producing the remarkable essay-film The Lanthanide Series (2014), which explores the importance of the “rare earths” (the elements with atomic numbers 57–71) for modern communication and informational technologies. The imagery for The Lanthanide Series was recorded, almost entirely, off the reflective surface of an iPad. In her work as a moving-image artist, Espelie combines poetry, science, environmental politics, and modern digital technologies within videos that defy traditional knowledge categories. She is currently editor in chief for Natural History magazine and a director of the NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

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