Mind and mood in modern art, II: Depressive disorders, spirituality, and early deaths in the abstract expressionist artists of the New York School

1994 ◽  
Vol 151 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-488 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Depressive Disorders ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
New York School ◽  
Abstract Expressionist

Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mena Mitrano
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
New York School ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Artists ◽  
De Chirico

In any history of the migrations and transformations of modernism, Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) deserves a privileged place. She shares with Marcel Duchamp, a close friend and her first guide to modern art, the distinctive merit of introducing surrealism to the New York School artists. Though it formed her taste, surrealism was by no means the only force behind her acquisitions. Her collection comprises masterpieces by a variety of European artists she enthusiastically promoted – from Kandinsky to Klee, from De Chirico to Severini, from Giacometti to Brancusi – and of American artists she supported through thick and thin, most notably Jackson Pollock.

Okada, Kenzô [岡田謙三] (1902–1982)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Szostak
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Initial Phase ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
New York School ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
American Citizen ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
Artistic Training ◽  
Mark Rothko ◽  
Marie Laurencin

Kenzô Okada was an American painter of Japanese birth, and one of the earliest artists from Asia to earn an international reputation as an abstract expressionist. Okada began his artistic training at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, but withdrew in 1924 in order to travel to France. In Paris, he met fellow expatriate Fujita Tsuguharu and also became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti and Marie Laurencin. A comparison of Laurencin’s portraits with work from Okada’s initial phase suggests her example was important in the development of his early figural style. Okada returned to Japan in 1927 due to financial hardship, at which point he became associated with the Nikakai, where he exhibited for the next thirty years. In 1950, Okada moved from Japan to New York, where he befriended Mark Rothko, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Clyfford Still. The work of these New York School painters encouraged Okada to forego representational styles in favor of abstraction. During this latter phase, he rendered his paintings in subdued, flat colors with a decorative lyricism often associated with the aesthetics of traditional Japanese paintings; in a 1968 interview, Okada later came to define abstraction as "West and East meeting each other." Okada became an American citizen in 1960 but made frequent visits to Tokyo, where he died in 1982.

scholarly journals Vladimir Mayakovsky and Frank O’Hara: a Reappraisal

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 144-185
Author(s):  
Ronald Vroon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
New York School ◽  
World War ◽  
Vladimir Mayakovsky ◽  
Frank O'hara ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Second World

The “New York School” refers to a group of poets and painters, mostly of the Abstract Expressionist movement, who congregated in New York in the first two decades following the end of the Second World War. They constitute a coterie that has been characterized as America’s “last avant-garde”. Among its most prominent members was Frank O’Hara (1926–1966). Like other members of the New York School of poets, he was strongly influenced by the French and Russian avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. He was particularly drawn to the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose persona and poetry are frequently referenced in his own oeuvre. The present study seeks to establish the origins of O’Hara’s interest in the Russian poet, the sources he consulted in familiarizing himself with Mayakovsky’s work, and the trajectory of references to Mayakovsky that documents how his avant-garde aesthetic both accommodates and distances itself from that of his Russian forebear.

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.

Alive Still

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Severe Form ◽  
The Other ◽  
Left Hand ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Village Voice

In 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met rising young artists and poets. Her life was hectic, with raucous parties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs, including a stint at the Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praise for her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to paint interiors and landscapes. By 1959, when the Whitney Museum purchased one of her paintings, her career was firmly established. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her postpolio work, she achieved a freer style, expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views from her windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.

Ted Berrigan’s Stanzaic Spaces

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmine Shamma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
John Donne ◽  
New York School ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Verse Form

After suggesting (and agreeing) that Berrigan led the Second Generation New York School, this chapter treats the actual forms of Berrigan’s poems, focusing on his sonnets to show that these poets interpret poems as spaces in which to recreate rooms. Berrigan, perhaps more obviously than any other New York School poet, took deliberate steps towards integrating aspects of traditional poetic verse form: Where John Donne encouraged: “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms,” Berrigan retorts (repeated throughout his Sonnets): “Is there room in the room that you room in?” riddling the form with domestic, urban and aesthetic complications. Berrigan explained to an interviewer: “I always thought of each one of my poems, like the sonnets, as being a room. And before that, I used to think of each stanza as being a room.” Accordingly, this chapter examines Berrigan’s stanzas as rooms, arguing that this responsive poetic form functions organically.

Edwin Denby’s Objectivist Modernism and the New York School

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York School ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Dance History ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Objectivist Theory ◽  
Biographical Approach

Whereas chapter 2 examines the emergence of a social modernist theory of ballet in the 1930s, chapter 3 illustrates a new ballet modernism arising in the 1940s through the contributions of Edwin Denby. Denby’s primary innovation to American ballet theory was to reassign dance meaning from social or political themes to the intrinsic properties of the movement itself. This chapter takes a biographical approach to Denby’s criticism to situate this theoretical shift in ballet within the interdisciplinary New York School, in which he was extensively involved, and in which similar challenges to the relation of art and politics were being made by painters, photographers, and composers. This chapter demonstrates that Denby was the architect of a new objectivist theory of dance, which relocates the emergence of objectivism to a much earlier point in dance history, and in a different genre, than previously acknowledged. More than any other critic, Denby was responsible for connecting this objectivist theory of dance to Balanchine’s American neoclassicism, formulating the set of aesthetic principles that still shapes our idea of American ballet to date.

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