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.

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.

Bishop, Isabel (1902–1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regina Palm
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
New York School ◽  
Art Students ◽  
Applied Design ◽  
Union Square ◽  
The City

Born in Cincinnati, Isabel Bishop spent her childhood in Detroit, where she attended life-drawing classes at the John P. Wicker School of Fine Arts. In 1918, Bishop enrolled in the New York School of Applied Design for Women to study illustration, but transferred to the Art Students League in 1920. Bishop is associated with the realist painters of the Fourteenth Street School. She is best known for her depictions of young female office workers of the 1930s and 1940s, whom she observed as they navigated their way through Union Square (the location of Bishop’s first studio). Bishop, like other Fourteenth Street artists, sought to capture contemporary urban life. Her depictions of working women are notable for their time, as she did not glamorize them or transform them into sexualized stereotypes, but rather strove to portray these young, modern women as they traversed the city in daily life. Bishop was granted her first one-woman show in 1933 at the Midtown Galleries and in 1941 was elected to the National Academy of Design.

Rothko, Mark (1903-1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Hodge
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Native American ◽  
American Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
New York School ◽  
Native American Art ◽  
Metropolitan Museum Of Art ◽  
Four Seasons ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko is one of the most celebrated painters from a group that matured in the US of the 1940s, later dubbed ‘The New York School’. His work became increasingly famous in the US and Europe during the 1950s, and his status was solidified by a large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962. Rothko began his career as a figurative painter. From 1938, he produced an innovative style that drew on Surrealism and incorporated disparate sources from ancient Greek and Native American art to Biblical imagery. After 1945 his paintings became increasingly abstract, moving towards the style that he is most associated with today. These works involve soft, cloud-like rectangles of colour, painted in multiple layers, which produce the appearance of glowing, shimmering light. Rothko had an uneasy relationship with art critics, collectors, and institutions. In 1950, he was amongst a group known as ‘The Irascibles’, who protested that a juried exhibition of contemporary works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was hostile to ‘advanced art.’ In 1958, he reneged on a major commission to produce murals for the Four Seasons Hotel in New York, deciding that its atmosphere was inappropriate.

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.

Krasner, Lee (1908–1984)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen C. Landau
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
American Art ◽  
Immigrant Parents ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Abstract Expressionist ◽  
Clement Greenberg ◽  
History Of ◽  
Artistic Career

Lee Krasner, born 27 October 1908 in Brooklyn, New York to immigrant parents from Russia, was an abstract expressionist painter whose status as the sole female pioneer of the movement is widely recognized. After attending the National Academy of Design and Cooper Union, Krasner’s talent blossomed at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where she developed a radical understanding of the implications of modernism. Throughout her lifetime and long after, Krasner’s artistic career was overshadowed by her role as the wife (and widow) of Jackson Pollock. Credited by critic Clement Greenberg as ‘‘absolutely catalytic’’ for Pollock’s aesthetic development, Krasner shrewdly managed his reputation and prices after his untimely death. This allowed her to establish the Pollock–Krasner Foundation in her will with a multi-million-dollar endowment to support needy and neglected artists. In her Little Image series, created after she and Pollock moved from Manhattan to Long Island in 1945, Krasner explored the possibilities of drawing (and sometimes dripping) in paint in a manner similar to Pollock. By the time Lee Krasner died, on June 20, 1984 in New York City, she was considered a role model for feminist artists. The complexity of what has been characterized as her ‘‘working relationship’’ with Jackson Pollock is a defining feature of her importance to the history of postwar American art.

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.

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.

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.

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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