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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 9
Lesson 1: Abstract Expressionism- Abstract Expressionism, an introduction
- Finding meaning in abstraction
- Norman Lewis, Untitled
- de Kooning, Woman I
- How to paint like Willem de Kooning
- How to paint like Willem de Kooning - Part 2
- Willem de Kooning, Woman, I (from MoMA)
- Barnett Newman
- Newman's Onement I, 1948
- The Painting Techniques of Barnett Newman
- Restoring Rothko
- Why is that important? Looking at Jackson Pollock
- Representation and abstraction: Millais's Ophelia and Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis
- The Case For Mark Rothko
- Rothko, No. 210/No. 211 (Orange)
- Mark Rothko's No. 3/No. 13
- The Painting Techniques of Mark Rothko
- The Painting Techniques of Jackson Pollock
- The Case for Jackson Pollock
- Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
- Jackson Pollock, Mural
- Paint Application Studies of Jackson Pollock's Mural
- "One: Number 31, 1950" by Jackson Pollock, 1950 | MoMA Education
- Lee Krasner, Untitled
- Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 57
- Franz Kline
- The Painting Techniques of Franz Kline
- Hedda Sterne, Number 3—1957
- "Low Water” by Joan Mitchell
- Beauford Delaney's portrait of Marian Anderson
- Abstract Expressionism
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Franz Kline
To experiment on your own, take our online studio course Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting or learn more about the art of this time in the online history course Modern and Contemporary Art: 1945-1989. Created by The Museum of Modern Art.
Want to join the conversation?
- What is the general European view of American abstract expressionism?(7 votes)
- http://www.academia.edu/2100857/Action_Abstraction_Contrasting_Views_on_Abstract_Expressionism I found this article helpful i hope you will too.(4 votes)
- 1:43- what is artistic about this?(6 votes)
- I think the general idea here is that painters of this time were exploring the idea that to share a mood or emotion with a viewer, much less was actually needed than previously thought. While generally people only relate emotionally to some sort of character or location that they can understand in a work of art, abstract works tend to say that color and composition alone can convey a feeling (perhaps in a much more subtle way).
If the emotion contained in a work of art could be explained in words, the artist could simply have told someone about it and saved a lot on paint supplies. Instead, Kline chose to immortalize one small fraction of his emotion in a way that could only be expressed visually. His popularity is testament to the number of people who looked at it and experienced some fraction of emotion that they cannot explain in words.(3 votes)
- 0:09- 0;19 ,0:34-1:02and ... for a total of 86 seconds out of 191 seconds the curator speaks in general terms about Franz Kline and as a background she has some paintings that have nothing to do with Franz Kline. I could not figure out this style of "lecturing". Is it just me??(3 votes)
- hanging on her left is a small Franz Kline and on her right is one of Kline's contemporaries, Mark Rothko. Both paintings come from the same moment and are directly related.
She's summing up 20 years of work in3:10- it's not all there, obviously, and unfortunately.(4 votes)
- From about1:20she talks about how this new American art differed from European art in its scale (it couldn't be painted on an aisle). But doesn't the long history of monumental European Salon paintings directly contradict this claim? I will give just one example of the hundreds of possible, the 1824 work by Delacroix The Massacre at Chios is "more than four meters tall" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Massacre_at_Chios(1 vote)
- She's referencing the art from the same era or perhaps a few decades before, not the entire history of art per se.(1 vote)
Video transcript
Ann: The importance of ...
of the two factors of scale and of gesture in
abstract expressionism are exemplified in the
paintings of Franz Kline. Usually with a white background and then either only with black or with black and some other dark colors in a very sober, somber
but very strong key, we have canvases that
present I think perhaps a very American idea in
terms of the expaniveness of the landscape in terms
of the bravado of the new. It's easy to make generalizations about how serene American art differs from European art, but
in the case of these paintings by Franz Kline,
I think it's actually, it holds true. The abstract expressionists saw what they felt were the elegant qualities of European art as something that needed to be replaced with
painting that focused on a sort of rawness or brutality even that seemed to exemplify the new world. Scale was one way. They
were making paintings, not that you could paint on an easel, but that need to be painted on the floor or just have the canvas tacked
on the wall of the studio because these were
paintings that were bigger than the human arm span or height and instead these were paintings whose scale was going to engulf you. They were not paintings
that you were going to dominate, either as a maker or a viewer and similarly, you are not going to have a polite brushstroke daintily made by holding a brush in one hand and a palette in the other hand, but instead the kind of forceful, gestural strength
that means that stroke was made not just with
fingers, not just with a wrist, not just with an elbow
but with the whole arm and probably even the whole body and when you look at those marks on a Franz Kline painting, you have the feeling almost
of bridges in America or railroad tracks or these
other parts of the country that were typical of the
technologies and the industry that had set America
apart in the 19th century. Franz Kline was one of the
regulars at the Cedar Tavern and really a [unintelligible]
member of the abstract expressionist group. I think we hear a lot of stories about how solitary they were in their struggles or how moody they were as they wrestled with their art, but in fact that wasn't always the case. There was often times real camaraderie, real helping of each
other at difficult stages and Franz Kline was one of those who was the most supportive and really inspiring to the painters and sculptors around him.