Franz Kline
Franz Jozef Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys. He attended Boston University, and later taught at a number of institutions including Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.[1] He spent summers from 1956 to 1962 painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and died in New York City of a rheumatic heart disease. He was married to Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer. Career[edit] As with Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, he was labeled an "action painter" because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas. Black and white and color[edit] Exhibitions[edit] Influence[edit]
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. His paintings are existential in tone and content, explicitly composed with the intention of communicating a sense of locality, presence, and contingency.[1] Early life[edit] Newman was born in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Career[edit] Newman wrote catalogue forewords and reviews and also organized exhibitions before becoming a member of the Uptown Group and having his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948. Throughout the 1940s he worked in a surrealist vein before developing his mature style. Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? The zip remained a constant feature of Newman's work throughout his life. Newman also made a series of lithographs, the 18 Cantos (1963–64) which, according to Newman, are meant to be evocative of music. Legacy[edit] Art market[edit]
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as Abstract expressionism or Action painting, and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, and Clyfford Still. In September 2011 de Kooning's work was honored with a large-scale retrospective exhibition: de Kooning: A Retrospective September 18, 2011 – January 9, 2012 at MoMA in New York City. Organized by John Elderfield it was the first major museum exhibition devoted to the full breadth and depth of de Kooning's career, containing nearly 200 works. Biography[edit] Mature works[edit] Exhibitions[edit] Recognition[edit]
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko (Latvian: Markus Rotkovičs, Russian: Марк Ро́тко; born Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич; Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. He is generally identified as an Abstract Expressionist, although he himself rejected this label and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter." With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists. Childhood[edit] Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Governorate, in the Russian Empire (today Daugavpils in Latvia). Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated ("We were a reading family," Rothko's sister recalled[2]), and Rothko was able to speak Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Emigration from Russia to the U.S. Fearing that his sons were about to be drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, Jacob Rothkowitz emigrated from Russia to the United States. Rothko received a scholarship to Yale.
Abstract expressionism
Style[edit] Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey, especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate the "all-over" look of Pollock's drip paintings. Mark Tobey, Canticle, 1954. Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of the early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. Although the abstract expressionist school spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and the San Francisco Bay area of California.
Eve - 1950
Frank Stella
Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella continues to live and work in New York. Biography[edit] Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent.[1] After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Work[edit] Late 1950s and early 1960s[edit] Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. From 1960 Stella began to produce paintings in aluminum and copper paint which, in their presentation of regular lines of color separated by pinstripes, are similar to his black paintings. Late 1960s and early 1970s[edit]
composition - 1955
