KEY ARTISTS:
Pollock & Rothko (USA)
McCahon & Hotere (NZ)
KEY MEANINGS:
Place
Philosophy & Spirituality
Identity
Ideas about art
KEY CONTEXTS:
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The WWII ended in 1945, but its impact lingered on. It brought significant social, economic and political changes in America, and the post-war society puzzled the minds of the emerging artists. They were mentally still traumatized by the violence of the war, but the war brought economic prosperity to the country, which changed and modernised their world at a rapid pace. Abstract Expressionist paintings reflect this troubled state, shaped by various social, political and philosophical influences.
"The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man's dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance."
- Paul, Stella. "Abstract Expressionism", Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
"The crisis of war and its aftermath are key to understanding the concerns of the Abstract Expressionists. These young artists, troubled by man's dark side and anxiously aware of human irrationality and vulnerability, wanted to express their concerns in a new art of meaning and substance."
- Paul, Stella. "Abstract Expressionism", Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Post-War American Society |
Post-WWII Economy Booms |
The Cold War |
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Existentialism in 3 Minutes |
Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious Theory |
Greenberg's Rule for Modern Art |
How Jackson Pollock became so overrated |
What is Abstract Expressionism? |
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ALL ABOUT THE ACTION: JACK THE DRIPPERJackson Pollock (1912-1956)In 1947 Jackson Pollock arrived at a new mode of working that brought him international fame. His method consisted of flinging and dripping thinned enamel paint onto an unstretched canvas laid on the floor of his studio.
This direct, physical engagement with his materials welcomed gravity, velocity, and improvisation into the artistic process, and allowed line and color to stand alone, functioning entirely independently of form. His works, which came to be known as “drip paintings,” present less a picture than a record of the fluid properties of paint itself. Though self-reflexive in nature, they readily inspire larger interpretations; the explosive, allover expanses of Number 1A, 1948 (1948) and One: Number 31, 1950 (1950) can be seen as registering a moment in time marked by both the thrill of space exploration and the threat of global atomic destruction. During the Cold War, Pollock’s paintings and those of his Abstract Expressionist peers, including Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, were promoted, as emblems of the freedoms fostered under liberal democracy. Pollock came to New York in 1930, as a young art student from Los Angeles. While taking classes at the Art Students League, he pursued a close mentorship with painter Thomas Hart Benton and immersed himself in Surrealism and the subconscious and the work of Pablo Picasso. For several years, he worked for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Pollock enjoyed recognition beginning in the early 1940s, with the support of critic Clement Greenberg and collector-gallerists Betty Parsons and Peggy Guggenheim. In 1956, at the age of 44, the artist died behind the wheel of his car. The profound influence of Pollock’s approach—at once emphatically literal and radically open to the world—may be found in the words of a Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd who wrote in Arts Magazine, “It’s clear that Pollock created the large scale, wholeness and simplicity that have become common to almost all good work.” www.moma.org/artists/4675 |
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950
PROCESS MADE VISIBLE: HOW POLLOCK PAINTED
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AN ARTIST WHO BELIEVED IN THE POWER OF ARTMark Rothko (1903-1970)Mark Rothko sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears.
“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions….If you…are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.” Rothko painted to plumb the depths of himself and the human condition. For him, art was a profound form of communication, and art making was a moral act. Born Markus Rothkowitz in Latvia in 1903, Rothko immigrated to the United States with his family in 1913. In 1921, he entered Yale University, leaving two years later. Like his peers, he found his direction and his place in New York. It was there, in 1925, that he began to study at Parsons School of Design under painter Arshile Gorky, who powerfully influenced him and many other Abstract Expressionists. Gorky and Rothko shared an interest in European Surrealism as evidenced by the biomorphic forms populating their paintings from the early 1940s. For Rothko, these forms would ultimately give way to the floating zones of colour over coloured grounds for which he would become known. Rothko first developed this compositional strategy in 1947. Described as “Colour Field painting” by critic Clement Greenberg in 1955—a term that stuck—it is a style characterized by significant open space and an expressive use of colour. Rothko was one of its pioneers. Rothko spent the rest of his career exploring the limitless possibilities of layering variously sized and coloured rectangles onto fields of colour. By 1968, Rothko’s health was in decline from years of severe anxiety and his related drinking and smoking habits. After surviving an aneurism, he continued to smoke and drink despite his doctor’s orders, but he did scale back the size of his canvases and switch from oils to acrylic paints to reduce the strain that his painting process placed on his body. In 1970, at 66 years old, the chronically depressed artist committed suicide, leaving behind a body of work that brought him both critical and commercial success during his lifetime. www.moma.org/artists/5047 A MUST WATCH: SIMON SCHAMA’S POWER OF ART - ROTHKO
Click on the image to watch |
SEAGRAM MURALS & ROTHKO CHAPEL
Rothko's Seagram Murals
“Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.”
– Mark Rothko “On February 25 1970, nine paintings by Rothko arrived at the Tate Gallery. A few hours earlier, Rothko’s body was discovered dead in his New York studio.” – Simon Schama |
Rothko Chapel (Houston, Texas)
NEW ZEALAND MODERNIST PAINTERS:
Colin McCahon & Ralph Hotere
Key Art Works: click for more info |
EXISTENTIAL QUESTIONS OF LIFE, DEATH, FAITH & DOUBTColin McCahon (1919-1987)"Colin McCahon is the outstanding figure in New Zealand visual art of the twentieth century. He was a great painter and a profound thinker. He was also a teacher, curator, and critic whose contribution to art in New Zealand is immense."
Colin McCahon was born in 1919 in Timaru, though he spent most of his early years in Dunedin. In 1933, convinced he wanted to be an artist, McCahon attended Saturday morning art classes taken by Russell Clark. Around this time McCahon would spend his summers in the Nelson area, cycling there from Dunedin to work in the orchards or tobacco fields. The experience of these long journeys through the landscape provided a continuous source of inspiration was to echo throughout his career. In 1945 McCahon married Anne Hamblett in Dunedin. As a wedding present they received a copy of G.A. Cotton’s The Geomorphology of New Zealand, a book that had a great influence on McCahon’s art. His landscapes are often stark and empty (rather than picturesque), raising questions about the human histories of these seemingly unpopulated landscapes. Though never a member of any church, McCahon acknowledged that religious questions were central to his work. From 1946 his paintings began to reflect this increasing fascination, as he ‘peopled’ empty New Zealand landscapes with the characters and events of Biblical stories. By doing so he was referring to a long established tradition within religious art. In the 1940s words began to appear in McCahon’s work. While the resulting paintings were often criticised by the public, it was important to McCahon that his messages were properly understood. He believed the directness of words could help, provide a ‘way in’ to his images. He was aware also of the long tradition of using words within painted images, especially in religious art. McCahon moved to Auckland in 1953. He lived in Titirangi, and around this time his landscapes featured beach, sea, sky, land, boats and kauri trees, all aspects of his immediate environment. McCahon worked at the Auckland City Art Gallery, starting as a cleaner, then later becoming Keeper (custodian of the paintings) and ultimately Deputy Director. In 1958 McCahon’s Gallery job enabled him to travel to the United States to view the major art galleries. This overseas trip, during which he viewed much European and American art, including contemporary works, was extremely influential. On his return from the United States McCahon painted the Northland Panels. This large work demonstrates both the influence of his American trip and his recurring interest in journeys – not only the ‘journey’ McCahon made (in memory) to Northland to paint the work, but also the ‘journey’ the viewer makes when walking past a sequence of panels. In 1961 McCahon started work on his Gate series of paintings. These abstract paintings reflect McCahon’s concern at nuclear war and the atomic bomb, and demonstrate his hope for a solution or ‘way through’. McCahon was appointed lecturer at Elam School of Art at the University of Auckland in 1964. From 1965, McCahon worked almost exclusively in black and white, and during the sixties produced a number of works combining numbers and texts, such as Io and Lark’s Song. Lark’s Song was based on a poem by Matire Kereama, an eighty year old elder of the Aupouri tribe, whose book The Tail of the Fish deepened McCahon’s interest in Māoritanga and Māori imagery. McCahon left teaching in 1970 to paint full-time. During this period he produced both word and landscape paintings, though words increasingly began to dominate. Works from this period include Victory Over Death 2, Gate III and the Necessary Protection series, as well as numerous landscapes of the Kaipara area. In 1972 the Auckland City Art Gallery mounted a survey exhibition of McCahon’s work that later toured the country. Six years later the New Zealand Government presented Victory Over Death 2 to the Government of Australia. Although this reflected the high esteem in which his name was now held, criticism earlier in his career made him suspicious of acceptance of his work. McCahon commenced no new paintings after 1980, and died in 1987 after a long illness. collections.tepapa.govt.nz/topic/947 |
Colin McCahon is New Zealand's most important artist, according to Justin Paton head curator of International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. New Zealander Paton is an active art critic, and author of several books including the award-winning How to Look at A Painting, which also became a TV series.
It's 100 years since McCahon's birth in 1919, and to celebrate Paton has released McCahon Country which examines nearly 200 of McCahon’s paintings and drawings, including both iconic works and others never before published. |
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A PAINTER OF BLACK LIGHTRalph Hotere (1931-2013)Ralph Hotere was one of New Zealand’s most important late twentieth-century artists. He began as a painter with a strong drawing practice, later moving into sculpture and installation. His work reflected an abstract aesthetic, often characterised by an emphasis on the colour black, the use of crosses, circles and lines, and the incorporation of the stencilled and handwritten words of poets. Many of his later works were collaborations with the artist Bill Culbert, who worked with light. Hotere was well-known for using power tools, applying industrial techniques to his artworks, for his innovative use of materials and his ability, as poet Ian Wedde put it, to show ‘the intelligence in ordinary things’.
His Catholic upbringing and Māori heritage underpinned much of his work, which frequently protested against injustice, war, human rights violations, colonisation, and industrial and environmental catastrophe. Art historian Jonathan Mane-Wheoki placed him ‘at the forefront of mainstream New Zealand art history. But in a sense he also stands outside of it, both as a Māori and as one of the most cosmopolitan, sophisticated, international artists New Zealand has yet produced.’ Hotere was born in Taikarawa, a small Māori settlement between the entrances to the Hokianga and Whāngāpē Harbours in 1931. Of Te Aupōuri descent, he was raised in a close Māori Catholic family in his home community of Mitimiti. At 15, he left Mitimiti to attend St Peter’s Māori College (Hato Petera) on Auckland’s North Shore for three years, followed by two years at Auckland Teachers’ College (1950–51). In 1953 Hotere was recruited as an itinerant Māori arts and crafts adviser based in the Bay of Islands by Gordon Tovey, the national supervisor of arts and crafts in the Department of Education. Hotere was one of a small group of pioneering Māori artists who developed the modernist Māori art movement of the 1960s, exploring the styles and techniques of international modern art. Avant-garde in their approach, the Māori modernists combined Māori ideas, cultural philosophies and sometimes forms with European modernism. The Māori modernists shared many of the same concerns as their non-Māori contemporaries. As artists they focused on creating contemporary art for the art gallery rather than the wharenui (Māori meeting house). Modernism provided a means to escape the conventionality of customary culture. Hotere was one of the most forward thinking of the group. His influence extended both to his contemporaries and to the generations that followed. Hotere was awarded a New Zealand Art Societies Fellowship that allowed him to travel to Europe to study painting and graphic design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1961. That year his work, ‘Sand dunes, Hokianga’, was selected for a contemporary group show at Auckland City Art Gallery, making him the first modernist Māori painter to be recognised by New Zealand’s art mainstream; for many years after he was the sole Māori modernist artist fully embraced by the art establishment. In 1961 he also showed work in a group show at Ikon Gallery, Auckland, alongside Colin McCahon. The following year Hotere gained a Karolyi International Fellowship to work in France, and from there spent the next two and a half years travelling and exhibiting in Europe. His travels included visits to the Sangro River War Cemetery on the Adriatic coast of Italy, where his brother Jack, who had been killed in action in 1943, was buried. These visits prompted his first anti-war paintings, his significant ‘Sangro’ series. He began to produce overtly political works, a practice he followed fearlessly through the remainder of his career. In 1962 he created his ‘Polaris’ series which referenced the deployment of US missiles with nuclear warheads during the 1962 Cuban crisis. During his time in England, Hotere exhibited in London which brought him international acclaim. Hotere was one of the first Māori artists to earn an artistic reputation outside New Zealand. Hotere returned to New Zealand in 1965. His time overseas had been a formative and productive period, during which he established his mature style. In 1968 he created and exhibited his first ‘black paintings’, reductive works in which he had ‘cleared away all that is superfluous to requirements’. His ‘black paintings’ became his signature and best known artworks, and he produced many series throughout his career.
In 1969, he moved to Otago permanently. Living in Port Chalmers, especially, he could work more easily away from the distractions of big-city life. Many of his works of this era incorporated stencilled and handwritten words in English, te reo Māori and other languages, including French. Some featured the words of New Zealand poets, including Tuwhare and Bill Manhire. Godwit/Kuaka Hotere’s commission to create a major mural at Auckland International Airport in 1977 marked a significant moment in his artistic development. The 18-metre ‘The flight of the godwit’ (left) is said to be one of his greatest works, featuring vertical bands of colour, circles and stencilled text on matt and shiny black backgrounds, and with ‘every detail resonant with past experience’, as art historian Kriselle Baker puts it. Godwit/Kuaka was restored and retitled by Hotere in 1997 after it was deinstalled by the airport. It was gifted to the Chartwell Collection housed in Auckland Art Gallery. Political works Although notoriously silent about his art, preferring it to ‘exist independently’, the 1980s saw Hotere become more politically vocal through his work. These included his first corrugated-iron works, made in reaction to the proposal to build an aluminium smelter at Aramoana, near Dunedin, that would damage ecologically fragile salt marshes. Other paintings and drawings expressed opposition to the 1981 Springbok tour and to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. His work also protested against international human rights violations, as well as paying tribute to black civil rights activists Martin Luther King and Steve Biko. Career highlights in the 1980s included being selected with Colin McCahon for the Fifth Biennale of Sydney Private symbol: social metaphor exhibition, and the creation of ‘Black phoenix’, a magnificent installation made from the charred remains of a fishing boat. Taking three years to complete, ‘Black phoenix’ has been described as a testament to resilience, a ‘memorial to regeneration’ and ‘an antipodean rephrasing of the European myth of the phoenix’. It was significant not only because of its scale and innovative use of materials, but also for its allusions to Te Aupōuri history. The 1990s saw Hotere create major collaborative installations with artist Bill Culbert, including ‘P.R.O.P.’, ‘Pathway to the sea – Aramoana’, ‘Fault’, and ‘Blackwater’. These works combined Culbert’s work with light and Hotere’s austere use of black, and innovative use of materials such as pāua shells, glass and corrugated iron. Ralph Hotere died in Dunedin on 24 February 2013, aged 81, survived by his wife Mary and daughter Andrea. He was buried at the Hione Urupa at Mitimiti. His work was credited with having led and shaped New Zealand art, and with having been influential within the discourse of contemporary art internationally. teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/6h3/hotere-hone-papita-raukura-ralph |