The New York School, Abstract Expressionism and Pollock’s Gestural Abstraction

Cyril Connolly, the influential British critic and editor at the mid 20th century mark, turned his gaze to the work produced by Gestural Abstractionists and stated:  “Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.”  What do you believe Connolly was referring to in this comment and do you concur with his notion?  Also, does Connolly’s remark offer genuine insight into the work of artists like Jackson Pollock?  Your thoughts?

Photo of Cyril Connolly

Photo of Jackson Pollock Painting

Picasso Responds to the Angst of the 1930s

The great Spanish painter/sculptor/printmaker Pablo Picasso produced a series of images during the second half of the 1930s that collectively constitute one of the strongest statements by a visual artist of man’s inhumanity to man to be found anywhere during this time period.  His masterpiece during this decade, a decade that witnessed the world slipping once again into the dark precipice, would be the mural sized painting entitled Guernica, which summarized not only the artist’s  horror of the Spanish Civil War but his fear and loathing of the impending second world war.  Assessing the imagery found in Guernica and its intended meaning, John Berger stated:

“Picasso did not try to imagine the actual event. There is no town, no aeroplanes, no explosion, no reference to the time of day…. Where is the protest then? It is in what has happened to the bodies—to the hands, the soles of the feet, the horse’s tongue, the mother’s breasts, the eyes in the head. What has happened to them in being painted is the imaginative equivalent of what happened to them in sensation in the flesh. We are made to feel their pain with our eyes. And pain is the protest of the body.6

Picasso’s images remove us from the specifics of the devastation of Guernica to the more general and universal suffering inflicted by war. Neither spears, nor horses, nor bulls can be found in the battlefields of Iraq, but that does not stop these images from retaining their relevance and immediacy.”

What are your thoughts on Picasso’s response to the targeting of Guernica by the German and Italian air forces and the strategic exercise of bombing the Basque enclave into ruins which proved to be a prelude to WWII?

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus

The famed German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, helped pioneer Modern architecture in Western Europe at the Bauhaus and, due to Germany’s slide toward nationalism and militaristic behavior, in Chicago between the wars.  Mies, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, established a new architectural style that they felt best represented modern times.  Mies’ style is characterized by extreme clarity of formal expression and simplicity.  His designs called for the use of modern materials, such as steel and plate glass, to define both the external and internal spaces.  Mies sought minimal structural order as he strove to achieve a maximum of free-flowing open spaces.  He liked to refer to his designs as “skin and bones”.  One of his famous aphorisms is “less is more”.  What are your thoughts on Mies and his architecture designs within the context of defining Modernity between and after and do you agree that “less is more”?

Photo of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion (reconstructed 1999)

The Bauhaus at Dessau

Between the two world wars, the Bauhaus Arts and Crafts School in Dessau offered German political leaders a unique opportunity to move away from the precipice by embracing advanced art theories.  A most profound collaboration between architects, painters, sculptors and designers had been developed by the modernist faculty at the Bauhaus.  Unfortunately, German leaders—including political, industrial, business and military—were blinded by the glare of nationalism and the result would be the condemnation of a powerful avant-garde movement in favor of a second trip to the precipice.  What are your thoughts on the following statement published in the 1919 Bauhaus Proclamation:  “Architects, painters and sculptors must recognize anew the composite character of a building as an entity.  Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which is has lost as ‘salon art’ …Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture ad sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”

Bauhaus Dessau

Max Beckmann and German Expressionism

Max Beckmann, a German expressionist artist who was one of the most insightful commentators on “man’s inhumanity to man” between the wars, sought the opening, the bridge he believed, that would enable him to access the invisible.  Leaving the “real world” behind in favor of the unconscious or subconscious realm, Beckmann sought imagination’s playground  in the hopes that he would communicate with his true transcendental inner being.  Part of his quest for the transcendental was fueled by Beckmann’s growing horror of Germany’s culture accelerating toward the precipice for a second time.  In his work, Beckmann was reacting to a German populace, led by nationalist politicians, that increasingly embraced values such as this statement uttered by Count Baudissin, director of the Folkwang Museum, in the 1930s:  “The most perfect form, the most sublime image to have been created of late in Germany does not come from an artist’s studio.  It is the steel helmet.”  What are your thoughts on Beckmann’s work within the context of the late 1920s and early 1930s Germany which was becoming nationalistic and militaristic once again?

Max Beckmann, Paris Society, 1931

Paul Klee and the German Bauhaus

Paul Klee, the German/Swiss painter and teacher/mentor at the Bauhaus, had strong feelings and beliefs about color, form, and structural expression.  In the 1924 publication On Modern Art, Klee stated:  “Sometimes I dream of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of element, object, meaning and style…We must go on seeking it!  We have parts, but not the whole!  We still lack the ultimate power, for:  the people are not with us.  But we seek a people.  We began over there in the Bauhaus. We began there with a community to which each one of us gave what we had.  More we cannot do.”  What are your thoughts on Paul Klee and his work within the context of this lament that the people are not with the avant-garde, they are not with the experimental artists?

Alexlander Eliasberg, Photograph of Paul Klee, 1911

Paul Klee, Twittering Machine, 1922

Franz Marc and the Expressionist Movement

Franz Marc, a founding member of the German Expressionist group called Der Blaue Reiter  (The Blue Rider), felt a growing tension in urban life during the second decade of the 20th century and retreated from this angst by focusing more and more on the animal kingdom.  With the inevitability of war almost a pre-drawn conclusion in Marc’s mind, the artist was convinced that he needed to unleash his abhorrence within the matrix of  his canvases. As Marc, and other Expressionist artists who shared his concerns for contemporary times, turned his gaze toward the animal kingdom, he wrote the following in a preface to the Der Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912):   “Whenever we have seen a crevice in the crust of convention, we have called attention to it, because we have hoped for a force underneath, which will someday come to light.”  Marc goes on to elaborate on this “force underneath” when he states:  “I could paint a picture called The Doe.  Pisanello has painted them.  I may also want to paint a picture, The Doe Feels.  How infinitely more subtle must the painter’s sensitivity be in order to paint that!”  What are your thoughts on Marc’s view on contemporary times as manifested in his writings and in his paintings such as Deer in the Forest and Fate of the Animals (both 1913)?

Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest, 1913

Franz Marc, The Fate of the Animals, 1913

Italian Futurism and the Second Decade of the Twentieth Century

Italian Futurism celebrated speed, power, noise, machines, engine heat, dynamic movement and a host of other manifestations associated with the Age of the Machine.  In the 1910 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, Umberto Boccioni exclaimed:  “Painters have always shown us things and people in front of us.  We will put the spectator in the middle of the picture.”  What are your thoughts about being put in the center or “middle” of the composition and how do you feel about the aesthetic glorification of the machine?

Umberto Boccioni, Elasticity

Picasso and Analytic Cubism

Pablo Picasso devoured the visible world whenever he unleashed his creative genius toward the blank canvas.  In a 1923 interview for The Arts, Picasso declared:  “Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results.  Those who think this way have not understood it.  Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life.”  An even more insightful comment about “process” may be distilled from the great Spanish modernist who made the following declaratio:  “When I paint a bowl, I want to show you that it is round, of course. But the general rhythm of the picture, its composition framework, may compel me to show the round shape as a square. When you come to think of it, I am probably a painter without style. ‘Style’ is often something that ties the artist down and makes him look at things in one particular way, the same technique, the same formulas, year after year, sometimes for a whole lifetime. You recognize him immediately, for he is always in the same suit, or a suit of the same cut. There are, of course, great painters who have a certain style. However, I always thrash about rather wildly. I am a bit of a tramp. You can see me at this moment, but I have already changed, I am already somewhere else. I can never be tied down, and that is why I have no style.”   Do these comments from Picasso help you understand his work?  Do the artist’s vocalization of his creative process give you insight and access to this master’s vision of the visible world?  Or is our knowledge of early modernism solely derived from the work itself and bears no bearing or allegiance to the artist’s words?  Your thoughts?

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Ambrose Vollard

Pablo Picasso and the Portrait of Gertrude Stein

In 1906 something magical unfolded in the realm of portrait painting when the young Spanish painter Pablo Picasso received a commission from the avant-garde American writer Gertrude Stein.  At this precise moment in time, Picasso was seriously reconsidering the space/time construct in the art of painting when he found himself on the receiving end of a most envious opportunity.  Ms. Gertrude Stein had recognized something intriguing in the work by Picasso that she had seen in Paris and desired to possess a painting by this young Spaniard.  After 80+ modeling sessions during the course of the summer 1906, both Picasso and Stein needed a break from one another.  Some weeks passed and then Picasso returned to the unfinished portrait and painted out the face with very thin washes of pigment.  Once the earlier effort of capturing a likeness of Ms. Stern had been obliterated,  Picasso responded “intuitively” to the “face issue” with a power and vehemence that would soon turn the ART world on its axis and forever impact how we “see” the face.  Looking back on this significant juncture in his artistic life, Picasso stated:     “To search means nothing in painting.  To find is the thing..I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”  What are your thoughts on Picasso’s sojourn into a new realm with this “finished” portrait of Gertrude Stein?

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906

X-ray of Stein portrait