Word: abstract
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...this summer is one of the most explosive and controversial art shows in decades. Called "The New American Painting" and financed by the International Council at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition is the first long, mass look Europeans have had at the leaders of the abstract expressionist movement. Billed by its partisans as the first home-grown art movement to rate international recognition, "The New American Painting" is getting cheers from most younger painters, cries of outrage from many critics, nibbles from some collectors and a monumental amount of bafflement from the general public...
Nearly all the leading U.S. abstract expressionists painted realistically before they turned to abstraction. Nine of them got through the 1930s painting government murals. "The most important thing for all of us was the WPA," says Willem de Kooning, recognized leader of the movement since the death of 44-year-old Jackson Pollock in an auto accident in 1956. The WPA was important in more than one way. It enabled the larval abstractionists to live by painting, established them as professionals and helped to produce the reaction that turned them to, abstraction in the 1940s...
Empty or Vital? The seekers merged as a group in 1948, when they formed "The Club" for artists only, met in a loft in Greenwich Village, debated: "What is abstract art in the good sense?'' "How do you know when a work is finished?" "Why put a title on a painting?" Though no agreement was reached, each artist found his canvas recording a battle royal in which the brush strokes, drippings and splatter were visual records of his ordeal...
...expression without regard for what it communicates. The absence of any recognizable visual imagery has struck many critics and philosophers, like Theologian Paul Tillich, as a cult of meaninglessness, proof of "the emptiness of our existence in industrial society." Other critics have an entirely different perspective, see in the abstract-expressionist breakthrough the opening of a brave, new, unfettered world of art. Worcester Museum Director Daniel Catton Rich finds the movement producing "the most fruitful work being done in this decade ... a new, vital kind of American abstraction, pictures which in sweep, size and dynamics display typically American qualities. Beside...
Empty or vital, art or droolings, U.S. abstract-expressionist painting has arrived and is not likely to be rubbed out. Most of the paintings submitted in art competitions in major U.S. art centers show strong abstract-expressionist influence. The interest and enthusiasm of young European artists or "The New American Painting" suggest that this influence is now being exported to Europe. Whether it will have force enough to break down the scorn of the unconverted critics and the bewilderment of the public is still to be seen...