Word: abstract
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Main fact to emerge is that the shock treatment of the past abstract expressionist decade is giving way to gentler, more lyric works, with a pronounced shift back toward nature. But with this shift the artists are still clinging tenaciously to most of the impassioned painting discoveries and new-found techniques of the older abstractionists. Second and less heartening conclusion is that the horde of painters spawned by the G.I. bill and flourishing art schools has served mainly to swell the ranks of the second-raters, produced only a handful of individual talents...
Judging from this exhibition one night imagine, that the schism between poetry and Strum and Drang lies in intensity of emotion or dramatic nature of the subject. Actually Goya's "Disasters of War," certainly more graphic than anything here, or Picasso's "Guernica," more symbolic and abstract than anything here, answer an emphatic no. For if Barlach, Kollwitz, Grosz, et al, utter an emotional cry from the blackness of chaos and confusion, it is Picasso and Goya who offer, with emotion disciplined. "right" and "inevitable," an answer which cannot help being true...
...shine to the strapping, red-haired painter from Pendleton, Ore., announced in Everybody's Autobiography: "He is the only American painter foreign painters in Paris consider as a painter and whose painting interests them. He is young yet and might only perhaps nobody can do that thing called abstract painting...
Back in Manhattan after World War II service overseas in the Psychological Warfare Division (SHAEF), Ferren soon became a leading practitioner and exponent of the new abstract expressionist movement, was a founding member of the artists' informal Greenwich Village headquarters, "The Club," served on the selection committee for the 1949 "Ninth Street Show," which pulled together Manhattan's abstract artists in one big show for the first time...
...involved in reorienting around a central image seemed as hard to Ferren as "breaking through the sound barrier." In fact, some such move has long been in the offing. Abstractionist Willem de Kooning first tried it with his grotesque woman images (TIME, April 4, 1953), only to relapse into abstraction. Drip Originator Jackson Pollock was himself struggling with half-glimpsed totem images before his death in an auto crash last August. Younger painters are now pulling and punching areas of pigment on their canvases to achieve a new-found "landscape look" that has been dubbed abstract impressionism...