Word: art
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...avant-garde art movement has ever won such instant recognition-and evoked such instant outrage-as did Abstract Expressionism, the movement that sprang from the lofts of downtown Manhattan and the studios at the far tip of Long Island in the turbulent years after World War II. Its trademark was a photograph of Jackson Pollock, intently swirling skeins of paint from a stick onto a canvas laid flat on a floor. "The most powerful painter in contemporary America," declared Critic Clement Greenberg. "Chaos . . . wallpaper . . . an elaborate if meaningless tangle of cordage and smears," complained the more conventional commentators...
Today Abstract Expressionists enjoy the status, both esthetic and financial, of old masters. And like old masters, they have been declared dead by the brashest of the avantgarde. But they changed the course of art. Whether for better or worse is arguable; that they did, is incontestable...
...nowhere can these Abstract Expressionists be seen as a group. Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art opened a show that aspired both to re-examine the movement's range and, by implication, to plead for more space to make a permanent shrine for this radical movement that first established U.S. leadership in the world of art. In a reproachful sentence intended to inspire donations to its building fund, the museum's press releases note that all the works belong to the museum or have been promised to it, but have mostly not been displayed...
Because the paintings of these founding fathers were mostly abstract, art historians have generally argued that Abstract Expressionism was a descendant of analytical Cubism, or the abstractionism of Russia's Wassily Kandinsky. Curator Rubin argues that the style's most immediate ancestor is Surrealism. His case is convincing...
Gathered penniless in New York in the politically volatile 1930s, artists boned up like magpies on a dozen different artistic idioms, haunting museums and devouring books when not studying at the Art Students League. Arshile Gorky, the Armenian refugee, was initially a devotee of Ingres, Léger, Matisse, Cézanne and Kandinsky. Robert Motherwell drew much of his inspiration from Matisse. De Kooning, the Dutch immigrant, was closer to Cubism and de Stijl; Pollock, the shy Westerner, studied under Thomas Hart Benton, and was influenced by Mexico's David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. They...