Word: expressionistic
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Pousette-Dart has always had his following, of course, and in any case it would be idle to put his early work in the '40s and '50s on the same level as De Kooning's or Pollock's. He certainly shared the early Abstract Expressionist interest in primitive art, totems, archetypal forms. And its general legacy from '30s Picasso too: Pousette-Dart's Portrait of Pegeen, 1943 (the subject was the deeply neurotic teenage daughter of Peggy Guggenheim, his dealer), is heavily dependent on Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. There is also a scary Expressionist insight to the chaotic...
Abstract expressionism, that image-destroying, paint-flinging whirlwind, held sway as America's -- and modernism's -- dominant style during the 1940s and '50s. Though its base was New York City, the abstract-expressionist ethos pervaded every artistic center in the U.S., including the San Francisco Bay area. There, during the late '40s, a flourishing local school had been influenced by the forceful presence of artist-teachers Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko...
...bold move that David Park, a young instructor at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, made one day in 1949. He gathered up all his abstract-expressionist canvases and, in an act that has gone down in local legend, drove to the Berkeley city dump and destroyed them. Park had become disenchanted with abstract expressionism's strict, non-representational regimen. He wanted, as he put it, to stop producing "paintings" and start painting "pictures." Two years later, he submitted a clearly representational work, Kids on Bikes, 1950, to a competitive show -- and won, to the astonishment...
...figurative art was not merely guerrilla resistance to abstract expressionism but a genuine stylistic movement. As the guest curator, Stanford University's Caroline A. Jones, writes in the catalog, it gave Bay Area artists "a way of saving that which was still vital and dynamic in the Abstract Expressionist style and a way of moving forward...
...Francisco an exhibition recalls how local artists shook loose from the dominant abstract-expressionist style of the 1950s to meld it with traditional figure painting...