Word: pollocks
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...prompt a change in the style of American painting that, though it seems less momentous now than it did 20 years ago, was quite decisive. This was the passage from De Kooning-style "gesture" (the most imitated side of '50s painting) to allover soaking and staining, derived from Pollock and Miro via Frankenthaler. No doubt, in the end, even the toughest woman artist shrinks from constantly hearing that she painted a "seminal work," but Frankenthaler's Mountains and Sea, 1952, was certainly generative. It was the picture that provoked American color- field painting...
...year-old Frankenthaler painted it after a trip to Nova Scotia, whose coast is plainly visible in it: the pine-forested mountains and humpy boulders, the dramatic horizontal blue. It was made flat on the floor, like a Pollock, and records the influence of Cezanne's watercolors, as well as abstract expressionist painters whom Frankenthaler had studied -- in particular, Arshile Gorky, whose looping organic line is reflected in her sketchy charcoal underdrawing. For all its size, it is an agreeably spontaneous image (and was painted in one day), pale and subtle, with a surprising snap to its trails and vaporous...
...kind of unforeseen imagery that popped out of it. From the big red hand (of God?) that appears in Eden, 1956, to the shamelessly romantic sky space that hangs behind the lavender blobs of pigment in Sacrifice Decision, 1981, one sees traces of the surrealist ideas that had formed Pollock -- an openness to the kind of unsought private image that was generally barred from color-field painting. Frankenthaler disliked programs and was not a self-conscious avant-gardist...
...from mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso's block figures and El Greco's twisty saints, Benton assembled the theory of kinetic composition that would eventually alter the walls of the Midwest. It would alter abstract painting itself, since his preoccupation with surge and flow got across to Pollock and, much etherealized, led to Pollock's invention of "all-over" abstraction. In his own work, however, what it mainly produced was rhetoric...
...State Capitol, Jefferson City, and the Truman Library, Independence, Mo.; his name might still be invoked in Kansas City, where his latter years were spent; and most students of American art history knew that he had been the teacher (and to no small extent, the substitute father) of Jackson Pollock at the Art Students League in New York City. But actual interest in the Michelangelo of Neosho, Mo., was fairly low, which mirrored the poor esteem into which American regionalism, the populist art movement that in the '30s had tried to assuage the miseries of the Depression, had slumped. From...