Abstract expression is also called abstraction, or abstraction. A school of painting after World War II until the early 1960s. Robert Coates, an art critic, first applied abstraction to American art in 1946. The term "abstract expressionism" is used to define bold abstract paintings created by a group of artists. Their works, whether passionate or peaceful, express and arouse people's emotions in an abstract form.
◎ Features
People think that art is abstract, mainly improvisation.
Technically, the most important predecessor of abstraction is usually surrealism. Surrealism emphasizes the concepts of unconsciousness, spontaneity and random creation. It is often used in the oil paintings spilled on the floor by Jackson Pollock in later generations. It is generally believed that Pollock studied max ernst's works.
The reason why the abstract school can form its own school is that it expresses the emotional power of art and has the characteristics of self-expression. This echoes the expressionist anti-figurative aesthetics and some European art schools that emphasize abstract totems, such as Bauhaus, Futurism or Cubism. Abstract painting often has a special feeling of rebellion, disorder and detachment from nothingness.
State
This is the first art movement in America. The rise of this art movement in the United States was influenced by new york's attempt to replace Paris as the world art center. It is also the first important movement of western art after World War II, enjoying an unparalleled position. This is the beginning of a long postwar style experiment, marking the arrival of a new era. Since then, the center of modern western art has shifted from Paris to new york.
Represent
Jackson Pollock's ideas and skills can best show the characteristics of this style. Starting from 1947, he adopted the painting method of laying a large canvas flat on the ground, then walking around it and splashing "paint" on the canvas. The process of painting became like a dance in some kind of ceremony, and his whole body was moving. Hypnotic concentration and thorough physical and mental devotion are the keys to a painting's "independent life". Once his works are completed, those dense pictures and vertical and horizontal twisted lines convey a kind of unrestrained vitality, a feeling of free movement, the infinite fluctuation of time and space and its internal strength.
The spirit of abstract expressionism can be appreciated from Pollock's masterpiece Lavender. At first glance, a mass of hemp-like lines are intertwined. Look at the painting carefully. The paint drops directly on the canvas. There is no recognizable image in the picture, and it is full of unrestrained freedom and passion everywhere. There is no room for perspective in the picture, but it is not flat. Pollock created an ambiguous space, in which most of the strokes are suspended behind this surface, suspended in a space that is intentionally compressed and deprived of perspective. Foreground and background penetrate each other and jump in people's field of vision.
Pollock himself described his painting process like this: "My painting doesn't come from an easel. I seldom stretch the canvas before painting. I'd rather nail the unstrained canvas to a hard wall or floor. I need a hard surface to support it. I feel more comfortable on the floor, so I feel closer to my painting, and I can be a part of it, because I can walk around it, starting from the four sides, and then really go to the middle of the painting, which is very close to the way that West Indians paint with sand. "
"I further abandoned the tools commonly used by painters, such as easel, palette, brush and so on. I prefer to use sticks, trowels, scrapers and thin liquid pigments, or thick coatings mixed with sand, plus broken glass or other materials that are not usually used. "
"When I paint, I don't know what I'm doing. I was familiar with it for a while before I saw what I was doing. I am not afraid to change or destroy the image repeatedly, because painting has its own life, and I try to make this life appear. As long as I get out of the picture, the result will be a mess. On the contrary, there will be pure harmony, harmony and nature, and painting will be perfect. "
Pollock was deeply impressed by the modeling characteristics of American Indian art. In his view, Indians, like real painters, have a relatively complete ability to capture appropriate images and have a strong understanding of the composition of painting themes. Their colors are mainly westernized, and their vision has all the basic characteristics of real art. He believes that art originated from the "sand painting" art in India. The so-called "sand painting" is to spill colored sand through fingers to form colorful patterns.
Pollock's unique creative technique initially aroused widespread anger among the American public, but in the eyes of a few people, he is a rebel hero in painting art. Some people say that looking at his paintings is an adventure, full of surprises and joy. But Pollock mostly ignored the public's point of view and continued to paint stubbornly. He no longer gives a proposition to his work, but only makes up a number when he finishes. He believes that when watching modern art as an audience, there is no need to seek anything. "Just look around-pay attention to the feelings of painting and avoid the themes and preconceptions they seek." When asked if "deliberately seeking meaning and expressing objects in abstract painting will interrupt the full appreciation of the work", he replied: "I think it should be a kind of enjoyment, just like music-you will soon like or hate it. But this is not a serious matter. I prefer this flower to that one. I think-people must be given a chance. "
Robert motherwell can be regarded as the organizer of the abstract expressionist movement. He is a knowledgeable and energetic artist. He studied history, criticism and philosophy earlier and is a self-taught artist. With the formation of abstract expressionism, motherwell's activities became more and more extensive. From 1947 to 1948, he is one of the editors of the influential magazine Possibility. From 1948, he and three famous painters, William Buzz Autes, Barnett Newman and Mark. 195 1 published a collection of dadaism painters and poets, and the publication of this book was one of the earliest signals of the birth of "new dadaism".
Motherwell is also a prolific painter, and his most famous works are a series of works called Spanish Elegy and China Elegy. The picture is dominated by black pens on a white background, forming a geometric shape and structure, with a calm and heavy sense of commemoration. Like Pollock, his brushwork is casual, but the difference is that motherwell's rational power can always play a role in painting. He tried to balance consciousness and unconsciousness, and to coordinate between free expression and maintaining a certain picture composition. The theme of this series of works comes from modern European history. He was only in his twenties when the Spanish Civil War broke out. Every stroke of the picture seems to be the author's nostalgic memory of his youth. His works also show that the "subjective" paintings popular in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s are not incapable of dealing with historical or social themes, while it is a misunderstanding for Europeans to think that abstract expressionism is just an "improvisational" art ... the same theme is war. Comparing motherwell's series of works with Picasso's guernica, we can see the progress of art. As a representative of cubism, Picasso's guernica expresses people's fear of war with a split image, but in motherwell's works, we can't even find the once surprising split image, only the brushwork is left, and the color is simplified to black and white. But it doesn't affect us in any way to find the author's emotion and the theme of painting from the works. To some extent, this "unconscious" expression with swimming strokes is more direct and direct than Picasso's creation. The author doesn't need to draw images to convey emotions, and the brush strokes already contain all the expressions.
From 1949 to 1976, motherwell created more than 50 variant paintings with the theme of lamentation. He began to practice the second major theme in his artistic career around 1968- 1972, and his masterpiece was 1969' s Kai 24. The work consists of monochrome block plane and charcoal lines. This exploration of large-scale color expression includes from relatively uniform but uneven color blocks to rhythmic and diverse painting methods. There is an internal connection between images, rather than a simple arrangement of formal elements, just like the charm of China's calligraphy.
Motherwell's research on surrealism is comprehensive, and he absorbed it selectively. He is not interested in "dreams", but he is willing to explore and exert some intensity and solemnity. 1976, he began to show a new theme, and it was from this time that motherwell entered the most varied and prolific stage in his career. Become an abstract original representative.
Franz Klein's works are as energetic as Pollock's. In the 1940s, he was keen on line drawing, especially used to drawing small black and white sketches and details, in which he studied a single theme or spatial relationship. /kloc-one day in 949, he enlarged some sketches with a slide projector, which inspired him to develop his own unique style: on the white canvas, there are some large black lines, which have nothing but lines and nothing concrete. The blank in the picture is vivid with powerful black strokes, and even some flying white looks more meaningful. When people look at his works, they can understand the meaning of "action painting". In his works, the movement of the pen is very important, which is consistent with China's calligraphy. Whether he is influenced by oriental calligraphy or not, his paintings are consistent with oriental calligraphy in the principle of "taking white as black". Moreover, we cut off all the redundancies and only use black and white to win more with less, so as to achieve a deeper beauty-this aesthetic taste is very close to the oriental calligraphy art.
Crane's first large-scale black-and-white abstract painting was created in 1950, which is characterized by large and thick brushstrokes, but controlled by it, the architectural structure is powerful. His structure had a great influence on the constructivist sculptors in the 1960s. He began to experiment with color in the late 1950s. In the year before his death (1962), color began to play an important role in his works, but the results were not necessarily satisfactory. It seems that color is not important in his ideas expressed by composition, but just a decoration.
Abstract expressionism can be divided into two types. One kind, like Pollock, emphasizes strength and movement and is full of passion. The other is more pure abstraction, which gives people peace. Roscoe is the representative of this style. Roscoe was born in a foreign country and came to the United States from Russia in 19 13, when he was only a teenager. His early works have traces of surrealism, and then gradually become simple. By 1950, he had completely abandoned the concrete image, and his works were often several blank rectangles painted on the painted background, with unclear edges, so their spatial positions were vague. This sense of space is also familiar to us in Pollock's works. Without deep space, this shallow space is unpredictable. The relationship between colors works because the rectangular space produces a gentle and rhythmic pulse, and the unclear junction hides many intriguing things.
Roscoe thinks that he is not an abstract painter, and he pays more attention to the expression of spirit. He said: "I am not interested in the relationship between color and form and other relationships ... I am only interested in expressing people's basic emotions, such as tragedy, ecstasy, destruction and so on." He wants to find the roots of today's western civilization in western traditional culture. He believes that the inner experience of modern people has never left the tradition, so to express the connotation of the spirit needs to be traced back to the Greek cultural tradition, especially the tragic consciousness in Greek civilization, which is the deepest source of western culture. Before he painted mature abstract paintings, he paid a lot of attention to the art of Greece and Rome. From the Greek tradition, he absorbed the contradictory state of the conflict between man and nature and the conflict between individuals and groups in the spirit of Greek tragedy. In his view, these conflicts sum up the basic conditions of human existence. Because he pursues the clarity of expression and removes everything irrelevant to his thoughts, he finally develops a completely black picture, in which he finds a form that is completely consistent with his tragic consciousness and cannot be simplified.
In the late 1930s, Reinhardt began to experiment with geometric shapes and rectangles. In the 1940s, he took collage as the carrier and began to use a free pattern that transcended cubism and space. These patterns minimize the use of personal brushwork, implication and traditional composition, making the work independent of the author and having a new life. In the early 1950s, he painted in a single color, such as red and very dark green, which was similar to black. In the 1960s, he used blue. After that, some internal images appear in monochrome blocks, and smaller rectangles, squares or regular crosses are formed by colors with different brightness or hue.
Finally, Reinhardt pushed his style to the extreme with black (left). On a plane of five square feet, nine black squares of the same size were drawn. These black blocks have no texture, no connection, no change, and seem to have no meaning. Therefore, he believes that what a good artist should do in his creation is to "repeat a painting of the same specification-the same idea, the same monochrome, the same line division in the first direction, the same symmetry, the same texture, the same pattern, the same freehand brushwork, the same balance ... and draw everything in a highly consistent and standardized way." "There are no lines and images, no shape and composition, no vision, no feelings and impulses, no symbols, no decorations, no color or picture sense. There is no joy and no sadness. " All these reflect Reinhardt's persistent belief that "art is art, and there is nothing else", and he pursues pure artistic expression. "The standards of art are individuality and beauty, accuracy and unity, abstraction and essence. For the art of beauty, it is non-breathing, non-life, non-content, non-space and non-time. " In his view, "one of the goals of abstract art in the past 50 years is to explain that art is nothing else, put it in a track, and make it more independent, closed, purified, absolute and detached-non-object, non-concrete, non-symbol, non-intention, non-expression and non-theme." The only way to talk about abstract art or art as art is to talk about things that are not art. "
Reinhardt abandoned everything he thought was art and everything he thought was spirit. His thoughts obviously have some oriental connotations. He used to teach oriental art at Brook and Hunter College, and he was an oriental art scholar. His views influenced minimalism and some later art schools, and also provided inspiration for conceptual artists.
Barnett Newman is one of the most rational artists in abstract expressionism, and his art is full of mysteries and unknowns. Newman expounded his views in an unpublished paper, or "confession", and clearly pointed out that the theme of his art is the mystery of creation and the meaning of human existence in the broadest sense. In many other articles, he wrote ... (the artist) constructs an orderly truth with desire and will, which is the expression of his attitude towards the mystery of life and death. It can be said that artists explore the universe like real creators. It is this that makes him an artist. In the1940s, Newman focused on the legends about creation in Jewish mythology, which not only came from Genesis, but also came from the whole tradition of Hebrew mystical philosophy and Jewish mystical thought. Around 1946, Newman began to develop a painting image: a band of light goes vertically from one side of the canvas to the other. This symbol is reminiscent of the literary metaphor that constantly appears in Genesis and Hebrew mystical philosophy-light as a symbol of creation. At the same time, Newman is close to another tradition, that is, comparing God and human beings to a beam of light-the creator and the creature are the same body. Ribbons appeared for the first time in a group of paintings called ‖ Moment ‖. Newman was not satisfied with the soft background of the ribbon. Finally, he finally found the most satisfactory solution in the ‖ single Ⅰ ‖ created by 1948. The picture is a uniform dark cadmium red background, and a thin bright cadmium red strip penetrates vertically into the center of the picture. He called the light band "zip", which not only reproduced God's initial posture, but also described the posture itself: an independent shape, human-the only animal that walks upright, Adam, masculine and standing upright.
In the following years, Newman has been developing towards this idea and made various variants, Adam being one of them. This work, especially in the use of color and title, seems to return directly to the ‖ single ‖. "zip" is not only a symbol of human beings here, but the orange ribbon on its brown-red background may imply another symbol in the interpretation of Genesis by mysterious philosophy. This involves the relationship between adama and adam in Hebrew. Adamah means "the earth", from which Adam's name comes directly (God created man from clay), and adom means "red". Newman may associate color with the earth and Adam in the theme of "creation". There is also an ‖ Eve ‖ corresponding ‖ Adam ‖. He conceived them as a couple, and after painting two pictures in succession, they were named ‖ Adam ‖ and ‖ Eve ‖ respectively.
Morris louis's paintings mark an important development in the exploration of color and light. This exploration can be traced back to the impressionism period. Louis invented the method of splashing paint on cotton canvas with different sizes and bottomless bottom, which made the picture look more dyed than painting paint on the canvas. As a result, an unprecedented color purity is produced, which no longer makes any sense, because the brush strokes run on the canvas and produce a texture effect. This technique is directly related to the lyricism of his color and the lyricism and drama of his composition. The famous critic clement greenberg wrote: "The more consistent the color is with the background, the more you can get rid of the interference of tactile association." The most basic simplicity in Louis' paintings is often mentioned by another critic, Amy Golding: "Louis was never a complicated artist, and his works were never in doubt."
‖ α-φ ‖ was created in 196 1. The shape of the separated ribbon comes from the shape of exotic plants and the lines of women's bodies, thus creating a sense of fluidity, which of course comes from the natural flow of liquid pigments on the canvas. Rhythmic colors flow obliquely on both sides of the painting, leaving a large blank and producing a moving force.
One of Louis' painting goals is a completely decorative surface, which is neither personal nor personal. Anything with "personality", such as directional strokes, changes in texture, or strokes of wrist movements, has been abandoned.
Abstract art:
General definition
The definition of abstract art (abstract painting): a kind of concrete and irrational pure visual form. There are three connotations: first, abstract painting does not depict or express the objective image of the real world, nor does it reflect real life; Secondly, there is no painting theme, no logical story and rational deduction, neither expressing thoughts nor conveying personal feelings; Third, it is a visual form composed of color, point, line, surface, texture, composition and combination.