Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning (April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as Abstract expressionism or Action painting, and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, and Clyfford Still. In September 2011 de Kooning's work was honored with a large-scale retrospective exhibition: de Kooning: A Retrospective September 18, 2011 – January 9, 2012 at MoMA in New York City. Biography[edit] In 1938, de Kooning met Elaine Marie Fried, later known as Elaine de Kooning, whom he married in 1943. Mature works[edit] The hallmark of de Kooning's style was an emphasis on complex figure ground ambiguity.
Franz Kline Franz Jozef Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement centered around New York in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and attended Girard College, an academy in Philadelphia for fatherless boys. He attended Boston University, and later taught at a number of institutions including Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.[1] He spent summers from 1956 to 1962 painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and died in New York City of a rheumatic heart disease. He was married to Elizabeth Vincent Parsons, a British ballet dancer. Career[edit] As with Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, he was labeled an "action painter" because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brush strokes and use of canvas. Black and white and color[edit] Exhibitions[edit] Influence[edit]
Jackson Pollock Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956), known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety, a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.[1] Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related, single-car accident; he was driving. Early life[edit] Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912,[4] the youngest of five sons. While living in Echo Park, California, he enrolled at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School,[6] from which he was expelled. Trying to deal with his established alcoholism, from 1938 through 1941 Pollock underwent Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. 1950s[edit]
Frank Stella Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella continues to live and work in New York. Biography[edit] Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent.[1] After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries influenced his artist development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Work[edit] Late 1950s and early 1960s[edit] Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. Late 1960s and early 1970s[edit] Frank Stella Harran II 1967
Franz West Flause (1998); Aluminium Franz West (16 February 1947 – 25 July 2012) was an Austrian artist. Early life and education[edit] West was born on 16 February 1947. His father was a coal dealer, his mother a dentist who took her son with her on art-viewing trips to Italy.[2] West did not begin to study art seriously until he was 26,[3] when, between 1977 and 1983, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Bruno Gironcoli. Work[edit] West began making drawings around 1970 before moving on to painted collages incorporating magazine images that showed the influence of Pop Art.[2] His art practice started as a reaction to the Viennese Actionism movement has been exhibited in museums and galleries for more than three decades.[4] Over the last 20 years he had a regular presence in big expositions like Documenta and the Venice Biennale.[5] West's artwork is typically made out of plaster, papier-mâché, wire, polyester, aluminium and other, ordinary materials. The Fitting Pieces[edit] Awards[edit]
Robert Motherwell Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Early life and education[edit] Robert Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington on January 24, 1915, the first child of Robert Burns Motherwell II and Margaret Hogan Motherwell. The family later moved to San Francisco, where Motherwell's father served as president of Wells Fargo Bank. At the age of 20 Motherwell traveled to Europe with his father and sister. At Harvard, Motherwell studied under Arthur Oncken Lovejoy and David Wite Prall; to research the writings of Eugène Delacroix he spent a year in Paris, where he met an American composer Arthur Berger. The New York School and the Surrealists[edit] It was Matta who introduced Motherwell to the concept of “automatic” drawings. Mature years[edit] Death and legacy[edit]
Clyfford Still Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism. Biography[edit] Clyfford Still was a leader in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still's contemporaries included Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada. New Windsor, Maryland home Clyfford Still shared with his wife Patricia from 1966 until his death in 1980 Still visited New York for extended stays in the late 1940s and became associated with two of the galleries that launched the new American art to the world — Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery and the Betty Parsons gallery. The paintings[edit] Education[edit]
Color Field Color Field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to Abstract Expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering Abstract Expressionists. Color Field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Color field painters emerged in Great Britain, Canada, Washington, DC and the West Coast of the United States using formats of stripes, targets, simple geometric patterns and references to landscape imagery and to nature.[2] Historical roots[edit] Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 110, 1971. Barnett Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?
Wassily Kandinsky Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (/kænˈdɪnski/; Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский, Vasiliy Vasil’yevich Kandinskiy, pronounced [vaˈsʲilʲɪj kɐnˈdʲinskʲɪj]; 16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. Artistic periods[edit] Kandinsky's creation of abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. Youth and inspiration (1866–1896)[edit] Early-period work, Munich-Schwabing with the Church of St. [edit] Art school, usually considered difficult, was easy for Kandinsky. Murnau, Dorfstrasse (Street in Murnau, A Village Street), 1908 Art market[edit]
Jean Arp Jean Arp / Hans Arp (16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966) was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper. When Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as "Hans", and when he spoke in French he referred to himself as "Jean". Many people believe that he was born Hans and later changed his name to Jean, but this is not the case. Early life[edit] Arp was born in Strasbourg as the son of a French mother and a German father, during the period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine (Elsass-Lothringen in German) after France had ceded it to Germany in 1871. In 1904, after leaving the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, he went to Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. Career[edit] Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. In 1926, Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon. Exhibitions[edit] Recognition[edit] Personal life and death[edit]
Mark Rothko Mark Rothko (Latvian: Markus Rotkovičs, Russian: Марк Ро́тко; born Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич; Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. He is generally identified as an Abstract Expressionist, although he himself rejected this label and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter." With Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, he is one of the most famous postwar American artists. Childhood[edit] Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Governorate, in the Russian Empire (today Daugavpils in Latvia). His father, Jacob (Yakov) Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual who initially provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated ("We were a reading family," Rothko's sister recalled[2]), and Rothko was able to speak Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Emigration from Russia to the U.S.
Joan Miró Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.[1] Biography[edit] Born into the families of a goldsmith and a watch-maker, he grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighborhood of Barcelona.[2] His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolors Ferrà.[3] He began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion. In 1907 he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja, to the dismay of his father. Career[edit] Illustration for Cavall Fort, a children's magazine in Catalan Miró initially went to business school as well as art school.
Salvador Dalí Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known as Salvador Dalí (/ˈdɑːli/;[1] Catalan: [səɫβəˈðo ðəˈɫi]), was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter and sculptor born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.[2][3] His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media. Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes"[4] to an "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors. Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. Biography[edit]