Art History (Lesson 64/5): Abstract Expressionism:Clyfford Still,Hofmann,Smith,Guston,Reinhardt:

Art History (Lesson 64/5): Abstract Expressionism:Clyfford Still,Hans Hofmann,David Smith,Philip Guston,| Ad Reinhardt:

Clyfford Still:
A pioneering Abstract Expressionist, in the mid-1940s Clyfford Still
became one of the first artists of the New York School to paint on a
large, “heroic” scale, and one of the first to ignore representational
subject matter. Still’s work married the two strands of Abstract
Expressionism. Like the Colour Field painters, he was concerned
with the emotive power of colour. Like the Action Painters, he was
interested in the expressive possibilities of brushwork, typically using
a heavily loaded brush to create jagged, impasto forms.
In the early 1950s, Still severed ties with commercial galleries and
worked in increasing isolation. His uneasy relationship with the art
world, and his reluctance to exhibit, meant that he did not receive
the acclaim given to his contemporaries.
Hans Hofmann:
Hans Hofmann was an influential Abstract Expressionist artist, and
an important, highly respected teacher. Trained in Munich and Paris,
Hofman emigrated to America in 1930, and ran an art school in New
York from 1934 to 1958. There, he taught many of the younger Abstract
Expressionists, including Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler. The
degree of contact he had with European artists was rare and much
valued among the New York School.
Hofmann developed a highly distinctive form of abstraction, based
on patches of vivid colour. The dense surfaces, which were often
vigorously and impulsively painted, linked his work to the Action
Painters, yet his painting was closer to the Colour Field painters. He
sought to create a tension between the flatness of an abstract painting
and the illusion of depth in a representational painting. The result, he
declared, was a pictorial space that was “alive, dynamic, fluctuating,
and ambiguously dominated by forces and counterforces .
David Smith:
David Smith is regarded as America's greatest post-war sculptor.
The son of an engineer, he sculpted by welding iron and steel —
marrying these modern American industrial materials with the
aesthetic developments of the leading European avant-garde artists.
Smith trained as a painter but turned to sculpture in the 1930s after seeing Picasso's and Julio Gonzalez’s welded metal pieces.
In 1940, he found the perfect place to work at Bolton Landing in
Newman the Adirondack Mountains, upstate New York. He developed a deep
affinity with the place, spending hours arranging and photographing his sculpture in the fields around his studio. Smith evoked the landscape through his sculptural method of “drawing in space” From the late 1950s, his sculpture became increasingly monumental.
Philip Guston:
Guston had an extraordinarily varied career. In the 1930s, he was a socially and politically committed . He made drawings that satirised the Ku Klux
Klan and from 1934 to 1942 worked as a mural painter (largely for the Federal Art Project) in Los Angeles and New York. In the 1950s, however, painterly concerns displaced political ones. He turned to Abstract
Expressionism, creating paintings of shimmering and luminous colour.
Ad Reinhardt:
Reinhardt was a pioneering abstract painter. As a member of the American Abstract Artists (1937-47), he painted crisp, geometrical images. He adopted an Abstract Expressionist style in the late 1940s. It was for his one-colour paintings, however, that he became famous. He worked in blue and red in the early 1950s, then in black from the mid-1950s. The paintings were
purged of subject matter and painterly expression. He declared, “| am simply making the last paintings that can ever be made."
Abstract Expressionism flowered in the 1940s and ‘50s in New York.

The term Abstract Expressionism was first used in connection with modern
American painters in 1945 by Robert Coates, art critic of The New Yorker,
but it had also been applied to the work of Wassily Kandinsky in the 1920s.
By the 1950s the term was in common currency, even though some Abstract Expressionists, such as Willem de Kooning, did not produce abstract work .
Influences:
The Surrealists were a major influence on the Abstract Expressionists. Their
ideas of unleashing the power of the unconscious and painting
automatically were adopted by the Abstract Expressionists — as was
biomorphism _a style of painting based on non-geometric shapes and motifs
that evoke living things. Most of the Abstract Expressionists — including its two best-known artists, Pollock and Rothko — began painting ina biomorphic style in the 1940s.
Abstract Expressionism was also a response to post-war American
society. In a conservative, and increasingly homogenized culture,
artists felt a need to communicate their innermost feelings and experiences. In doing so, they created the first American art movement to achieve worldwide influence.