Tag: abstract expressionism

Paul John Wonner

The Artwork of Paul John Wonner

Born in Tucson, Arizona in April of 1920, Paul John Wonner was an American painter who rose to prominence in the 1950s through his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement. He was best known for his abstract expressionist styled still-life paintings. 

After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Paul Wonner earned a Bachelor’s degree in 1941 at Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts, now the California College of the Arts. During his military service stationed in San Antonio, Texas, he continued his studies and set up a neighborhood studio. In 1946, Wonner was discharged and quickly relocated to New York City to continue his art career. He worked as a commercial designer and attended classes at the Art Student League as well as symposiums at Robert Motherwell’s studio. 

In 1950, Wonner returned to his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and his Master of Arts in 1953. Wonner also earned his Master Degree of Library and Information Science in 1955, a requirement for most professional librarian positions in the United States. After graduation, Paul Wonner worked in the late 1950s as a librarian for University of California, Davis, and as a lecturer during the 1960s at the Otis Art Institute and UC Santa Barbara.

At UC Berkeley in 1950, Paul Wonner met fellow painting student William Theophilus Brown who became his lifelong partner. During their studies at the University of California, Wonner and Brown shared a studio space in Berkeley at the same building as painters Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Together these artists incorporated the figurative style of David Park’s paintings into their own works. This group became a part of what became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. In 1957, Wonner joined eleven other artists for the Oakland Museum of Art’s Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting Exhibition.

In the early 1960s,  Wonner and Theophilus Brown moved to Malibu where they became part of the Southern California art scene. In 1968, Wonner became a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and began to tutor as an artist in different areas of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1976, he and Brown settled in San Francisco, where as an abstract realist, Wonner continued painting his still lifes and later figurative works. A prolific painter, Paul John Wonner died in April of 2008 in San Francisco; he was survived by his partner Theophilus Brown who died in February of 2012.

Interested in art as an adolescent, Wonner’s initial art training began when his parents hired a local California artist to assist him with his drawing amid his secondary school years. Wonner started his painting career during a time when abstract expressionism was at its height. In Berkeley during his association with the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Wonner’s work was similar to the figurative style of  many of his fellow artists. However, his work still retained the vigorous brushwork and strong coloring of the abstract expressionists. 

Beginning in 1956, Paul Wonner painted a series of works on paper and canvas that depicted multiple male bathers and boys with bouquets. By the end of the 1960s, he had abandoned his loose, figurative style and concentrated on a hyper-realistic form of still-life images. Although Wonner used the the Dutch Baroque still-life tradition as a historical source, he typically incorporated objects from contemporary life in his works. 

In the late 1970s, Wonner’s style turned crisp with an emphasis on sharp shadows and bright lighting effects. As he matured in his painting skills, Wonner’s later works portrayed his subjects distinctly separated through the use of surrealistically rendered vacant spaces. In his most recent figurative work, Wonner’s human figures are situated in arrangements and settings that are vaguely allegorical in nature.  

Paul Wonner’s paintings and other artworks are housed in both private and public collections all over the United States, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York city’s Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Cocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, California, which has an extensive collection of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown’s work.

Notes: The online Artnet site has an extensive collection of works by Paul Wonner that are available for sale. Images of these works can be found at: https://www.artnet.com/artists/paul-john-wonner/

Scott Shields, the Associate Director and Chief Curator of the Crocker Art Museum, discusses the work of both Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at the Heather James Fine Art site. In addition to the video discussion, the site includes many images of Wonner and Brown’s work. The Heather James site is located at: https://www.heatherjames.com/multimedia/wonner-and-brown-scott-shields-interview/

Top Insert Image: Frank J. Thomas, “Paul Wonner”, circa 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Paul Wonner, “Model and Mirror”, 1964-65, Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Rose Mandel, “Paul Wonner”, 1954, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Paul Wonner, Untitled, Watercolor and Pencil on Paper, 43.2 x 35.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Lincoln Yamaguchi, “Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown at Berkeley”, 1955, Gelatin Silver Print

Marylyn Dintenfass

The Artwork of Marylyn Dintenfass

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, Marylyn Dintenfass is an American painter, printmaker and sculptor known for the dynamic color palette of her oil paintings. She graduated from New York’s Queens College in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts. During her studies, Dintenfass worked with abstract expressionist painter John Ferren and muralist Barse Miller. She developed her own style of abstract expressionism and acquired an appreciation for the wide range of materials available. 

Though mostly known for her paintings, Marylyn Dintenfass was first recognized for her sculptural mixed-media installations. Her use of ceramics, epoxies, pigments, wax, steel, lead and wood expanded the traditional definitions of ceramic work. The installation sculptures and architectural reliefs Dintenfass created were unique to her organic and structural personal style. For her work, she constructed a pictographic language that consisted of symbols and the fusion of curves and lines. 

After a tour of museums in Paris, Rome and Amsterdam, Dintenfass traveled to Jerusalem in 1966. She studied etching and worked with Swiss painter Ruth Bamberger known for her textile design and fresco work. Through interactions with artists and intellectuals in the city, Dintenfass was given her first architectural commission; the design of Jerusalem’s first disco. She worked with a wide range of materials to fashion shapes, surfaces, textures, colors and light; these components became intrinsic parts of her developing artistic form .

Marylyn Dintenfass received large-scale installation commissions for the State of Connecticut’s Superior Courthouse; the New York Port Authority’s 42nd Street Bus Terminal; IBM’s headquarters in San Jose, Atlanta and Charlotte; and the Ben Gurion University in Israel, among others. In 2010, Dintenfass produced “Parallel Park”, a site-specific work for the exterior walls of the Lee County Justice Center’s parking garage in Ft. Myers, Florida. Each of her twenty-three images were enlarged tenfold to a size  ten by seven meters through the utilization of digital software. These were then  printed with archival ink on Kevlar fabric. Installed on all four facades of the garage, Dintenfass’s patterned images recalled the friezes and frescoes of Medieval as well as Italian Futurist artists. 

Dintenfass’s paintings combine the intense gestural movements of Abstract Expressionism with the repetitive image technique from Pop Art. Central to her work are both the underlying grid reference and the adjustability of the modular sections in their relationships to others. These structural aspects lend stability to Dintenfass’s exuberantly colored and dramatic abstractions. Her abstract images often contain formations of circles or stripes that are formed over alternating layers of high gloss or matte textures.

Marylyn Dintenfass has shown her work in more than sixty national and international exhibitions including solo shows at the Queens Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art, among others. Her work was included in the 2008 inaugural exhibition of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. Works by Dintenfass are housed in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Dintenfass was awarded the Silver Medal at the First International Exhibition held in Mino, Japan, and the Ravenna Prize at the 45th Concorso Internazionale Della Ceramica D’Arte in Faenza, Italy. She was also a member of the faculty at New York City’s Parsons School of Design  for ten years. Dintenfass was a visiting professor at Norway’s National College of Art and Design, the Brezel Academy of Art and Design in Israel, Canada’s Sheridan College, and New York City’s Hunter College. 

Notes: Due to the large-scale format of work by Marylyn Dintenfass, the best way to view her art is through exhibitions. Her website, which includes exhibitions and publications as well as video interviews, is  located at: https://www.marylyndintenfass.com

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Marylyn Dintenfass at “Parallel Park”, 2011, Permanent Public Installation, Fort Meyers, Florida

Second Insert Image: Marylyn Dintenfass, “Token Thorn Prick”, “Drop Dead Gorgeous” Series, 2012, Oil on Canvas, 254 x 195.6 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, Installation of “Things Are Not What They Seem” Exhibition, Date Unknown

Agnes Martin

The Artwork of Agnes Martin

Born in March of 1912 at the town of Macklin located in Saskatchwan, Agnes Bernice Martin was a Canadian-American abstract painter known for her minimalist and abstract expressionist style. Martin’s patterned work, both delicate and awe inspiring, established a connection between the arts of writing and painting. 

One of four children born to Scottish Presbyterian farmers, Agnes Martin spent her formative years in Vancouver before relocating to the state of Washington in 1931 to assist her pregnant sister. She studied at the College of Education of Western Washington University and later received her Bachelor of Arts in 1942 from the Teacher College of New York’s Columbia University. During her studies, Martin was exposed to the artwork of sculptor and painter Joan Miró and abstract expressionist painters Adolph Gottlieb and Arshile Gorky. Inspired by their work, she began to take studio classes and seriously work towards a career as an artist. 

In 1947, Martin attended the Summer Field School of the University of New Mexico in Taos and, through lectures by Zen Buddhist scholar Daisetsu Teltaro Suzuki, became interested in Asian disciplines and ethics as a tool to manage her journey in life. Following her graduation, Martin enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque where she taught art classes. She resumed her studies at Columbia University and in 1952 earned her Master of Fine Arts in Modern Art. 

At the invitation of gallery owner Betty Parsons, Agnes Martin settled in New York City for a period of ten years beginning in 1957. She lived in a loft within the Coenties Slip area, a historic section of nineteenth-century buildings surrounded by the city’s financial district. Originally an area with an artificial inlet for loading and unloading cargo ships, Coenties Slip became both home and studio space for ground breaking artists from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The area also served as a haven for the queer community in the 1960s. Among Martin’s friends and neighbors were Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Adolph Reinhardt, and Lenore Tawney, for whom she wrote an essay included in the brochure of Tawney’s first solo exhibition. 

Although not documented until 1962, Martin was known to have schizophrenia, the struggle of which was largely a private and individual affair. She was frequently hospitalized to control its symptoms among which were aural hallucinations and states of catatonia. Martin was aided by her friends from the Coenties Slip who enlisted the support of a respected psychiatrist who was both friend and art collector. The full impact of this illness on her life is unknown. 

In 1967, Agnes Martin abandoned the art world and her life in New York. After a period of travel in Canada and the western United States, she settled in Mesa Portales, New Mexico in 1968 where she rented a fifty-acre property until 1977. On this property, Martin built several adobe brick structures herself. She did not paint any works during the period from 1968 to 1971 and distanced herself from social events and the public eye. In 1973, Martin returned to art with the creation of thirty serigraphs for a portfolio entitled “On a Clear Day”.

An admirer of Mark Rothko’s work, Martin simplified her own work to its basic elements, a process to encourage a perception of perfection and emphasize the painting’s transcendental quality. Her work’s signature style focused on grids, lines and fields of subtle color. In the early 1960s, Martin created square 182cm canvases using only black, white and brown; these were covered with dense, minute and lightly defined graphite grids. Her paintings, while minimalist in form, differed from other minimalist works as her work retained small flaws and noticeable traces of the artist’s hand. Martin’s paintings and her writings both reflected her interest in Eastern philosophy, an aspect which became increasingly more dominant after 1967.

In 1974, Agnes Martin returned to painting with 30cm square and 182cm square canvases that represented a new exploration characterized by vertical and horizontal lines in a palette of yellows, pinks and blues. These were exhibited in 1975 at her first show at New York’s prestigious Pace Gallery. During her time in Taos, Martin continued her use of light pastel washes on the grids and bands of her paintings but reduced the scale of her work to a square of 152cm. She also modified the grid structure she had been using since the late 1950s; the pencil lines were now being drawn intuitively without a ruler. 

In 1976, Martin made her only completed film, “Gabriel”, a seventy-eight minute silent film, except for seven moments at which excerpts from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” occur for two or three minutes. Unscripted, the film was shot with a handheld camera and presented the story of a young boy who wanders in the natural landscape of rural New Mexico. Martin’s goal was to make a film about happiness and innocence; an angel’s name, representing innocence, was used for the title of the film. 

In 1978, Agnes Martin left her Portales home and moved to Galisteo, near Santa Fe. Her broad-striped paintings became more luminous, a result derived from the application of diluted acrylic color over a ground of multiple layers of white pigment. Martin’s work evolved again in the 1990s; the early symmetric bands of color in her paintings began to be composed of varying widths. In 1991, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum hosted a retrospective of Martin’s work, which was followed in the next year by a retrospective held at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

Following the Whitney show, Martin moved to Taos, New Mexico where she lived and worked for the remainder of her life. She introduced a new palette of color in her work which included a spectrum of greens and saturated orange. In her very last paintings, Martin reintroduced the geometric elements from her 1950s work; she placed dark triangles and rectangles against gray grounds but kept the graphite lines that were a integral part of all her work. Agnes Martin passed away in Taos, New Mexico at the age of ninety-two in December of 2004.

Agnes Martin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton in 1998 and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004. In 1994, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos renovated its Pueblo-Revival building and dedicated a wing to Martin’s work. Since her first solo exhibition in 1958, Martin participated in many international exhibitions including three Venice Biennales, two Whitney Biennials and the 1972 Documenta in Kassel, Germany. In 2016, the same year the Guggenheim Museum held a retrospective of her work, Agnes Martin’s 1965 graphite and oil on canvas “Orange Grove” sold at auction for $13.7 million dollars. 

Notes: Despite sharing several meaningful and long-term relationships in Oregon, New Mexico, and New York City, Agnes Martin never specifically acknowledged her sexuality in interviews or writings during her life. Martin kept her sexuality hidden, often even from close acquaintances. 

An article on Agnes Martin written by William Peterson for the November 2013 “New Mexico Mercury” can be found at: http://newmexicomercury.com/blog/comments/some_late_thoughts_on_the_early_work_of_agnes_martin

An extensive biography of Agnes Martin, written by Christopher Régimbal and entitled “Agnes Martin: Life and Work”, can be found at the Art Canada Institute site located at: https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/agnes-martin/

Top Insert Image: Dorothy Alexander, “Agnes Martin”, 1978, Gelatin Silver Print, Art Canada Institute, Toronto

Second Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Self Portrait”, circa 1947, Encaustic on Canvas, 66 x 49.5 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “With My Back to the World”, 1997, 152.4 x 152.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Fourth Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Portrait of Daphne Vaughn”, 1947, Oil on Canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm, Private Collection

Fifth Insert Image: Agnes Martin, “Summer”, 1965, Watercolor, Ink and Gouache on Paper, 22 x 23.5 cm, Private Collection of Patricia Lewy, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Gianfranco Gorgoni, “Agnes Martin in Cuba, New Mexico”, 1974, Detail, Gelatin Silver Print, Art Canada Institute, Toronto

Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas, “Light Blue Nursery”, 1968, Acrylic on Canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891, Alma Woodsey Thomas was an expressionist abstract painter and art educator. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Washington, DC to escape the racism the family experienced in the South. Thomas attended Howard University, where she took classes taught by painter and educator Lois Mailou Jones and impressionist painter James V. Herring, who founded Howard University’s art department. 

Alma Thomas graduated in 1924 as the university’s first Fine Art graduate. She acquired her Masters in Art Education from New York’s Columbia University and studied abroad in Europe with the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She was greatly influenced by the techniques of French Impressionism, through the still-lifes and landscapes of Berthe Morisot and Claude Monet.

Through her life, Thomas was involved with the history of black American intellectual life and participated in many organizations promoting such history and culture. Among these was the Little Paris Group, a literary circle of black public school teachers who met weekly in the 1940s. Alma Thomas also served as Vice President of the Barnett Aden Gallery, founded in 1947, as a black-owned non-profit art gallery. The gallery exhibited the work of all artists regardless of race; however, it was one of few places that showed black artists on equal footing with their white contemporaries.

After she retired, at the age of sixty-nine, from her career as an art teacher, Alma Thomas developed her own personal style. Inspired by the shifting light filtering between the leaves of trees in her garden, she began to paint her signature abstractions. Thomas was given her first solo show at the Dupont Theatre Art Gallery in 1960.

Although the work is abstract, the titles summon up specific moods and scenes, such as “Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses” in 1969, the 1973 “Snow Reflections on Pond”, and “Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music” painted in 1976. The colorful rectangular dabs of paint, often arranged in circles or rows, allow the under-colors to emerge through the open spaces.

Alma Thomas died at the age of 86 in 1978 in Washington, DC. During her life she was included in many group shows centered around black artists. It was not until after her death that her work began being included in shows which did not focus on the unifying themes of race or gender identity, but rather was allowed to exist simply as art. Her work can be seen at many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum. 

Note: The insert image is Alma Thomas’s “Grassy Melodic Chat”, an acrylic on canvas painting done in 1976. It is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Sonia Gechtoff

Sonia Gechtoff, Top Image: “Children of Frejus”, 1959, Oil on Canvas, Denver Art Museum    Bottom Image: “Tropics”, 1983, Color Etching with Embrossing, Edition of 50, Antique-White German Etchng Wove

Sonia Gechtoff was a prominent Abstract Expressionist painter who experimented with styles and materials throughout her life. She was born in 1926 in Philadelphia, into a family with art it its genes. Her father was a painter and her mother was a gallery owner. Gechtoff received her BA in Fine Arts from the Philadelphia Museum School of Art in 1950. At that time she abandoned figurative art in favor of the abstract.

Sonia Gechtoff also at this time started working with a palette knife to apply her paint on canvas rather than the traditional brush. Sonia refined her palette knife technique, and by the late 1950s, the slashing marks, often applied in a vortexlike way, were a hallmark of her work. In the 1980s, she expanded that technique with increasingly larger and less-controlled acrylic paintings that had elements of realism, architectural and landscape images. She continued to experiment and produce new work in a range of media throughout her life.

Sonia Gectoff, a mainstay of the New York art scene, passed away in February, 2018, at a hospice center in Bronx, New York at the age of 91.

Basil Beattie

Basil Beattie, “Top Up”, 2013, Oil Paint and Wax on Canvas, 213 x 198 cm

Baeil Beattie is an English painter and printmaker. He studied at West Hartlepool College of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools, London. He taught at Goldsmiths College, London, from the 1960s to the 1990s.

He was Influenced by the work the New York artists associated with Abstract Expressionism while still a student at the Academy Schools in the late 50s. Throughout his career his work has always been distinguished by his sensuous and physical use of paint – characteristics which he shares with the Abstraction as practised by other English painters such as John Hoyland, Albert Irvin, and Gillian Ayres.

In the late 60s and into the 70s, Beattie was preoccupied with making paintings where there was no trace of the hand.The work was like ‘nature’ not so much in appearance but in the manner by which it was made, where gravity and the consistencies of paint were fundamental in the forming of the image.

It was in 1987, in his exhibition at the Curwen Gallery London, that Beattie’s pictographic language began to evolve. This was followed in 1991 with a drawing Installation – “Drawing on the Interior”, at the Eagle Gallery London, consisting of 376 drawings. The work explored the emerging imagery, such as ladders, stairways, corridors, tunnels, towers, doors, and ziggurats. Many of these images became subjects for paintings. Beattie has said of these images that they were not attempts to paint literal things, but were used as vehicles for conveying symbolic and metaphoric associations.

Richard Pousette-Dart

Richard Pousette-Dart, “Untitled”, circa 1946-1948, Gouache, Ink and Paper Collage on Board, 30 x 23 cm, Private Collection

One of the earliest Abstract Expressionists, Richard Pousette-Dart explored a variety of painterly styles, including figurative work, all-over abstraction, pattern making, and Surrealist Automatism. Deeply influenced by Native American art and textiles, Pousette- Dart distanced himself from his contemporaries with an interest in spirituality, his paintings dealing with traditional dualities between light and substance, spirit and body, and harmony and discord. He favored heavy layers of acrylic and oils with small, thick brushstrokes to emphasize luminosity and distinctive colors.

 

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli, Untitled, Collage and Mixed Media on Canvas, 1960, 138 x 172 cm

Marca-Relli is considered one of the main exponents of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, and he was involved in the movement from its conception as he organized the first Abstract Expressionist show at the Ninth Street Show in 1951, with the artist Franz Kline and the gallerist Leo Castelli.

This important exhibition marked the beginning of the new uniquely American artistic movement, which is based on revolutionary painting methods, notably, Action Painting.  Artists that participated in this exhibition included: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Barnet Newman, Hans Hoffman, Franz Klien and Conrad Marca-Relli.

Jake Berthot

Oil Paintings by Jake Berthot

Jake Berthot was born in Niagara Falls, NY in 1939.  He attended the New School for Social Research and Pratt Institute in the early 1960s. The artist held teaching positions at Cooper Union, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and The School of Visual Arts. Jake Berthot died December 30, 2014 and bequeathed 12 works to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC.

Berthot began exhibiting in the mid-1960s, at a time when Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism were part of the aesthetic environment. Berthot’s early work was geometric and the color was subdued. Over the following years, his color intensified and the underlying grid opened to include an oval (some thought a portrait or a head). In 1992, Berthot moved to upstate New York where he wrote a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson on the wall of his new studio: ‘We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, or spirit, or poetry – a narrow belt.”

There, Berthot began to incorporate the landscape into his paintings – the land that held him and demanded his care. Although his step away from abstraction to figuration seemed radical, the tenets that characterized his work remained the same: his torqued underlying grid, his distinctive brushwork (an admirer of Milton Resnick), and his sensitive color.

William Baziotes

William Baziotes, “Dwarf”, 1947, Oil on Canvas, 106.7 x 91.8 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

William Baziotes was a New York painter whose lyrical and often mysterious works relied heavily on subject matter derived from biomorphism and Symbolist poetry. He was an integral part of the Abstract Expressionist circle and exhibited with them frequently. Like his peers, he was deeply committed to concerns of paint application and abstracted forms.

Yet his interest in the medium of paint was combined with many sources for his imagery to produce works that evoked particular moods, or dream-like states – often more closely related to European Surrealism than to Abstract Expressionism. This duality in his work was described as “biomorphic abstraction” and was influential to artists such as Mark Rothko.

Baziotes was one of the few Abstract Expressionist artists who remained committed to the figure. He took his early Surrealist-inspired explorations further by creating strange, primitive imagery that seems to have been pulled from the darkness of the subconscious. His works in this vein were described as “biomorphic abstraction” because of his use of organic forms and other figurative elements that were not easily identifiable.

Unlike his Abstract Expressionist peers, even Baziotes’ most experimental canvases contain a structured, almost grid-like composition that was influenced by early Cubism and the artist’s work with stained glass. In conjunction with this underlying structure, however, Baziotes also felt that art should evoke emotions and moods through color, shape, and paint application.

Irving Kriesberg

Paintings by Irving Kriesberg

Irving Kriesberg (1919–2009) was an American painter whose work combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with figurative elements of human and animal forms.

In 1945 Irving Kriesberg moved to New York City and had numerous solo and group exhibitions. His entry into the international art scene came when Dorothy Miller, curator of the Museum of Modern Art included Kriesberg in the landmark 1952 exhibition “15 AMERICANS” at MoMA. The ‘15 AMERICANS’  exhibition included Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and others.

Where hard-line Abstract Expressionists shunned figural elements in their work, Irving Kriesberg used them lavishly. As a result, he was often called a Figurative Expressionist; the term applied to midcentury Expressionists whose work was not strictly abstract.

But as often as not, Mr. Kriesberg’s work transcended category. Though it teemed with figures — frogs, birds, people, angels and much else — it was anything but representational. Normally small creatures tower and loom, dancers weave through space at unorthodox angles, and customarily static objects appear fluid and sinuous. All these things gave his work a sense of wit and mystery.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, “Wall Painting III”, 1952, Oil on Fiberboard, 48 x 72 Inches, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Robert Motherwell 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.

He described his working process as follows: “I begin painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors, which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images.”

Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky, “ The Black Monk”, Museo Thyssen-Bomemisza, Madrid, Unfinished on Gorky’s Easel at the Time of his Death in 1948.

Arshile Gorky was an ethnically Armenian painter, who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent most his life as a national of the United States. Along with Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century.