Tag: abstraction

Thomas Downing

Thomas Downing, “Untitled”, 1950, Acrylic on Unprimed Canvas, 243.8 x 225.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1928 in Suffolk, Virginia, American painter Thomas Downing initially studied English literature at Randolph-Mason College in Ashland, Virginia, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1948. After frequent visits to exhibitions held at Randolph-Mason and local museums, he eventually decided to study art. Downing moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute of Art, where he was influenced by the New York School of painters. With a grant given to him in 1950 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, he was able to travel and study in Europe, briefly enrolling in the Académie Julien in Paris.

In Paris, Thomas Downing secured a position as a studio assistant for the painter Fernand Léger in 1951, eventually exhibiting a series of his own gouaches at Paris’ Galerie Huit. After a short service in the US Army, he moved in 1953 to Washington, DC, working as a high school teacher. Downing attended summer sessions at Catholic University, where he studied under and was influenced by painter Kenneth Nolan, one of the founders of the Washington Color School of painting, a flourishing abstract art movement emphasizing pure color. An established member of Washington’s art community by 1958, Downing had his first one-man show with the Sculptors Studio in 1959. By the early 1960s, he began producing canvases that were composed of grids and circles of dots of varying color, a motif which became recognizable as his body of work.

Thomas Downing’s work explores the formal possibilities of color and color-space, establishing that as the sole subject of his compositions. His circles of varying hues and colors seem to float in an undefined space, with each set of color appearing on a flat plane, but collectively presenting a depth of space. Downing’s specific color choices suggest the modern design principles of the Bauhaus movement, particularly the color-space theories of painter and instructor Josef Albers. 

Following a series of successful solo shows in the DC area, several of Downing’s dot paintings were included in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 traveling exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction” and the New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s influential 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye”. In 1966, Downing included a series of shaped canvases to his works in the “Systematic Painting” show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

Downing taught at the Corcoran School of Art from 1965 to 1968, influencing artists such as Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs. He moved to New York to teach at the New School of Visual Art, and after a brief tenure at the University of Houston in 1975, settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In his later years, he had many exhibitions, including tow at the Osuna Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1979 and 1980,  and one at The Phillips Collection in 1985, the year of his death. 

Thomas Downing’s work is in a number of collections, both private and public, including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, both in Washington, DC, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. 

Lawren Harris

Lawren S Harris, “Billboard (Jazz)”, 1921, Oil on Canvas, 1072 x 1275 cm, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

The first paintings Lawren Harris exhibited in Toronto in 1911 included urban scenes of streets and houses in The Ward, the largely immigrant area west of Toronto’s City Hall. Best known for his landscapes of Ontario’s near north, the Rocky Mountains and Arctic and later abstractions, Harris’s urban scenes played a key role in his exploration of the role of art in the transformations of Canadian society.

Harris exhibited several of his new “Shack Paintings” at the 1921 Group of Seven exhibition in the Art Gallery of Toronto. These paintings dealt with a subject he had been treating for almost ten years- houses in the poorer sections or in the unserviced and uninsurable outskirts of Toronto.

The painting “Jazz”, later retitled “Billboard” was provacative at the time, dealing with modern, urban life, considered by the then puritanical Toronto to be a decadent or immoral lifestyle. Painted with agressive brushwork and fractured text, it shows workers in the foreground and a row of frame houses receding in the background. The almost abstract billboard with its torn posters is the principle subject; this abstraction is carried across the top of the canvas by the torn clouds.

Over the course of his career, Lawren Harris’s painting evolved from Impressionist-influenced, decorative landscapes to stark images of the northern landscape to geometric abstractions. From 1934 to 1937, Harris lived in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he painted his first abstract works, a direction he would continue for the rest of his life.

In 1938 Harris moved to Sante Fe, New Mexico, and helped found the Transcendental Painting Group, an organization of artists who advocated a spiritual form of abstraction. Harris died in Vancouver in 1970, at the age of 84, as a well-known artist. He was buried on the grounds of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, where his work is now held.

 

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson

 

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Knockout”, 1929, Oil on Canvas, 46 x 44 cm, Private Collection

Born in Lund, Sweden, in April of 1884, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, known as GAN, was an artist working in both oils and watercolors, and writer of poetry and short stories. He is regarded as a founding member of the Modernist art movement in Sweden.

For his early education, Gösta Adrian-Nilsson attended a Technical Company School; he later studied at Danish historical painter Kristian Zahrtmann’s School in Copenhagen. In 1907, he entered his work in an exhibition held at the Art Museum of the University of Lund.  Adrian-Nilsson traveled to Berlin in 1913 where through author and critic Herwarth Walden’s gallery, Der Sturm, he came in contact with the contemporary art movements.

Both Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc were of huge importance when Adrian-Nilsson began developing his own style of expressive cubism, a semi-abstract style with deep, vibrant colors. Adrian-Nilsson became very influential in the radical art movement and was a member of the Halmstadgruppen, a group of avant-garde artists at Hamstad, Sweden, which continued unchanged until 1979. This group eventually included painter and sculptor Alexander Archipenko, painter and graphic artist Erik Olson, Sven Jonson, and Esaias Thorén. Initially cubists, the group was influenced later by Adrian-Nilsson’s surrealistic phase and his motifs of seamen.

Adrian-Nilsson was fascinated by modern technology and masculine strength, which was reflected in his images of sailors and sportsmen . Works of this nature include the 1914-15 “Katarinahissen I”, depicting two sailors amid a cubist blue-toned landscape, and “Sjömän i Gröna Lunds tivoli II”, a surrealistic work in blues and browns depicting sailors in Gröna Lund’s amusement park. Living a hidden life at a time that gay eroticism was both taboo and illegal in Sweden, Adrian-Nilsson expressed himself through these cubist and surreal images. 

By 1919, Adrian-Nilsson’s art was developing into pure abstraction. He lived in Paris between the years 1920 and 1925, during which time he met Alexander Archipenko and Fernand Léger whose influence can be seen in Adrian-Nilsson’s renderings of mechanically-styled sportsmen, seamen and soldiers. In the later part of the 1920s, Adrian-Nilsson was working in his geometric abstract period. He developed his own personal style of surrealism during the 1930s and exhibited his work in multiple  exhibitions, including the 1935 Kubisme-Surrealisme exhibition in Copenhagen.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson died in Stockholm on March 29, 1965 and is buried at the cemetery of Norra Kyrkogården in Lund.

Gösta Adrian-Nilsson’s work is represented at the Nationalmuseum and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Gothenburg’s Art Museum, the Malmö Art Museum, and the Museum of Culture in Lund where his work constitutes a permanent exhibition of modernistic art. Adrian-Nilsson’s writings are preserved at the University Library of Lund.

Insert Image: Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, “Katarinahissen I”, 1914-15, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 56 cm, Private Collection

Willem de Kooning

Four Paintings by Willem de Kooning

De Kooning strongly opposed the restrictions imposed by naming movements. While generally considered to be an Abstract Expressionist, he never fully abandoned the depiction of the human figure. His paintings of women feature a unique blend of gestural abstraction and figuration. Heavily influenced by the Cubism of Picasso, de Kooning became a master at ambiguously blending figure and ground in his pictures while dismembering, re-assembling and distorting his figures in the process.

Although known for continually reworking his canvases, de Kooning often left them with a sense of dynamic incompletion, as if the forms were still in the process of moving and settling and coming into definition. In this sense his paintings exemplify ‘action painting’ – they are like records of a violent encounter, rather than finished works in the old Beaux Arts tradition of fine painting.

Although de Kooning came to embody the popular image of the macho, hard-drinking artist, – de Kooning approached his art with careful thought and was considered one of the most knowledgeable among the artists associated with the New York School. Willem de Kooning is thought to have possessed the greatest facility and polished techniques of painters in the New York School, one that compares to that of Old Masters, and he looked to the likes of Ingres, Rubens and Rembrandt for inspiration.

Alden Mason

Paintings by Alden Mason

Born in the state of Washington, Alden Mason is perhaps best known for his so-called Burpee Garden series, painted in the 1970s, and named for the seed catalogs that enthralled him as a child growing up on a farm in the Skagit Valley.

“They were big, glorious abstractions, with transparent, very thinned-down oil paint,” said Sheila Farr, a Seattle author, arts writer and former art critic for The Seattle Times. The paintings were acclaimed and catapulted his career into the New York art world. But Alden Mason paid a price for the works, as fumes wafting up from the thinners and paint sickened him. “He had invented this really unique style of painting, but he had to give it up,” Farr said.

The influence of nature, native art forms and the free-form artwork of children infused much of his work. “My paintings are a private world of improvisation, spontaneity, humor and pathos, exaggeration and abandon,” Alden Mason wrote in an artist’s statement for Foster/White Gallery, which has represented him since 2002. “Old-fashioned emotional involvement is still my main priority in painting.”

Ladislav Hodný

Ladislav Hodný, “Abstract Composition II”, 2012, Oil, Acrylic and Lacquer on Canvas, 130 x 105 cm.

In 1943, Ladislav Hodný was born in the city of Týn nad Vltavou in the Czech Republic. He  graduated in 1961 from Vocational School of Bookbinding in Nový Jičín and, in 1965, from Secondary School of Arts and Crafts located in Brno. Hodný began his artistic career in the studio of his father, Ladislav Hodný Sr, where he continues the family tradition.

William Baziotes

William Baziotes, “Cyclops”, Oil on Canvas, 1947, Chicago Art Institute

William Baziotes was an American painter known for his luminous abstractions of biomorphic forms. Though he is considered an Abstract Expressionist, Baziotes’s work remained outside the dominant aspects of the movement. His paintings are in many ways more closely aligned with the early Surrealist works of Mark rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell.

Born on June of 1912 in Pittsburgh, PA, William Baziotes was raised in the town of Reading, PA, where he worked antiquing glass as a young man. Interested in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the paintings of Henri Matisse, Baziotes moved to New York in 1933 to attend the National Academy of Design. During the late 1930s, he worked for the WPA Federal Art Project, both as a teacher and in its easel division.

Baziotes was introduced to Motherwell by the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta in 1941, and had his first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century in 1944. William Baziotes died on June 6, 1963 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, “Elergy to the Spanish Republic No. 110”, Acrylic with Pencil and Charcoal on Canvas, 1971, Guggenheim Museum

The atrocities of the Spanish Civil War which started when he was twenty-one made an indelible impression on Robert Motherwell. who later devoted a series of more than two hundred paintings to the theme. From Motherwell’s retrospective view, the war became a metaphor for all injustice. He conceived of his series  “Elegies to the Spanish Republic” as majestic commemorations of human suffering and as poetic, abstract symbols for the unceasing cycle of life and death.

Motherwell demonstrates his admiration for French Symbolism with this series of paintings, an appreciation he shared with his fellow Abstract Expressionist painters. Motherwell was particularly inspired by the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s belief that a poem should not represent some specific entity, idea, or event, but rather the emotive effect that it produces. The abstract motif common to most of the Energy series, an alternating pattern of bulbous shapes compressed between columnar forms, may be read as an indirect reference to the experience of loss and the heroics of stoic resistance.

The contentious nature of life itself is expressed through the stark juxtaposition of black against white, which is emphasized by contrasting ovoid and rectilinear slab forms. Concerning the Elergy series, Motherwell said, “After a period of painting them, I discovered Black as one of my subjects—and with black, the contrasting white, a sense of life and death which to me is quite Spanish. They are essentially the Spanish black of death contrasted with the dazzle of a Matisse-like sunlight.”

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Number 8”, 1949 Drip Period, Enamel and Oil on Canvas, Neuburger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase

In the 1949 painting “Number 8”, Jackson Pollock’s line of paint has the capacity to be everywhere at once, to serve the ends of both illusion and substance. The paint line functioned supremely well as the vehicle of a speed of light all-overness, creating the impression that Pollock’s large poured all-over paintings arrived at their structure both internally and immediately. Pollock’s delicate crusts, which achieved an infinitesimal layer of relief, had profound affinities with two related modernist achievements, the Analytic Cubism of Picasso and the late wall-sized Impressionism of Claude Monet.

Pollock’s encrusted, puddled, labyrinthine, and weblike surfaces are physically and erotically present, enticing the viewer into a relation in which his body, and not just his eyesight, directly confronts the abstract field. This relation, which is at least as close to the experience of architecture as it is to the tradition of seeing through or “into” an illusionistic painting, can be deceptive. By means of his interlaced trickles and spatters, Pollock created a fluctuating movement between a clearly definite surface and an illusion of indeterminate, but somehow, definitely shallow depth.  This effect reminds viewers of what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque arrived at with the facet-planes of their Analytical Cubist paintings.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “The She-Wolf”, 1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock, like many of his peers, explored primeval or mythological themes in his work. The wolf in the 1943 painting “The She-Wolf” may allude to the animal in the myth of Rome’s birth that suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

However, “She-Wolf”came into existence because I had to paint it,” Pollock said in 1944. In an attitude typical of his generation, Jackson Pollock added, “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.”

“The She-Wolf” was featured in Pollock’s first solo exhibition, at the Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting the following year, making it the first work by Jackson Pollock to enter a museum collection.