Download Free Reframing Abstract Expressionism Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Reframing Abstract Expressionism and write the review.

In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity - a new experience and idea of self. In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping "primitive" and "unconscious" components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors - including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness - that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated. According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity, a feature that helps to account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions alike.
Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Art - History of Art, grade: 1,3, University of Essex (Art History), course: Art in the USA, language: English, abstract: Abstract Expressionism is often referred to as the “most powerful original movement in the history of American art” , which dominated American painting from the end of World War II. In examining its styles and themes, this essay is going to illustrate why the movement is deemed a modern and American art practice. Consindering paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and Barnett Newman (1905-1970), specific attention will be drawn to issues of race and gender.
Reissue. Originally published: Ithaca, N.Y. : Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1978.
I conclude that Pollock's drip paintings address the particular relation of individuated "subject" to "object" (viewer and painting) by activating an experience of the general relation of "organism" to "environment." In using these latter terms, I propose a new way to address the radical proposal about the body in painting that Pollock's drip works make. The large-scale drip works stripped the body of its specificity and tried to convey some fundamental condition or modality of bodily experience. I use the term "reflexive potential" to describe the primal, minimum condition of this complex transaction. Reflexive potential is the condition of possibility which an organism and an environment initially emerge as distinct from one another, leading to the distinctions of inside and outside, or subject and object, which characterize all later interactions. I contend that Pollock's pragmatic paintings exemplify the original conditions of an organism on the verge of purposive behavior in an environment.
Abstract Expressionism was the defining movement in American art during the years following World War II, making New York City the center of the international art scene. But what the heck did it mean! The drips, the spills, the splashes, the blotches of color, the wild spontaneous energy—signifying what? Abstract Expressionism For Beginners will not only help you understand, but also appreciate the art of some of the most iconic figures in modern art—Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and others. Explore their lives and artistic roots, the heady world of Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s, the influence of jazz, the voices of critics, and the enduring legacy of a uniquely inspired group of artists.
Michael Leja offers a new, specifically visual, model for understanding American art in the decades before and after 1900.
For more than a decade, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner devoted their lives to each other, serving in turn as muse, critic, companion, lover, friend and alter ego. Their romance was stormy - their raucous arguments are the stuff of legend - but their talents were prodigious. This book is packed with examples of the contributions both artists made to the world of modern art. Readers will learn how Pollock and Krasners artistry evolved and how they influenced each others success. Recent developments, such as a revealing biopic and the art worlds elevation of Pollock to the status of being the most expensive artist in the world, bring their portrait fully up-to-date. While the author acknowledges historys sensationalisation of their lives, it is the paintings themselves - revolutionary, innovative and daring - that tell the most compelling story.
A collection of essays that discuss abstract expressionist art.