38 research outputs found
Re-created Flatness: Hans Hofmannâs Concept of the Picture Plane as a Medium of Expression
For Hans Hofmann and Clement Greenberg, flatness--more specifically, âre-created flatness,â a term Greenberg adopted after hearing it used in the painterâs important 1938â 39 lectures--became a key term in their accounts of pictorial meaning. In this paper, I articulate what is significant about that idea and draw out its implications for understanding what Hofmann meant by artistic expression. Ultimately, I suggest that the concept of re-created flatness, and its pictorial realization, implies or entails a certain view of expression: namely, that what is expressed by an artwork is the artistâs meaning (in contradistinction to the arbitrary meanings that may be imputed to her work by a viewer). This paper has three principle objectives. First, I overview Hofmannâs unpublished writings and lectures on aesthetics. So far, the critical analysis and evaluation of these materials have had little visibility in modernist studies. I aim not only to contribute a more specific account of Hofmannâs concepts as they were introduced through his program of aesthetic education but also to situate them in a wider intellectual and critical context. Second, I interpret the significance of those ideas for modernist criticism by focusing especially on the concept of re-created flatness as it appears in the writings of both Hofmann and Greenberg. Finally, I hope to demonstrate that Hofmannâs closely associated notions of flatness, depth, and the picture plane are deeply implicated in the issue of modernist paintingâs autonomy, especially as formulated by Greenberg
âI am Natureâ: Science and Jackson Pollock
An attempt has been made to determine the authenticity of some newly discovered paintings that may be by Jackson Pollock on the basis of a belief that his art incorporates fractal patterns seen in the natural world. This is only the latest in a long line of interpretations of his works in terms of references to nature, as Michael Schreyach discusses
Representing âActualityâ
In an effort to challenge some prevailing assumptions surrounding the art of the painter Wolsâwhose work various critics in the late 1940s associated with the expression of existential uneaseâAlex Potts proposes that what Wols truly wished to convey was âa real sense of the substance of the world,â its âbare non-art materialityâ (119â20). An anecdote supplied by the critic RenĂ© Guilly on the occasion of Wolsâs 1947 Paris exhibition provides some evidence for that contention, even as it reveals the artistâs feelings of inadequacy in the face of his task. Walking by a decomposing wall glimpsed through a pane of broken glass, Wols is said to have lamented, âMy painting will never achieve thatâ (119). He may have meant that his art was incapable of the immediacy and directness he associated with the âreal.â Perhaps, as Potts suggests, Wolsâs disappointment came from recognizing that his desire for ârendering the reality of thingsâ in their âbrute materialityâ was incommensurate with working in mediums that were each bound, for better or worse, to sets of historical conventions that conditioned artistic representation (120). Nonetheless, in Pottsâs ambitious account of twentieth-century realism, some version of Wolsâs aspirationâto convey as if directly the âvivid actualityâ (326) and âmaterial substanceâ (3) of thingsâwidely animates the experimental practices of postwar artists
Introduction to \u3cem\u3eTotality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman\u3c/em\u3e
Pre-objective Depth in Merleau-Ponty and Jackson Pollock
Pollockâs drip technique generated certain unconventional representational possibilities, including the possibility of expressing the pre-reflective involvement of an embodied, intentional subject in a perceptual world. Consequently, Pollockâs art can be understood to explore or investigate the pre-objective conditions of reflective and intellectual consciousness. His paintingâhere I consider Number 1, 1949âmotivates viewers to consider the relationship between intention and meaning as it appears in both primordial and reflective dimensions of experience. The account proceeds in three stages. First, I review key features of Merleau-Pontyâs concept of the pre-objective and attempt to clarify the reflexive nature of investigating it by considering his analysis of Paul CĂ©zanneâs technique. Second, I consider Pollockâs technique and some critical responses to it, while analyzing some of its implications for a notion of pictorial address. Finally, I examine the perceptual effects of Number 1, 1949 and interpret them, following Merleau-Pontyâs lead, in view of a revised understanding of the relationship between automatism and intention
Meeting Spaces
Although in size and shape they more closely resemble traditional easel pictures than do some of his previous worksâspecifically those on uniquely fashioned supports, which patently display their constructed aspect, or his large-scale public commissions on concreteâMark Schlesingerâs recent paintings nonetheless convey the impression, like those prior works, of having been built. Not only do the wooden frames upon which he mounts his canvases project his surfaces away from the wall at a noticeably greater distance than do conventional stretchers, but Schlesinger has made an effort to render his auxiliary supports conspicuous
Seeing Nolandâs Feeling
Kenneth Noland\u27s paintingsâwhether his target-like compositions and their elliptical variations of the late 1950s and early 1960s; his midcareer chevrons, diamonds, and elongated horizontal bands; or his irregular polygon-shaped canvases of the 1970sâexhibit the artist\u27s formal solutions to some notoriously difficult pictorial problems, specifically those generated by the complex interrelationships between shape and color
Helen Frankenthalerâs Gravity
Helen Frankenthaler, like other painters of her generation, was compelled to come to terms with the technical and philosophical modes of Abstract Expressionism\u27s gestural practice. Responding to Pollock\u27s black-and-white paintings of 1951, she evolved a technique of staining raw, unsized canvas with thinned acrylic pigments that became her hallmark and a formative influence on many other painters, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. The method yielded paintings whose images appeared indivisible from their canvas grounds because colors were soaked directly into the surface. Moreover, since the technique de-emphasized the touch of the artist, it potentially renounced Abstract Expressionism\u27s painterly gesture