New York City and the Arts

By Darren Panicali

You know, you don’t go to many museum exhibits with a contorted, baffled expression on your face that screams of the question “What the hell is that?” but that’s really what the MoMA’s abstract expressionism gallery will have you doing, with its works all meandering outside the visual arts box and straying from the safe and the customary.  I strolled on down to the exhibit on Saturday, 11/13, and I was trying to keep the most open and receptive mind possible for what was to come – how else could you possibly approach an art style so feverishly and flamboyantly nonconformist and strange? I wasn’t about to walk in and cast everything off as nonsense; I’d be miserable.  No, I was ready and willing, and Deborah Goldberg (bless that poor woman; she had a cold and still delivered a fine tour, complete with excellent oration and description) was about to show me the light – or perhaps a few of the most bizarre works of art known to man. (Well, who’s keeping track anyway?)

Deborah gave us a crystal-clear window through which to view these outrageous paintings: She described them as moving away from subject matter and forcing viewers to consider the methodology instead – what materials were used, how they were applied, what modes were utilized, and so on. And instead of blathering on and on about the history of the art and what it meant as we moved from work to work, she would leave much room for simple contemplation and interpretation, describing the pieces succinctly and giving a brief history of the lives of the artists, lives which were always so filled to the brim with arduous struggle but also the will to forcefully push forward cogent messages through art. Each work was a culmination of both the uplifting and destructive experiences the artist had endured, and you could really feel that as Deborah spoke.

Some of the drives behind certain paintings were so inspiring. According to Deborah, Gorky wanted to create forms that were “biomorphic, organic, and amoebic,” Gottlieb desired to design “that which is tragic and timeless” and “good for humanity” in his hieroglyphic-like works, and Newman hoped to instill a “sublime or transcendent spiritual feeling” with his color field genre. The various media employed contributed a gamut of brilliant techniques to the abstract expressionist movement – application of paint in layers, adjustment of patterns with turpentine, use of anything from dried-up brushes and tape to turkey basters and rags … all kinds of innovative and outlandish stuff! And to top it off, they were used in many different ways: Paint was applied in certain orders, or the paint would be caked up to create a 3D obtrusive effect, or various colors would flow both within and beyond boundary-lines – it was fantastic.

But particularly fantastic was Hedda Sterne’s New York, VIII:

Courtesy of www.moma.org

One of the things that piqued my interest in our seminar discussions was Professor Jablonka’s comment about having to be there and actually experience the painting rather than viewing it online or in print. I was a little skeptical of this idea and was actually eager to test her point, and to my delight, she was right, and this was the piece that best helped me to see that. Sterne employed synthetic polymer paint to create a scintillating radiance – a demure but pervasive glow, characteristic of a dimly lit romantic scene. The key words here are dreamlike and surreal. It was like that first moment atop the magnificent Woolworth Building after first gazing upon the city in all its stupefying grandeur.  But as I look at the above image, I can’t help but think it doesn’t even compare to the feeling I had in front of the work. The luminosity here is faded, and the contrasts of the colors have dwindled. Sterne used such brilliant techniques: She created streaks of light with brighter colors (You can’t see them here!) and depicted chaos with the interspersing of dabs of light blue, orange, tan, and gray on a black and pale blue background. The dreamy quality I felt seeing it with my own eyes a few feet away has diminished, and a lesser, disappointed appreciation lies in its wake… But still, I found this work to be absolutely gorgeous, and overall, I’ve really come to understand a strange type of art that was just so foreign before. Thanks Deborah and Professor Jablonka!

Izaya Abdurakhmanov

My experience at the Museum of Modern Art’s gallery talk on abstract expressionism in New York was a mixture of both dissatisfaction and enjoyment. The guide of my group was Deborah Goldberg. She seemed very knowledgeable about the subject and gave lots of information/ background on each of the painters as well as the abstract expressionist movement itself. I learned how the movement began after World War II and that it represented change, rebellion, and desire to start anew. Abstract expressionism was influenced by surrealism, which was a previous movement involving unexpected and surprising art.

When we started looking at Barnett Newman’s work, any respect I had for this type of art quickly diminished. When I saw the first painting I could not hold in my thoughts so I said out loud, “ What the #$/*?! This is art?” and I guess I wasn’t the only one who thought this since a woman next to me laughed. I was completely flabbergasted by how a line through a colored background could be called art. When I thought I’d seen it all, I saw a long, thin line in the middle of the wall. It was like the line going through the background of the previous painting, only Newman took that line and made it the only part of the painting. That line looked like something I would use to line the corners of my walls. I guess what I’m trying to say is that paintings that could easily be done or thought of by a non-artist, in my opinion, are not worthy of being called art.

All hope was not lost however, as Jackson Pollock’s work came next. The respect I lost in the previous room slowly started coming back. What I really liked were his drip paintings because a lot more work was put into them than could visibly be seen in Newman’s work. His work would definitely be something I would like hanging on my wall or at least on the floor as a carpet. In addition to his drip paintings, I liked his painting titled “The Flame” because I’ve never seen fire drawn in such an abstract way before. The figure of the flame was white and the surrounding of the figure had tiny red flames, which was the opposite of what you would expect from normal painting of a flame. It was abstract enough to not look like fire but at the same time you could still tell that it is fire.

The last artist’s work we saw was Mark Rothko. His work was just colors layered on top of one another, which made me lose respect again. It was still better than Newman’s work but still not very difficult to do. What was interesting about these paintings was that they reminded me more of science than art. The paintings with colors layered on top of each other reminded me of gel electrophoresis, which is a technique used to separate DNA fragments. Each color looked like a DNA fragment after separation. There were also two other paintings, which reminded me of a plant cell and an animal cell.

My favorite painting, or the painting that spoke out to me the most was “Desert” by Richard Pousette-Dart. The painting is so wacky with so many things going on at once. At first look, it looks like an eye but at a colder look, there are so many geometrical shapes like triangles, circles, squares as well as squiggly lines all with different colors. However, all of these colorful shapes are on the background of a desert like color, which would explain the title. I guess what this means to me is that the center piece represents creativity and liveliness but since it is in a desert, there is no one to reach out to and so it remains in isolation. Perhaps it could symbolize the abstract expressionist movement itself, in that the centerpiece represents the colorful and lively movement, but the desert its in represents society.

So overall, I disliked some of the paintings with a passion but I did enjoy quite a few as well. Thus, abstract art is still something I would like to see occasionally.

Kevin Wang

Response to Abstract Expressionism

In my trip to the Moma and their abstract expressionism exhibition on Saturday, November 13, 2010, I’ve learned a lot about the histories of abstract art from our art curator, Debra Goldberg. She told us about why abstract expressionism began in the 1940’s, because of artists who were angry at how society has destroyed itself in numerous occasions through the atomic bombing of Japan, the holocaust in Europe, and World War II. The painters sought to express the changes of society in their art. The artists believed they could change the world with their art by reasserting all that is good in mankind. This led to abstract expressionism art. In this gallery, my favorite artist was Jackson Pollock. One of his pieces, The Flame, really caught my attention. The Flame was a mass of red, white, black, and yellow colors. The vividness of the colors and the odd shapes created from these colors drew my attention to the image. I realized also after looking at it, that there were parts of the paint that protruded out at you, making the picture seem more alive and real and not just a two dimensional image on the wall. As I looked at the painting, I realized that there appeared to be two people to the very left of the image. I think Pollock is trying to say that everyone has a capacity for lighting up a flame of passion and that we just have to find the spark. This painting inspired me to work hard and find my own passions so I can light up the same beautiful fire that is portrayed in this painting.

Going into the MoMA’s latest exhibition, “Abstract Expressionist New York”, I couldn’t find myself thinking of a straight forward definition for that style. The only paintings I thought were abstract were the Dali paintings I saw on Sesame Street as a kid. My tour guide, who also led my group through the “Pictures by Women” exhibition, gave a brief definition I still could not understand, but explained that it culminated in the 1940s/1950s postwar America, where styles such as Dadaism and Expressionism could flower. I figured that as we walked through the galleries I would possibly encounter some familiar paintings and answer my own question.

The paintings started out with primitive techniques and use of different mediums (“Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive”-Robert Motherwell) and became more complicated, using deliberate splashes of color to invoke sparks of emotion and grab the viewers attention (“Summation”-Arshile Gorky) as well as more elaborate and large scale as large Cubist sculpture (“Cubix”-David Smith). As the tour continued as such, I found myself slightly disappointed with the pieces that were being discussed.

After the tour I had time to look around on my own and try to make some sense of the third floor. I liked the paintings with recognizable/discernible figures because I got so lost in the paint splatters of Pollock. My favorites were the pieces with bright splashes of unusual colors like amethyst and lime green, giving life to an otherwise drab canvas. Ready to leave the museum, I was satisfied with my own definition of abstract expressionism-whatever it is the artist thinks it is. Every artist I saw had their own take on the style, ranging from colorful splashes to unfinished works in charcoal and oil paint. However, they all had a warped view of the original subject or inspiration. The way in which the artist decides to interpret these, usually by inverting features or limbs, using unusual colors or materials, and looking for patterns in color or texture, is what makes them expressionists.

I will admit that I tried to rush through some of the smaller paintings in the galleries to get to the pop art exhibition next door (dedicating an entire wall to Andy Warhol, of course) and upstairs to see the Mexican paintings of Rivera and Kahlo and an interesting piece by David Alfaro Siqueros entitled “Collective Suicide”. With the superimposition of separate pieces, mixture of warm and cold colors, and unusual subject matter, this is what I thought was Abstract Expressionism all along.

When I arrived at the MoMA for the gallery talk on November 6th, I felt really grateful to experience it from MoMA educator Agnes Berecz, the tour guide who enhanced the Women in Photography exhibit for me a few months ago. Her extensive knowledge about the historical contexts and the artists themselves as well as her opinionated input really made me feel like I was engaging in more of a conversation than an educational lecture.

Something I found interesting about experiencing the gallery tour was the new Jackson Pollock appreciation it lent me. I entered the exhibit with a general bias against him since I’ve studied his past and disapproved of his unfavorable character. I have seen Pollock’s “#31” at the MoMA dozens of times before without feeling too impressed or emotionally drawn to the piece. But as our tour guide, Ms. Agnes Berecz, began explaining the consequences of horizontality in a piece and the special relations it requires, I felt a strong sense of how Pollock’s paintings epitomized complete release from control and an allowance to let the body and gravity take art where it wishes to go– a huge element in  Abstract Expressionist art. The fact that Pollock made a decision as simple as changing the orientation of a painting that consequently affected an entire movement is fascinating to me.

I love Abstract Expressionism because, in some cases, a variety of elements are taken into consideration while the end product exudes a subtle beauty that strikes viewers. In others, the sheer magnitude of a painting and the execution of brush strokes, color choice, and subject matter evoke an emotion by themselves. One of my favorite paintings in the exhibit is Willem de Kooning’s “Woman, I” because it embodies a raw and intense power normally associated with a work that takes extensive time to complete. I can feel the artist’s frustrations and rage with every bold brush stroke, and I feel like a work that’s so revealing not only of its purposeful subject matter but its behind-the-scenes creation takes art to another level.

I entered the Abstract Expressionism exhibit rolling my eyes. Over the years my appreciation for and patience with the kind of art that was now before me – paint splatters, abstract aggression smeared on pretentious half-formed shapes – had slowly dwindled. I recognize that art has taken a turn from a focus on technique and precision towards the beauty of the concept and message. But Pollock simply frustrated me. His artwork is original and recognizable, but I could not understand the appeal of his work. It was all the same to me. After I went on a guided tour of the exhibit with Ms. Agnes Berecz, however, my attitude towards this kind of art had very much changed.

Ms. Berecz began the tour with a discussion of the significance of the Abstract Expressionist movement in American history, since it was the first home-grown American art movement. She took us on a crash course through the exhibit and the history of Abstract Expressionism. Our first stop was Hans Hoffman. We discussed Hoffman’s manipulation of space in his paintings, and how the cool colors recede while the red jumps out at the viewer. After briefly discussing Robert Motherwell, we came to a very large piece by Arshile Gorky called Summation. Color’s role was pointed out; subtle dabs of color on an otherwise beige-and-black background directed our vision to different parts of the drawing, avoiding a single focal point. This was a recurring theme in the exhibit, and what fascinated me most about the art displayed. The same was seen in Jackson Pollock’s paintings, and Joan Mitchell’s Ladybug. These are works of art that are meant to pull you into a surreal world of beauty and color, stimulating our thoughts with colors and forms. At the same time, these works challenged conventional methods in art, some through magnitude, others by manipulating direction and orientation.

After hearing about the philosophy behind some of these pieces, I was filled with a newly found respect for the artists. I still question their effectiveness as works of art. Art, in my mind, should stand on its own. These works need explanation, a background story, history to be fully understood. But the philosophy in these works is definitely intriguing, and I look forward to further exploring this colorful corner of the art world.

The exhibit on absract expressionism at the MoMA was absolutely superb. I learned a lot about origins and the development of the movement itself. Additionally, many of the key pioneers were introduced to me, many of whom I had never heard of before except for Jackson Pollock. Our tour guide, Agnes Berecz was not afraid to get up close and personal and ask pivotal questions about the paintings, which helped us too learn even more.

The first painter that we were exposed to was Hans Hofmann and his painting “Spring” painted in 1941. When we first approached the painting , I thought we were approaching a Jackson Pollock piece, but it was not. Hofmann was important in the expressionist movment because he was one of the first European artists to flee from Europe to America during WWII and helped start the movement.  His painting was very similar to Pollock’s in that it involved the drizzling of paint on canvas with no real rhyme or reason to it. The key to his painting, however, was the use of “push and pull with red and blue colors”. Despite being a two-dimensional piece, he managed to create depth on the flat surface by using two contrasting colors that create illusions in the human eye. By placing blue and red next to each other, it seems as if the red is jumping out at you and the blue is pushing into the canvas. For this reason, Hofmann is one of the master expressionists.

Of all the artists that Mrs. Berecz showed us, my overall favorite is of course Mr. Pollock. His work just amazes me and has always stood out to me since childhood. His pieces might seem quite primitive, but as Mrs. Berecz demonstrated, there was actually a reasoning behind his method; It wasn’t just throwing paint at canvas. For instance, there was no up, down, left, or right in his painting style, leaving much up to the viewer in terms of interpretation. Similarly, this was revolutionary as he was one of the pioneers to take a canvas and place it on the floor . Aside from his unique style, the method to his paint throwing was very artistic  in that it was very symbolic of the dancing movements he made while painting. Everything is rounded and smooth imitating the dance like movments he made while painting. Also, he actually layered his application of paint, creating depth to the image.

Now while Pollock was my favorite artist overall, the image above of Willem de Kooning’s “Painting” was absolutely my favorite piece in the exhibit. It has a graffiti like nature to it, and looks like an explosion that’s both violent yet gentle thereby combining the best of both worlds. It seriously stands out to me and was by far my favorite piece in the whole exhibit. If I had the money, I would buy it because I loved it so much. For this reason, my trip to the MoMA to see this exhibit will be unforgettable.

At the Abstract Expressionism talk on Sunday 11/7, I felt a variety of emotions from these works of art. Deborah Goldberg was my gallery speaker. We focused mainly on works by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, with the inclusion of a few other works done by Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner, William Rubin, Philip Guston, and William de Kooning. The exhibit was much different than the classic art we have looked at in class. It had no real subject, no relation to titles of the artwork, lots of lines and geometry, lots of dripping and was carefree. I really did not get Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. I liked how his point was to show that different colors pop out while others recede in a painting, and I definitely saw that in Heroic Sublime Man (featured below). However, it is not something I could see myself analyzing for a long time, and it was not something that I was very fond of. I could not get connected to it, I could not see what Deborah said how the lines were potentially people, and I was slightly bothered that something that seemed so simple was displayed in a museum. This made me realize that art has different definitions to each individual. I still like modern art, but I think I am more attracted to the more recent pop-art instead. After talking to other classmates I realized that the gallery was so large that each speaker focused on different paintings for each talk so each of us experienced different pieces. I saw some pieces in my wandering that caught my eye so maybe if I attended another talk I would relate to those better.

A painting I did like was Jackson Pollock’s One Number 31, 1950. It was large and contained so many lines and drips and colors. I definitely understood why he was known as Jack the Dripper after looking at this painting. I liked how the painting was large and all a consistent pattern so it was as if it was growing or engulfing me as the viewer. The colors fit together and made looking into the picture seem like I was looking into static on a TV, into a mass of nothingness. I also liked imagining how he painted it, leaning over the canvas on the floor, making painting the chaotic picture like a dance and a strenuous exercise, which seemed to work together.

-Nicole Lennon

I really enjoyed our visit to the MET. I was, and still slightly am, unfamiliar with many of the Old Masters, and I had no idea that certain styles and images were common across countries and eras, such as the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus. One of my favorite pieces from the Baroque period has to be the last one we all saw: Rubens, his wife Helena Fourment, and their son Peter Paul, by artist Peter Paul Rubens. The image itself is rather large and adds to its eye-catching quality. I like how the tour guide pointed out the triangular format of the figures, all centering around Helena. It is obvious to us how much Rubens loved his wife; the way he uses a luminous white/creamy pearl as her skin tones literally makes her glow and sparkle, making her seen angelic.

Some of the other paintings I enjoyed were also by Rubens, and I realized that his style incorporated animals and nature into settings along with humans. There is also a split contrast between mortal and divine and light and dark, as in Venus and Adonis. The amount of detail he put into painting fabrics and textures is also something to be amazed by.

My favorite painting of the evening however was from an adjacent gallery: Magic Scene with Self-Portrait by Pieter van Laer. It seemed like something that should not fit in..one of these things is not like the other…The artist was not somber and calm faced; he wore a face distorting scream, with stained cheeks and horror stricken eyes you can almost sense the presence of the devil creeping over you. The various spell books and strange bottles lying around aren’t typical objects found in paintings of the era, and I enjoyed seeing it surrounded by paintings of stiff looking ladies and gentlemen and scenes of divine intervention. This is way darker.

-Laura Ayala

As made obvious by their art, the Byzantines and Renaissance-era Italians loved Jesus. They enjoyed making visual tributes to him in a plethora of scenes, but by far the most popular was the ‘Madonna and Child’. We saw an absurd amount of Madonna and Child paintings, all with baby Jesus sitting in the crook of his mother’s right arm and/or resting on her leg. While not particularly enthused by the subject material (or lack of it…the same concept was repeated over and over again) it was interesting to see how people’s concept of how Mary and Jesus evolved over time. The paintings grew less flat and stylized over the centuries and infant Jesus started to look more like an infant (in the early byzantine renderings, he looked like an adult face on a weird baby body….it was not, in my opinion, the most attract look for the young savior).

The painting I enjoyed most in the Flemish section was Wolf and Fox Hunt. Part of a series of hunting scenes, the painting was made and sold to Sir Dudley Carleton in the 1610s or 1620s. I liked the detail and vivacity present in the painting of the animals; there is a realism in them that was less apparent (or at least I thought) in many of the people painted by the old Flemish masters. While I think that the idea of mixing mother of pearl into their paint certainly achieved the luminosity they were looking to create, I was not so keen on how it worked in the context of the painting. I believe this may be because standards of beauty have changed over time. The grandmasters painted their subjects with pale, opalescent skin because it seemed to connote the angelic for them; when I look at these paintings I see an iridescence that seems bizarre as a skin tone. This strive for the heavenly is also visible in the shapes of their models. All the women and children, regardless of age seem cherubic, painted with soft lines; angular features and deep shadows are relegated to men, and often not even then are they utilized by the Flemish masters. This ties back to why Wolf and Fox Hunt was my favorite in the grouping, because their were heavy lines and a sense of action that was not present in most of the other Flemish paintings.

Wolf and Fox Hunt

Also, on a related note, a quasi-animated rendering some of you all might like:

http://www.lukasweb.be/splash.html Art in Flanders, (in 3-D?)