Our class went to the fourth floor of MOMA last Monday, and saw some extraordinary pieces. Okay honestly, not all were extraordinary. I laughed at the friendly banter between Greg and ToniAnn (and Beth as well) about the creativity of some of these pieces. As Greg said “No Beth, you know what it looks like this guy did? It looks like he painted one half of the canvas black, and the other half of the canvas gray.”
Yeah, you had to be there to find it funny.
But the talk of gray and black art is a nice way to get into what I really wanted to talk about. While there at MOMA, I came across a section dedicated to black and white abstract art. I was immediately reminded of what had been my recent blog at the time “Black and White and 15 feet long!”
The work of Aaron Siskind interested me especially. I realized while browsing the abstract pieces at MOMA what it is that attracts me to colorless art; color speaks. We live in a society where black and white and gray are all mundane. Color holds so much more significance in our lives than we may realize. Red means stop, green means go. Pink blankets are for baby girls, blue blankets are for baby boys. So when black and white and grey get a chance to speak volumes on a canvas, it feels more powerful and persuasive in a world where color holds so much meaning.
Aaron Siskind explored all types of art, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that he began exploring abstract visual language over representational artwork. His art inspired many painters such as Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Aaron Siskind's "Chicago 206" 1953
One of the pieces that I admired at MOMA. The grungy feel is compelling, and I like the recurring pattern in the back that looks like something dripping from a cave wall. The X and the splattered specks of white on the left can be interpreted so many different ways.
To learn more about Siskind, you can visit this link, which also has a wide variety of his art.
More of Aaron Siskind\’s abstract works
Franz Kline was also another black-and-white artist that struck me. I don’t find his works as creative or as well thought-out as Siskind, but I still found that his simple work “Painting Number 2” invoked feelings in me as I smiled and tried interpreting his slashes of black paint.
Kline's "Painting Number 2" 1954
It is quite interesting to find these examples of black and white art. Art of this type is more about line and form. It is interesting to isolate that aspect (i.e. line and form) and then to see how that aspect re-emerges in a painting that also includes color.