Abstract Art - I

Vasily Kandinsky 1866 – 1944
Kazimir Malevich 1879 – 1935 (Suprematism)
Paul Klee 1879 – 1940
Hans Hofmann 1880 – 1966
Arthur Dove 1880 – 1946
El Lissitzky 1890 – 1941
Mark Rothko 1903 – 1970
Clyfford Still 1904 – 1980
Barnett Newman 1905 – 1970
Paul Pollock 1912 – 1956

Abstract Art

Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.

Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and nonrepresentational art are loosely related terms. They are similar, but perhaps not of identical meaning.

Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in depiction of imagery in art. This departure from accurate representation can be slight, partial, or complete. Abstraction exists along a continuum. Even art that aims for verisimilitude of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties, altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract. Total abstraction bears no trace of any reference to anything recognizable. In geometric abstraction, for instance, one is unlikely to find references to naturalistic entities. Figurative art and total abstraction are almost mutually exclusive. But figurative and representational (or realistic) art often contains partial abstraction.

Both geometric abstraction and lyrical abstraction are often totally abstract. Among the very numerous art movements that embody partial abstraction would be for instance fauvism in which color is conspicuously and deliberately altered vis-a-vis reality, and cubism, which blatantly alters the forms of the real life entities depicted.

Much of the art of earlier cultures – signs and marks on pottery, textiles, and inscriptions and paintings on rock – used simple, geometric and linear forms which might have had a symbolic or decorative purpose. It is at this level of visual meaning that abstract art communicates. One can enjoy the beauty of Chinese calligraphy or Islamic calligraphy without being able to read it.

Vasily Kandinsky
1866—1944

Wassily Kandinsky. Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter

Kandinsky Vasily
(1866—1944). Russian painter, born in Moscow, generally considered the pioneer of abstract painting. His 1st work to be so described was a watercolour of 1910; however, all representational elements disappeared from his work only in the 1920s. K. was trained as a lawyer and took tip painting when he was 30, studying the art 1st in Munich. His early work was related to the Russian Symbolists and the Sezession groups. In 1906 he went to Paris for a year and exhibited at the current Salons. On his return to Munich his work began to reflect the ideas of the French *Nabis and *Fauves and became related to the Die *Brucke group; from the beginning the city of Moscow, Russian icon painting and folk-art strongly influenced him, providing a link with the Moscow avant-garde. By 1909 K. was painting landscapes called Improvisations which reflect a growing detachment from nature. In 1910 he painted his 1st abstract works, making contact with the Muscovite avant-garde, who invited him to exhibit at the 1st *Knave of Diamonds Exhibition. His On the Spiritual in Art was publ. in 1912. In 1911 he was a co-founder of the *Blaue Reiter. In 1912 K. had his 1st one-man show at the Berlin Sturm Gallery and publ. 2 plays Yellow Tone and Violet, which reflect his interest in relations between colour and music; he also became interested in the German Romantic philosophers, Rudolf Sterner and occultism. With the Bolshevik Revolution he was drawn into administrative work in the art field. In 1920 he drew up a programme for a new teaching system m art schools, but its Symbolist philosophy was rejected by the *Gonstructivists and was put into practice only after he had left Russia and joined the *Bauhaus school in Weimar (1922). In 1920 K. began to paint again, introducing geometrical forms which became strictly abstract, reminiscent of *Suprematist and Constructivist work; such torms remained typical throughout his Bauhaus period up to 1933 when he moved to France and came under the influence of Miro, his forms becoming more fluid and Surrealist. While at the Bauhaus he wrote Point ami Line to Surface (1926), which deals with the nature of form.

Improvisation 7

Paisaje romantico

Lyrisches

Grabiele Munter

Noche de luna

Noche de luna

Moscu I

San Jorge y el Dragon

Figurines para la escena XVI, Laa gran puerta de Kiev

Orange

Untitle

Tension en rojo

Composicion VIII

Composicion X

Amarillo-Rojo-Azul

In the Blue

Kleine Welten II from the set Kleine Welten

Wassily Kandinsky

WASSILI KANDINKSY: ABSTRACT WATERCOLOR. 1910.

WASSILI KANDINKSY: Improvisation 7. 1910.

WASSILI KANDINKSY: Glass Painting with the Sun. 1910.

WASSILI KANDINKSY: Murnau with a Church. 1910.

WASSILI KANDINKSY

Vassily Kandinsky, 1935 - Mouvement

Reciprocal, 1935 by Wassily Kandinsky

Fixed
1935. Kandinsky

Black composition on dark background (1935)
by Wassily Kandinsky

Kazimir Malevich
1879 – 1935
Suprematism

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Self-portrait

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (23 February [O.S. 11 February] 1879 – 15 May 1935) was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. Born in Kiev to an ethnic Polish family, his concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is also considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde (together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay, Aleksandra Ekster, and David Burliuk) that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and later over a geographical span between Europe and America.

Early on, Malevich worked in a variety of styles, quickly assimilating the movements of Impressionism, Symbolism and Fauvism, and after visiting Paris in 1912, Cubism. Gradually simplifying his style, he developed an approach with key works consisting of pure geometric forms and their relationships to one another, set against minimal grounds. His Black Square (1915), a black square on white, represented the most radically abstract painting known to have been created so far and drew "an uncrossable line (…) between old art and new art"; Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), a barely differentiated off-white square superimposed on an off-white ground, would take his ideal of pure abstraction to its logical conclusion. In addition to his paintings, Malevich laid down his theories in writing, such as "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism" (1915) and The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (1926).

Malevich's trajectory in many ways mirrored the tumult of the decades surrounding the October Revolution (O.S.) in 1917. In its immediate aftermath, vanguard movements such as Suprematism and Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivism were encouraged by Trotskyite factions in the government. Malevich held several prominent teaching positions and received a solo show at the Sixteenth State Exhibition in Moscow in 1919. His recognition spread to the West with solo exhibitions in Warsaw and Berlin in 1927. From 1928 to 1930, he taught at the Kiev Art Institute, with Alexander Bogomazov, Victor Palmov, Vladimir Tatlin and published his articles in a Kharkiv magazine, Nova Generatsiia (New generation). But the start of repression in Ukraine against the intelligentsia forced Malevich return to modern-day Saint Petersburg. From the beginning of the 1930s, modern art was falling out of favor with the new government of Joseph Stalin. Malevich soon lost his teaching position, artworks and manuscripts were confiscated, and he was banned from making art. In 1930, he was imprisoned for two months due to suspicions raised by his trip to Poland and Germany. Forced to abandon abstraction, he painted in a representational style in the years before his death from cancer in 1935, at the age of 56.

Nonetheless, his art and his writing influenced contemporaries such as El Lissitzky, Lyubov Popova and Alexander Rodchenko, as well as generations of later abstract artists, such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists. He was celebrated posthumously in major exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art (1936), the Guggenheim Museum (1973) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1989), which has a large collection of his work. In the 1990s, the ownership claims of museums to many Malevich works began to be disputed by his heirs.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Aviator
1914

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

RUNNING MAN 1933-1934. Paris. MNAI

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

The Knife Grinder Principle of Glittering

Kazimir Malevich, 1915
Black Suprematic Square

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Black Cross
1923

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Head of a Peasant
1929

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Blue Portrait
1930

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Sportsmen
1931

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Complex Presentiment: Half-Figure in a Yellow Shirt
1932

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Worker
1933

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Portrait of Artist s Wife N.A. Malevich
1933

KAZIMIR MALEVICH: AN ENGLISHMAN IN MOSCOW. 1914. Amsterdam. Stedelijk Museum

Photograph of The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10, St Petersburg, Russia, 1915

SUPREMATISM

Suprematism is a movement born of the reflections the Russian painter Kazimir Malevich who, under the title From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematis launched the idea in Petrograd in 1915. Also that year, he had exhibited his Black Square on White, which caused a real sensation.

For Malevich, the painter must be concerned only w painting and must reject any external considerations: “All painting prior to Suprematism, past and present (sculpture, verbal arts, music), was enslaved by the foi of nature and awaits its liberation to speak in its o! language and avoid dependence on reason, common sense, logic, philosophy, psychology, various laws causality, and technical changes in life.” More then Kandinsky's About the Spiritual in Art, this was the foundation for an art that was radically nonfigurative. Malevich would later state that painters must “reject subject and objects if they wish to be pure painters.” He hims practiced what he preached by putting nothing but tv dimensional geometric figures on his canvases. An o growth of Cubism and Futurism, Suprematism was a a translation to the plastic arts of “Zaouum" studies—transmental language—consisting of neologisms and imaginary words, which the poets Khlevrickov and Kruchernykh, friends of Malevich, had been involved in for several years.

Beginning in 1916, several major painters ralli around Suprematism, including Olga Rozanova, Ivan Klioun, Liubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, Nadejda Oudalstova, and Ivan Pougny. After the Russian Revolutuions Malevich taught his own theories at the Unovis stud in Vitebsk. With his students Nicolas Suetin and Ilya Chachnik, he used Suprematism in the applied arts, particularly industrial ceramics. Thus, despite the opposition of the Constructivists Tatlin and Rodchenko, Suprematism had a real impact on the Soviet Union. It became known abroad in 1922 thanks to El Lissitsky, who became involved with the Bauhaus through Moholy-Nagy and with the Stijl group through Van Doesburg. Suprematism reached its extreme with White Square on White, Malevich’s most famous painting, which he executed in 1919. Deliberately aggressive, the Suprematist conceptions created a considerable stir. Beyond their frequently anarchistic inspiration, these conceptions evinced a rare sense of the absolute. A even though the studies to which they led finally reached an impasse on both the plastic and theoreti levels, Suprematism’s goal of wiping the slate clear the past and placing the art of our century on entii new foundations is not present with so much intransigence in any other movement.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

SUPREMATISM. 1915.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

SUPREMATISM. 1915.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

SUPREMATISM. 1915.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

SUPREMATISM. 1915.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack. Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension, 1915

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:
Red Cross on a Black Circle (1915)

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

SUPREMATISM. 1915.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles (1915)

KAZIMIR MALEVICH:

Suprematist Composition .1915.

Paul Klee
1879 -1940

Klee Paul

(1879-1940). Painter born near Berne, Switzerland. He studied in Munich (1898- 1900) under Knirr and Stuck, visited Italy (1901) and then returned to Berne (1902-6). Most of his early work was in black and white graphic media: the precision of his draughtsmanship and the recurrent Expressionist fantasy element (e.g. Inventions etchings, 1903-5) link him with the N. European tradition. K. settled in Munich in 1906 and in 1911 made contact with the *Blaue Reiter artists (Kandinsky, Marc, Маске) and contributed to their exhibition in 1912. In 1912 also he visited Paris, met *Delaunay and trs. his essay Sur la lumiere. The accumulation of his contacts with the colouristic paintings of the Blaue Reiter, and with Delaunay's *Orphism, and finally his experience of Tunis, which he visited with Маске in 1914, resulted in K.'s release from his early monochromatic discipline. He now felt ready to paint and his watercolours of 1914—16 are subtle arrangements of glowing translucent colour areas. During the war he served in the army (1916—18) and was deeply distressed by the deaths of Маске (1914) and Marc (1916).
From 1920 to 1931 he taught at the *Bauhaus, Weimar and Dessau. His Pedagogical Sketchbook' was publ. in 1925 as a Bauhausbuch. The principle of his art and his influential teaching is best expressed in his own metaphor of the tree whose trunk is the artist. The pattern of growth of the roots is the pattern of nature (the artist's source of forms and ideas); this pattern is reflected in the growth of the branches and blossoms, but in this final flowering (which is the work of art) nature has been transformed by the richness of the artist's imaginative instincts. Improvisation plays an important part: the work of art is allowed, like a doodle, to follow its own evolution, subconsciously guided by the artist rather than consciously controlled. These ideas, disciplined by a rare self-knowledge and humility, which lie behind so many later developments, have made him a very influential thinker in art; the persistent quality of his prolific and varied oeuvre, exquisitely sensitive in line, colour and texture and often laced with fantasy and humour, has made him one of the c.'s most original artists. A Young Lady's Adventure (1922) shows his subtle colour, fluid line and uninhibited wit, but it is difficult to appreciate the character of his art without experiencing its full range. He left the Bauhaus (c. 1931) and held a professorship at Dusseldorf until 1933, when he was expelled by the Nazis. 102 of his works were confiscated from German museums during the Nazi regime, 17 of which were incl. in the notorious exhibition Degenerate Art (Munich, 1937).

Portal of a Mosque

Queen of Hearts

Rock-Cut Temple with Fir Trees

Romantic Park

Scenic-Physiognomic

Senecio

Small Fool in Trance 2

Spirit Drinking and Gambling

Street in the Camp

Teatro de guinol

The Festival of the Asters

The Mountain of the Sacred Cat

The Singer L. As Fiordiligi

The Singer of the Comic Opera

Two Country Houses

Water Pyramids

Around the Fish

Hans Hofmann
1880 – 1966

Hans Hofmann
(March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 (along with Jackson Pollock’s in late 1943) as a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's recognition grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963), which traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago.

Hofmann is also regarded as one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century. He established an art school in Munich in 1915 that built on the ideas and work of Cézanne, the Cubists and Kandinsky; some art historians suggest it was the first modern school of art anywhere. After relocating to the United States, he reopened the school in both New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts until he retired from teaching in 1958 to paint full-time. His teaching had a significant influence on post-war American avant-garde artists—including Helen Frankenthaler, Nell Blaine, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and Larry Rivers, among many—as well as on the theories of Greenberg, in his emphasis on the medium, picture plane, and unity of the work. Some of Hofmann's other key tenets include his push/pull spatial theories, his insistence that abstract art has its origin in nature, and his belief in the spiritual value of art. Hofmann died of a heart attack in New York City on February 17, 1966.

Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann, Pompeii, 1959

Hans Hofmann: Sic Itur ad Astra (Such Is the Way to the Stars), 1962.

Hans Hofmann: The Vanquished, 1959.

Hans Hofmann
Rising Moon, 1965

Smaragd Red and Germinating Yellow, oil on canvas by Hans Hofmann, 1959

Untitled
HANS HOFMANN, 1940

Laburnum
HANS HOFMANN, 1954

Summer Summit
HANS HOFMANN, 1962

The Gate
HANS HOFMANN, 1959 – 1960

Untitled
HANS HOFMANN, 1940

Arthur Dove
1880 – 1946

Arthur Garfield Dove (August 2, 1880 – November 23, 1946) was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations, to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of his career. Dove made a series of experimental collages in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion as exemplified in Dove's 1938 painting Tanks, in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

Arthur Dove, Nature Symbolized No. 2, c.1911

Arthur Dove, Cow, 1914

Arthur Dove, Long Island (1925)

Arthur Dove, Moon, (1928)

Arthur Dove, Clouds and Water, 1930

Arthur Dove, Thunder Shower, (1940)

El Lissitzky
1890 – 1941

El Lissitzky
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (23 November [O.S. 11 November] 1890 – 30 December 1941), better known as El Lissitzky, was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant-garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.

Lissitzky's entire career was laced with the belief that the artist could be an agent for change, later summarized with his edict, "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation). Lissitzky, of Lithuanian Jewish оrigin, began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia. When only 15 he started teaching, a duty he would maintain for most of his life. Over the years, he taught in a variety of positions, schools, and artistic media, spreading and exchanging ideas. He took this ethic with him when he worked with Malevich in heading the suprematist art group UNOVIS, when he developed a variant suprematist series of his own, Proun, and further still in 1921, when he took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his remaining years he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, where in 1941 he produced one of his last works – a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany. In 2014, the heirs of the artist, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum and leading worldwide scholars on the subject, established the Lissitzky Foundation in order to preserve the artist's legacy and to prepare a catalogue raisonné of the artist's oeuvre.

Lissitzky's The Constructor, 1924, London, Victoria & Albert Museum

El Lissitzky. Proun. 1st Kestner Portfolio

El Lissitzky. Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1920

El Lissitzky. A Proun, c. 1925. Commenting on Proun in 1921, Lissitzky stated, "We brought the canvas into circles ... and while we turn, we raise ourselves into the space."

El Lissitzky. Untitled

El Lissitzky - Preliminary sketch for a poster, 1920.

Mark Rothko
1903 - 1970

Mark Rothko

b. 1903, Dvinsk, Russia; d. 1970, New York City

Mark Rothko was born Marcus Rothkowitz on September 25, 1903, in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia). In 1913 he left Russia and settled with the rest of his family in Portland, Oregon. Rothko attended Yale University, New Haven, on a scholarship from 1921 to 1923. That year he left Yale without receiving a degree and moved to New York. In 1925 he studied under Max Weber at the Art Students League. He participated in his first group exhibition at the Opportunity Galleries, New York, in 1928. During the early 1930s Rothko became a close friend of Milton Avery and Adolph Gottlieb. His first solo show took place at the Portland Art Museum in 1933.

Rothko’s first solo exhibition in New York was held at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in 1933. In 1935 he was a founding member of the Ten, a group of artists sympathetic to abstraction and Expressionism. He executed easel paintings for the WPA Federal Art Project from 1936 to 1937. By 1936 Rothko knew Barnett Newman. In the early 1940s he worked closely with Gottlieb, developing a painting style with mythological content, simple flat shapes, and imagery inspired by primitive art. By mid-decade his work incorporated Surrealist techniques and images. Peggy Guggenheim gave Rothko a solo show at Art of This Century in New York in 1945.

In 1947 and 1949 Rothko taught at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, where Clyfford Still was a fellow instructor. With William Baziotes, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell, Rothko founded the short-lived Subjects of the Artist school in New York in 1948. The late 1940s and early 1950s saw the emergence of Rothko’s mature style, in which frontal, luminous rectangles seem to hover on the canvas surface. In 1958 the artist began his first commission, monumental paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave Rothko an important solo exhibition in 1961. He completed murals for Harvard University in 1962 and in 1964 accepted a mural commission for an interdenominational chapel in Houston. Rothko took his own life on February 25, 1970, in his New York studio. A year later the Rothko Chapel in Houston was dedicated.

MARK ROTHKO: HIERARCHICAL BIRDS. 1944. Washington, D.C. National Gallery of Art

Sacrifice of iphigenia
Mark Rothko
1942

Untitled
Mark Rothko
1941 - 1942

Untitled
Mark Rothko
1942

Untitled
Mark Rothko
1942

Untitled
Mark Rothko
1942

Gethsemane
Mark Rothko
1944

Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea
Mark Rothko
1944

Archaic Idol
Mark Rothko
1945

Untitled
Mark Rothko
c.1945

Fantasy
Mark Rothko
1945

Untitled
Mark Rothko
c.1944 - c.1945

Rites of Lilith
Mark Rothko
1945

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1952

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1952

Mark Rothko, Orange and Tan, 1954

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1954

Untitled (Yellow, Red and Blue)
Mark Rothko
1953

Untitled (Purple, White, and Red)
Mark Rothko
1953

Green and Maroon
Mark Rothko
1953

Untitled
Mark Rothko
1955

MARK ROTHKO:

HOMAGE TO MATISSE. 1954.

New York. Private Collection

Light Red Over Black
Mark Rothko
1957

No. 16 (Red, White, and Brown)
Mark Rothko
1957

White Over Red
Mark Rothko
1957

Composition
Mark Rothko
1958

Untitled Mural for End Wall
Mark Rothko
1959

Blue, Orange, Red
Mark Rothko
1961

No. 16
Mark Rothko
1961

Untitled (No. 17)
Mark Rothko
1961

Orange, Red, Orange
Mark Rothko
1961

Clyfford Still
1904 – 1980

Clyfford Still
(November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.
Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada. In 1925 he visited New York, briefly studying at the Art Students League. He attended Spokane University from 1926 to 1927 and returned in 1931 with a fellowship, graduating in 1933. That fall, he became a teaching fellow, then faculty member at Washington State College (now Washington State University), where he obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1935 and taught until 1941. He spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation (now Yaddo) in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In 1937, along with Washington State colleague Worth Griffin, Still co-founded the Nespelem Art Colony that produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting Colville Indian Reservation Native American life over the course of four summers.

In 1941 Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where he worked in various war industries while pursuing painting. He had his first solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) in 1943. He taught at the Richmond Professional Institute (RPI), now Virginia Commonwealth University, from 1943 to 1945, then went to New York City.

Mark Rothko, whom Still had met in California in 1943, introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her gallery, The Art of This Century Gallery, in early 1946. The following year Guggenheim closed her gallery and Still, along with Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists, joined the Betty Parsons gallery.

Still returned to San Francisco, where he became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), teaching there from 1946 to 1950. In 1950, he moved to New York City, where he lived most of the decade, the height of Abstract Expressionism, but also a time when he became increasingly critical of the art world. In the early 1950s, Still severed ties with commercial galleries. In 1961 he moved to a 22-acre farm near Westminster, Maryland, removing himself further from the art world. Still used a barn on the property as a studio during the warm weather months. In 1966, Still and his second wife purchased a 4,300-square-foot house at 312 Church Street in New Windsor, Maryland, about eight miles from their farm, where he lived until his death.

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Barnett Newman
1905 – 1970

Barnett Newman
1950 - 1951

Barnett Newman
(January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate simplistic forms to emphasize this feeling.
Barnett Newman was born in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He studied philosophy at the City College of New York and worked in his father's business manufacturing clothing. He later made a living as a teacher, writer, and critic. From the 1930s on he made paintings, said to be in an expressionist style, but eventually destroyed all these works. Newman met Annalee Greenhouse in 1934 while both were working as substitute teachers at Grover Cleveland High School; they were married on June 30, 1936.

Barnett Newman
1950

Onement 1, 1948
Roger Bissière

Eve
Barnett Newman
1950

Untitled I
Barnett Newman
1950

The Wild
Barnett Newman
1950

Paul Pollock
1912 – 1956

JACKSON POLLOCK:

NUMBER SEVEN. 1952

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an American painter. A major figure in the abstract expressionist movement, Pollock was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US$200 million in a private purchase.

A reclusive and volatile personality, Pollock struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car collision when he was driving.