Postwar Abstraction in the United States

In the 1940s artists around the world tried to deal with the impact of World War II. The Surrealist art movement, born in pre-war Europe, had great influence in postwar America largely due to the wartime migration of significant European artists. In New York, Surrealism continued to be a major influence on the free association method of working, called ‘automatism’. Through this method, artists sought to unlock images from the depths of their unconscious.

Many artists took an interest in Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and sought to explore symbols that had powerful shared meanings across different cultures and throughout history. This theory often provoked the desire to study tribal art and symbols as seen in the early work of Mark Rothko and his close friend Adolph Gottlieb.

The notion of a ‘return to origins’ of our deep humanity informed a renewed interest in the spontaneity of children’s art and what was then known as ‘the art of the insane’.

Philosophies such as existentialism, which stressed personal responsibility for creating meaning in one’s life, contributed to artists working with personal imagery. These ideas were incorporated in the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock. His distinctive style incorporated signature linear gestures and a layered surface made up of energetic drips and splatters.

Colour Field painters such as Morris Louis and Mark Rothko created colour saturated and stained  canvases to emphasize the flatness of the painting’s surface and express spiritual states of awareness.

 
 

Jackson Pollock Untitled (Green Silver) c.1949

"The modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique."
Jackson Pollock, born America 1912

Many Australians were introduced to Jackson Pollock’s work by the controversy surrounding the Australian Government’s purchase of his work, Blue Poles, Number 11, 1952. Blue Poles exemplified his signature drip-painting style. The picture shown here, Untitled (Green Silver) c. 1949 is one of his smaller works, produced partly because they attracted sales more readily than his large-scale canvases.

1949 was a big year for Pollock’s celebrity status as an artist. In 1949, Time Magazine asked of Jackson Pollock ‘Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?’ What started out as a slightly contemptuous investigation, referring to his technique as ‘drools’ and ‘doodling’, was soon taken seriously in the art world and beyond.

Untitled (Green Silver) c. 1949 is made from enamel and aluminium paint on paper fused to canvas. Pollock often tacked his canvases onto the floor in an approach he likened to that of the Navajo sand painters. Pollock explained that:

"On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting".

Materials and Techniques

Pollock did not produce preparatory drawings, colour sketches or other plans for his work. After long deliberation before the empty canvas, he used his entire body in the picture-making process, as he dripped, poured and splattered commercial paint – including Duco (automotive paint) acrylic and aluminium – across its surface with the aid of sticks, hardened brushes and garden trowels. In Pollock’s classic poured paintings, line no longer serves to describe shape or enclose form, but exists as an autonomous event, charting the movements of the artist’s body. As the line thins and thickens, it speeds and slows. Its appearance is modified by chance behaviour of the medium such as bleeding, pooling or blistering. In short, Pollock broke free from the conventions and tools of traditional easel painting.

Susan Davidson has written about the intense period between 1947 and 1950 when Pollock made Untitled (Green Silver).

"Here, not only did Pollock move away from a reliance on traditional figuration and subject matter, but he broke free from the standard use of drawing and painting implements, usually abandoning their direct contact with the surface. Instead he worked from distances above the picture plane, using dripping, pouring, and splattering techniques – methods that were not necessarily Pollock’s invention alone but that he pushed to new extremes."

 
 

Mark Rothko Untitled 1947

"I'm only interested in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom…and if you…are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point."
Mark Rothko, born Russia 1903

Untitled, 1947, an oil on canvas by Mark Rothko, is indicative of Rothko’s move away from Surrealist influences.

Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia (now Latvia), Rothko moved with his family to Portland, Oregon, USA at the age of ten, in 1913.  He left Yale University before his final year was complete, moving to New York where he eventually studied at the Art Students League, where many famous Abstract Expressionists took classes. In the decades that followed, Rothko befriended influential abstract artists such as Barnett Newman and Adolph Gottlieb.

Like Pollock, by the late 1940s Rothko departed from his earlier figurative style. Untitled 1947 shows his mature idiom: a formalist approach comprised of stacked, luminous fields of almost opposing colours. The large, flat fields rendered in intense hues are surprisingly serene, and are an abstraction of earlier Surrealist forms.

Throughout his career, Rothko maintained that his art was a form through which to communicate his meditations on the human condition.

 
 

Middle Years

1.1 From Edge to Edge: A Practical Activity

1.2 Signs and Symbols: A Compositional Task

1.3 Soak and Stain: A Textural Art Based Project

1.4 Wet into Wet: Exploration of Pigments and Supports

Senior Years – VCE Art & VCE Studio Arts

1.5 New Extremes in Materials and Techniques

1.6 Conservation Case Study

1.7 Interpretive Framework: Formal Analysis

1.8 Discussing and Debating Art