Comments on Painters Painting

Frank Stella, Damascus I, 1969

Hello class,

Ahead of our trip to the Albright-Knox, I wanted to write a post about the film we watched in class last Friday. We'll be seeing a lot of the artists' works who were interviewed or mentioned in the movie at the museum. Here's the short list of those.

Barnett Newman
Jackson Pollock
Willem de Kooning
Hans Hofmann
Robert Motherwell
Robert Rauschenberg
Jasper Johns
Helen Frankenthaler
Kenneth Noland
Clyfford Still
Frank Stella
Larry Poons
Jules Olitski
Andy Warhol
George Segal

Also: Marcel Duchamp and Dada

By the way, did you notice? Just one woman among them, and no artists of color represented, either. A sign of those times (early 70s when the film was made) for sure. The Guerilla Girls have been working to improve this situation since the 1980s.

The term Modernism was brought up more than once during the film in relation to the work of these artists. What does it mean when we say something is "Modern" art? Is modern art still being made now? How about Postmodernism? Contemporary Art? How does it all fit together? Do your own research and write a blog post about your findings if you like.

Have a look at the new slideshow I posted in the sidebar produced by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City to find out more. Here is MOMA's take on Postmodernism as well. Also, if you're getting really into this stuff, here's something more academic for you to chew on.

Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952

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My notes from the film – these are some things you can think and write about:

Barnet Newman talking about Cezanne's apples as cannonballs

The shifting of the center of the art world from Paris to New York City – why do you think this happened?

How about the shift from smaller artwork ("easel sized") to wall-sized? Robert Motherwell mentions this subject, saying that "In the United States, the scale and experience is different than in Europe."

The comparison of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to those of the old masters; is it still too soon to decide Pollock's lasting impact, influence, and importance in art history? Why or why not?

De Kooning talking about the importance of the mark – "The mark is everything!" Is this evident in his paintings? (Remember the HUGE paint brushes he was working with?) Keep in mind also the way the he uses collage in his paintings as well – the women's mouths, the newspapers used as a ground. We will see the latter in the painting hanging at the Albright-Knox in person!

De Kooning also refers to Manet's Olympia. What are the similarities between this work and the paintings de Kooning did of women? (Notice how very aware all these artists are of the place the occupy in art history, those who came before them and how they relate to or reject that.)

Hans Hofmann was quoted as saying that he was "sweating out cubism." What do you think that means? See what the critic Clement Greenberg has to say about Hofmann and his relation to Cubism.

Barnet Newman comes back talking about his "zip" paintings (NOT stripes!) – size doesn't count, he states, but scale does. What is the difference?

Robert (Bob) Rauschenberg talks about his experience as a student of Josef Albers, as well as his project of erasing one of de Kooning's drawings.

Jasper Johns, Numbers in Color, 1958-59.
Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery – we'll see this one on our field trip.

Jasper Johns asks, "What about Dada? What kind of question is that?" How does his work perhaps relate to what the Dadaists were interested in?

Helen Frankenthaler also talks about Cubism and Hans Hofmann – the latter of his use of "push and pull" in the painting to create a particular effect. Frankenthaler comes out of the abstract expressionist and color field tradition, though using a technique of staining the canvas with color that was very new.

Frank Stella positions himself alongside Mark Rothko when challenged that his paintings are cold and unfeeling. Do you agree with that charge for either artist? I don't know about you, but I really loved seeing Stella talk about his then-new series of Saskatchewan paintings, in which he described how curves made the color travel and give the paintings direction. You can look at and read a more recent catalogue of his work from the late 1990s, which feels more organic and influenced by the abstract expressionists – and those sculptures reminds me of John Chamberlain's that we saw in Herb and Dorothy.

Larry Poons, Via Reggia, 1964. 

Larry Poons made a transition from hard-edged painting to something very different. The process of working with the canvas on the floor recalled Pollock's technique, while the results were perhaps more aligned with the color field painters like Barnet Newman and Mark Rothko. On the issue of drawing vs. painting, he said that what he's doing is "discovering the drawing rather than making it," presumably in his process of pushing the paint around and layering and layering color.

What about the idea of color as subject?