# 22 Chrysler Treasures - Abstract Expressionism
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Twenty second in a series of caches highlighting the art of Norfolk's Chrysler Museum, One Memorial Place, Norfolk, VA 23510. The Chrysler Museum is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm, Sunday from Noon to 5 pm. Admission is Free. Website: www.chrysler.org. These paintings may be seen in Gallery 223 at the museum.
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic, or subconscious creation.
Artists in the Chrysler collection who are considered abstract expressionists include Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hoffman, Paul Jenkins, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, and Mark Rothko. The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity & self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. It has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic. In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist. Jackson Pollock's energetic "action paintings", with their "busy" feel, are different, both technically and aesthetically, from the rectangles of color in Mark Rothko's paintings, yet both artists are classified as abstract expressionists.
Although it is true that spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. Abstract art clearly implied expression of ideas concerning the spiritual, and the unconscious. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression, but also by the muralists of Mexico such as Diego Rivera. The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate the social protests of these painters. The McCarthy era was a time of artistic censorship in the United States, but if the subject matter were totally abstract then it would be seen as apolitical, and therefore safe.
The post-World War II period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval, with an urgency to economically & physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris, formerly the center of European culture & capital of the art world, the climate for art was a disaster, and New York replaced Paris as the new center of the art world. A new generation of American artists began to emerge and to dominate the world stage, and they were called Abstract Expressionists. This "modernist" movement combined lessons learned from Matisse, Picasso, Surrealism, Miró, Cubism, and Fauvism via great teachers in America such as Hans Hofmann from Germany and Ashile Gorky. Hofmann as teacher, mentor, and artist was very influential in the development and success of abstract expressionism in the United States. Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. He is considered to be one of the founding fathers of abstract expressionism and a surrealist. Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken color. In his most accomplished paintings between 1941–1948, he consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting the paint run and drip, under and around his familiar lexicon of organic shapes and delicate lines.
Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all contemporary art that followed him. Harold Rosenberg spoke of the transformation of painting into an existential drama in Pollock's work, in which "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event". The gesture on the canvas was one of liberation from value—political, aesthetic, moral." Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. He redefined what it was to produce art. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials; linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown; drawing, staining, brushing; imagery and non-imagery—essentially took art-making beyond any prior boundary. In several paintings that Pollock painted after his classic drip painting period of 1947–1950, he used the technique of staining fluid oil paint and house paint into raw canvas. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings. Other Abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new ones of their own. In a sense the innovations of Pollock, Kline, Rothko, Hoffman and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them.
The physicality of these paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces was the key to understanding them as documents of the artists' existential struggle. This spontaneous activity was the "action" of the painter, through arm and wrist movement, painterly gestures, brushstrokes, thrown paint, splashed, stained and dripped. The painter would sometimes let the paint drip onto the canvas, while rhythmically dancing, or even standing in the canvas, sometimes letting the paint fall according to the subconscious mind, thus letting the unconscious part of the psyche assert and express itself.
By the 1960s, the movement's initial affect had been assimilated, yet its methods and proponents remained highly influential in art, affecting profoundly the work of many artists who followed. Abstract expressionism preceded Tachisme, Color Field painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Fluxus, Pop Art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, Neo-expressionism, and the other movements of the 60's and 70's and it influenced all those later movements that evolved.
Other caches in this series include:
Chrysler Treasures #1 - The Norfolk Mace (GC7C965) Located in Gallery 208
Chrysler Treasures #2 - Man (GC7EAZX) Located in Gallery 221
Chrysler Treasures # 3 - Angel Appearing to Shepherds (GC7EC96) Located in Gallery 211
Chrysler Treasures # 4 - The Neophyte (GC7ECR7) Located in Gallery 214
Chrysler Treasures # 5 - The Wounded Indian (GC7EMPZ) Located in Gallery 212
Chrysler Treasures # 6 - Picasso (GC3B4KQ) Located in Gallery 219
Chrysler Treasures # 9 - Veronese (GC7EYA3) Located in Gallery 204
Chrysler Treasures #10 - The Last Judgement (GC7EYE5) Located in Gallery 202
Chrysler Treasures #11 - The Vegetable Vendor (GC7EZM5) Located in Gallery 207
Chrysler Treasures #12 - James Baldwin (GC7F3HN) Located in Gallery 222
Chrysler Treasures #13 - Ganymede and the Eagle (GC7F4BK) Located in Gallery 208
Chrysler Treasures #14 - Renoir (GC7F3PJ) Located in Gallery 217
Chrysler Treasures #15 - Samurai Armor (GC7F6M8) Located in Gallery 106
Chrysler Treasures #16 - Tiffany Glass (GC7F5WY) Located in Gallery 116
Chrysler Treasures #18 - Naga Buddha (redux) (GC8A8PE) Located in Gallery 107
Chrysler Treasures #19 - Sarcophagus (redux) (GC8A8X8) Located in Gallery 109
Chrysler Treasures # 21 - Libenksy and Brychtova (GC7QFM0) Located in Gallery 223
Chrysler Treasures # 22 - Abstract Expressionism (GC7QG86) Located in Gallery 223
Chrysler Treasures # 23 - Hamlet Robot (GC7QG8E) Located in Gallery 223
Chrysler Treasures # 24 - Here Kitty, kitty (GC89AWG)
Chrysler Treasures # 25 - Bernini's Bust of Christ (GC8RZB5) in Gallery 205
Chrysler Treasures # 26 - MacPherson and MacDonald (GC8ZXF5) in Gallery 218
Chrysler Treasures # 27 - Karen Lamonte (GC8ZY3Q) in Gallery 108
Chrysler Treasures # 28 - Amor Forgiven (GC90M9V) in Galley 216
Chrysler Treasures # 29 - Standing Warrior (GC90VFT) in Gallery 105
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