When Did New York Became the Center of the Art World

Painters in Postwar New York City

The cease of World State of war II was a pivotal moment in globe history and by extension the history of art. Many European artists had come to America during the 1930s to escape fascist regimes, and years of warfare had left much of Europe in ruins. In this context New York Metropolis emerged as the near important cultural center in the West. In office, this was due to the presence of a diverse group of European artists like Arshile Gorky, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalì, Piet Mondrian, and Max Ernst, and the influential German teachers Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann (see also Black Mountain College). American artists' exposure to European modernist movements also resulted from the founding of the Museum of Modernistic Art (1929), the Museum of Not-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum, 1939), and galleries that dealt in modern art, such as Peggy Guggenheim'southward Art of this Century (1941). Both Americans and European expatriates joined American Abstract Artists, a group that advanced abstract art in America through exhibitions, lectures, and publications.

These institutions and the art patrons affiliated with them actively promoted the work of New York Urban center artists. During the 1940s and '50s, the scene was dominated by the figures of Abstract Expressionism, a group of loosely affiliated painters participating in the first truly American modernist motion (sometimes called the New York Schoolhouse), championed by the influential critic Clement Greenberg. Abstract Expressionism's influences were diverse: the murals of the Federal Art Project, in which many of the painters had participated, various European abstruse movements, like De Stijl, and especially Surrealism, with its accent on the unconscious mind that paralleled Abstract Expressionists' focus on the artist'south psyche and spontaneous technique. Abstract Expressionist painters rejected representational forms, seeking an fine art that communicated on a monumental calibration the artist's inner country in a universal visual linguistic communication.

Jackson Pollock: Number thirty, 1950 (Fall Rhythm), enamel on sheet, ii.667×5.258 1000, 1950 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1957, Accession ID: 57.92); © 2011 The Pollock–Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; prototype © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

These painters autumn into two broad groups: those who focused on a gestural awarding of paint, and those who used large areas of colour as the basis of their compositions. The leading figures of the showtime grouping were Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, and to a higher place all Jackson Pollock. Pollock'southward innovative technique of dripping paint on canvas spread on the flooring of his studio prompted critic Harold Rosenberg to money the term activeness painting to describe this type of practice. Action painting arose from the understanding of the painted object as the result of artistic process, which, as the immediate expression of the artist'south identity, was the true work of art. Helen Frankenthaler besides employed experimental techniques by pouring thinned pigments onto untreated sheet.

Mark Rothko: No. 13 (White, Red on Xanthous), oil and acrylic with powdered pigments on canvas, 2.423×2.067 m, 1958 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of The Marking Rothko Foundation Inc, 1985, Accession ID: 1985.63.v); © 2011 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; prototype © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The 2d co-operative of Abstruse Expressionist painting is usually referred to as Color Field painting. 2 fundamental figures in this group were Mark Rothko, known for canvases composed of two or 3 soft, rectangular forms stacked vertically, and Barnett Newman, who, in contrast to Rothko, painted fields of color with sharp edges interrupted by precise vertical stripes he called "zips" (see Vir Heroicus Sublimis , 1950–51). Through the overwhelming scale and intense colour of their canvases, Colour Field painters like Rothko and Newman revived the Romantic aesthetic of the sublime.

Because of the huge influence of Abstract Expressionism in postwar New York City, other artists and movements are mostly understood in relation to it. Advertizement Reinhardt in the early 1950s and then Frank Stella later in the decade painted abstruse canvases, just rejected the Abstract Expressionist accent on gesture and the painting as a means of communing with the artist (see Stella'southward Die Fahne Hoch! , 1959). They instead reinforced the essence of the painting as a physical object through precise geometric forms and shine application of paint, presaging Minimalism (see also Hard Edge painting).

The other principal movement of postwar New York was Pop fine art. Although Pop had begun in England (see, for case, Richard Hamilton), postwar America provided a meaningful context for the movement's emphasis on mass media and consumer civilisation. American adherents also saw Pop art as a welcome culling to pure brainchild. The artists Jasper Johns and his close friend Robert Rauschenberg rejected Abstract Expressionism's attachment to the universal meaning expressed in a work of art, instead creating multiple or fluid meanings through combinations of everyday objects and images. Johns depicted "things the mind already knows," such every bit American flags, targets, numerals, and beer cans, and incorporated newsprint and plaster casts into his works (see Target with 4 Faces , 1955). Rauschenberg as well blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture with his combines, such equally Bed of 1955. These works are related to both assemblage and collage in their use of found three-dimensional objects (bedding, furniture, taxidermied animals) and layering of printed cloth (product packaging, newspaper, photographs) on painted surfaces.

Andy Warhol: Self-portrait, acrylic and silkscreen on sail, 2.032×2.032 one thousand, 1986 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Buy, Mrs. Vera G. Listing Gift, 1987, Accession ID: 1987.88); © 2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Social club (ARS), New York; image © The Metropolitan Museum of Fine art

Both Johns and Rauschenberg provided a critical departure from the pure abstraction of the dominant painters of the 1950s, setting the stage for the flourishing of Pop art in the '60s. Andy Warhol was unquestionably the primal effigy of the American Pop art motion. He first worked as a highly successful advertizing artist in New York before exhibiting paintings and silkscreen prints beginning in the early 1960s. Best known for his images of Campbell'south soup cans, Coke bottles, and American public figures, Warhol'south work seems to celebrate icons of consumer civilization – both bodily products and celebrities who were marketed and sold as such, like Marilyn Monroe – but is also ofttimes interpreted as a critique of passive, unthinking consumption. James Rosenquist, a contemporary of Warhol, besides took inspiration from his work in advertising every bit a billboard painter. His huge canvases depicting images from print media and advertisements, such as Marilyn Monroe I (1962), are rooted in the vulgarity of gimmicky life, only reminiscent of Surrealism in their juxtaposition of disparate, bitty imagery.

The success of abstruse and Pop painters in postwar New York established the city'due south international importance equally an artistic middle, in the ensuing decades drawing to information technology some of the world'south most talented and innovative artists.

Cyberspace resource

Find more images and information through these links, selected by the editors of Oxford Art Online.

Multimedia resources

• MoMA, Abstruse Expressionist New York [interactive site with images, videos, and texts]
• MoMA, De Kooning, A Retrospective [interactive site with images, videos, and texts]
• SFMOMA, Jackson Pollock on His Procedure [video, with links to related videos and interactive features]
• Tate, Mod Paint Podcast on Rothko [streaming audio]
• National Gallery of Art, Jasper Johns, An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965 [images and brusk essays]
• National Gallery of Fine art, Art Since 1950 [educational resources, PDF]
• Smarthistory – Pop Fine art [videos accompanied by curt articles]
• The Art Story: Your Guide to Modern Art [images, timelines, and manufactures on movements, artists, and critics]

Collections and images

• Museum of Modernistic Fine art, New York
• Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• Guggenheim Museums

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Source: https://www.oxfordartonline.com/page/1634

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