Action vs. Abstraction |
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"Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye." - Clement Greenberg |
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"Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work. The meaning of art in our time flows from this function of self-creation." - Harold Rosenberg |
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Rough Draft Share Due on Monday! |
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Sula Bermúdez-Silverman VTLS talk Thursday at 7 PM! Zoom Link: https://chapman.zoom.us/j/97954073252 |
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Robert Arneson, Jackson Pollock, 1983. |
Action/ Abstraction |
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Harold Rosenberg 1906 - 1978 |
Clement Greenberg 1909 - 1994 |
Earned law degree |
Studied English literature |
Art critic for The New Yorker 1967 - 1978 |
Art critic for The Nation 1942 - 1949 |
Actively wrote about art 1952 - 1978 |
Actively wrote about art 1939 - 1972 |
Action |
Abstraction |
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Rosenberg | |
American art after WWII had radically broken with the past, and ruptured tradition |
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Willem de Kooning, Woman I,
1950 - 1952. |
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Hedda Sterne, Machine 5, 1950. |
The Tradition of the New, 1959 |
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Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955. |
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Elaine de Kooning, Harold Rosenberg, 1956. |
Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion,1962 |
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Purchased by Eli Broad in 2005 for $23.8 milion making it the most expensive contemporary work sold at auction at the time |
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David
Smith, Cubi XXVII, 1965. |
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Dorothy Dehner, Formulation, 1969. |
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Allan Kaprow in Life magazine 1967 |
Greenberg |
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Hitler touring the Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937 |
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Alfred Baar Jr. on the founding principles of MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum |
Alfred H Barr Jr., cover of the Cubism and Abstract Art catalog, MOMA, 1936 |
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Kenneth Noland, Tide, 1958. |
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Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952. |
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Edouard
Manet, Luncheon on the Grass
(Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe), 1863. |
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Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538. |
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Diane Arbus, A family one evening at a nudist camp, 1965.
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Ed and Nancy Kienholz, The State Hospital, 1966. |
Ed Kienholz, The State Hospital tableau, 1966.
First retrospective of Kienholz's work at LACMA in 1966
Ed Kienholz, Back Seat Dodge '38, 1964.
Ed Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969 - 1972.
Arte Povera = Arte povera means literally ‘poor art’ but the word poor here refers to the movement’s signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, bronze, or carved marble. Materials used by the artists included soil, rags and twigs. In using such throwaway materials they aimed to challenge and disrupt the values of the commercialised contemporary gallery system. - Tate Museum |
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus of the Rags, 1967 and 1974.
Jannis Kournellis, Untitled (12 horses), 1969.
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sfera di giornali (Newspaper Sphere) or Walking Sculpture, & 2017.