DAVID GARIFF: Today's topic
is abstract expressionism,
or the New York School.
I didn't introduce myself.
For those of you who are new,
my name is David Gariff.
I'm a senior lecturer here.
And we're working our way
through the permanent collection
in the East Building.
And now we are
on the upper level,
and we're ready to talk about
one of the most important
and one of the most beautiful
rooms
in the reinstallation, which
is the room now devoted
to the New York School,
or to abstract expressionism.
This is, of course, one
of our most important paintings
from this period.
This is Jackson Pollock's
Number 1, 1950, that subtitle
Lavender Mist, from 1950.
Currently, this
is in another location
because it's part
of a different exhibition
in the galleries
that I'll talk about when we get
there.
So here it is again with one
of our beautiful wall texts
that lets you know what you're
going to see once you enter
this room.
So this is now the room devoted
to abstract expressionism,
the New York School--
although I should tell you
the way you're seeing it here
in this photograph, which was
from a while back, it's changed
a fair amount now.
A lot of paintings
have moved around, gone
other places,
and been substituted.
So it's not exactly like what
you see here.
There's a great David Smith
sculpture here.
One of the most beautiful--
although, now it's not present
anymore because we've moved
out some paintings--
but this relationship is one
of the most beautiful.
So again, when a curator
installs, he doesn't just throw
the stuff up willy-nilly.
But he's hoping that you're
going to see certain comparisons
and juxtapositions.
So it has to be very carefully
orchestrated when you curate
and install an exhibition,
or reinstall this collection.
So this
is a beautiful relationship
there between the Franz Kline
and the David Smith.
Another David Smith looking
deeper into the space.
Again, not everything can be
tightly scripted.
So for example, Giacometti
is in this room.
Technically, he's not,
certainly, a part of the New
York School.
But certain considerations have
to be made for the space
that we have to exhibit all
the things that we need
to exhibit.
So Giacometti is, in part,
in this room now.
So I'm going to move
through some of the information
that we've already talked about
rather quickly because it was
about surrealism, et cetera.
But we need to set the scene
for the emergence of the New
York School.
So one of the things one
should just mention is, well,
what the heck was going on
in America before the New York
School came to prominence,
or at least while they were
beginning to come to prominence?
And really, there are two
movements in American painting
that were dominant at the time.
One was what we call
Regionalism.
And so here, we have two works
by Grant Wood.
This is a work we own
at the gallery.
It's called Haying, 1939.
And of course,
the great American Gothic
at the Art Institute of Chicago
from 1930.
So '30, '39-- this is the decade
of the '30s.
And Regionalism was a very
prominent movement/style
in American painting
at this time.
And of course, as the name
implies, it stressed
regional traditions, especially
traditions in the Midwest.
So most of the artists--
Jon Steuart Curry, Grant Wood,
Thomas Hart Benton--
were associated
with a certain regional part
of the country, especially
the Midwest.
So it has a very American kind
of feeling.
The Grant Wood paintings,
especially the American Gothic,
kind of stresses this idea
of our Puritan ethic and work
values and work ethic
and virtues.
This was his sister
and his dentist who posed
for the painting.
So if you want to get a kind
of a severe-looking guy,
probably your dentist
is a good choice.
Of course, the title
American Gothic refers
to the great northern tradition
of painting
in Europe, the Gothic
and the Northern Renaissance.
You see the Gothic window here
in the farmhouse.
So all of this stuff
stresses permanence,
good down-home American values,
virtues, work ethics, et cetera.
The other side of Regionalism--
different than Regionalism--
was Social Realism.
So this was more related
to the cities, obviously,
than to the rural parts
of the country.
So it was very prominent
in New York and other places.
And the artist we associate
with that tradition of Social
Realism is Ben Shahn.
So this is a photograph by Ben
Shahn called Striking Miners,
Scotts Run, West Virginia, 1935.
So he took this photograph
in '35, and then he used
this photograph as the basis
for this painting, which
is called Scott's Run, West
Virginia, 1937.
This is at the Whitney Museum
of Art today.
Of course,
unlike the Regionalists,
Ben Shahn was very
attuned to social/political
problems, to the rising labor
movement, to the people who were
disenfranchised, living
on the edges
of American society,
especially sensitive
to the politics of the day,
especially to leftist politics.
So that's a counterbalance,
you might say,
to the Regionalists.
Among the most famous paintings
by Ben Shahn,
it dealt with a very famous
trial and execution.
And this is the painting,
on the left,
called The Prisoners Sacco
and Vanzetti from 1931-32.
And then, arguably, what might
be his most famous painting
on the right, The Passion
of Sacco and Vanzetti
from 1931-32.
He did a whole series
of paintings that dealt
with a very important arrest,
trial, and execution of two
Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
One was a shoemaker,
and the other one was a fish
seller.
They had emigrated from Italy.
They had been accused
of murdering two people--
two men--
during an armed robbery
at a factory in Braintree,
Massachusetts.
This was in 1920.
There were seven years
of legal battles about the case.
Evidence was handled in a very
sloppy way,
in terms of forensics and all
these other things.
In any case, they were found
guilty.
They were executed on midnight
of August 23, 1927.
And this was a case that
galvanized the country, in part
because it was such a clear case
of anti-immigrant sentiment.
In this case,
it was against Italians who had
emigrated to the country who
were considered, at this time,
to be among the lowest
of the low on the immigration
scale.
Both of these guys
were Italian immigrants.
They had arrived.
They were poor.
They couldn't find work.
They did get involved
with leftist politics
during this time.
All of that
counted against them.
And so there was a huge debate
in the United States
about this case.
The painting on the right, this
shows them when they were
on their way to trial, when they
were in the courtroom handcuffed
together.
This is actually based
on a photograph, as well.
But the more famous painting
shows Sacco and Vanzetti
after their execution.
They're in their coffins
in front
of this neoclassical building,
which is the courthouse.
And on the porch, you see
the judge in the trial, whose
name-- he's up here--
was Webster Thayer.
There were three other people
who were part
of the advisory committee
for the convictions.
One was Samuel Stratton.
He was the president of MIT
at the time.
Another one was Lawrence Lowell,
who was the president of Harvard
at the time.
And another was a guy named
Robert Grant, who was
a retired judge.
So basically, it was these four
men who determined their fate.
They were all openly
hostile to leftist politics,
to radicalism,
and, specifically, to Italians.
And at certain points
in the trial, Thayer was heard
to refer to the defendants
as "dagos,"
"anarchist bastards,"
and "sons of bitches."
So he seemed to have
a little problem with Italians.
So this was well-known, that he
was prejudiced.
And so the conviction
came about.
And they were, as I said,
executed, despite the outcry
on the part of the larger
public.
So here is Thayer
in this neoclassical courthouse.
And he's looking, if you notice
here, he's looking
at this lamppost.
But that lamppost is actually
created as a fasces.
It's a bundle of sticks.
That's the symbol of fascism
in Italy going back to Roman
times.
So that's a symbol of fascism
that he turns into a light post.
After the conviction,
there was a period where
the four individuals who had
come up with the verdict
did agree to summarily review
the evidence.
And they did the whole review
in 10 days, and they upheld
the conviction.
So they were executed.
In 1977, when Michael Dukakis
was the governor
of Massachusetts, on August 23,
1977-- that was the 50th
anniversary of the execution
of Sacco and Vanzetti--
essentially, Governor Dukakis
issued a proclamation that
exonerated them.
So 50 years later, they were
exonerated.
And he attempted to remove
the stigma and the disgrace that
had been associated
with their names.
So this is very
different than Regionalism,
obviously.
Now, I can move quickly here
because we've seen a lot
of this.
Remember in the group
in America, the sort
of indigenous, shall we say,
American painters were
Regionalist, Social Realists.
But then you have
this mass migration of Europeans
into America.
And so we saw this last time
when we talked about Dada
and Surrealism--
the Artists in Exile photograph
from the exhibition in 1942
at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.
Pierre Matisse had opened
the gallery in New York.
So he emigrated, as well.
So here's Matta, here's Breton,
there's Mondrian.
Here's Tanguy, here's Max Ernst.
Here's Léger.
It's almost
like a complete brain drain
of the great European artist
coming now to America.
Here's another photograph
with Peggy Guggenheim.
This is in her apartment.
This is Peggy Guggenheim.
Here, we saw this from, again,
1942.
Again, this is Max Ernst.
Here's Breton.
There's Léger.
You can go through--
Berenice Abbott down here.
We talked about Surrealism,
then, coming to be--
its last phase takes place
in New York, you might say,
because Breton comes,
and he's looking
for new members.
And remember, The Surrealist
Manifesto comes out in 1924.
And it stresses what Breton
would call psychic automatism,
or automatism, which he said
is "in its purest state
by which one proposes to express
verbally,
by means of the written
word or any other manner,
the actual functioning
of thought, dictated by thought
in the absence of any control
exercised by reason
exempt from any aesthetic or
moral concerns."
So this was to be
an automatic, unself-conscious,
very, very spontaneous kind
of idea.
And here they all are again.
We looked at this.
Here's Salvador Dali
in this one.
So all these guys are running
around New York now.
And most young American artists
had no idea of what was going on
in Europe.
And they may have heard of some
of these guys,
but they certainly had never
talked to them
or seen much of their work.
And remember, there were
a number of techniques
and principles
that underlied surrealism.
One was
automatism-- automatic drawings,
where you just move
with no premeditation.
So here is Masson and Jean Arp
using automatic techniques that
could not be rigidly controlled,
the effects of chance, so
frottage and grattage--
scraping and rubbing.
This is Max Ernst here.
Remember oscillation, where
Ernst would take a can of paint,
tie it to a string,
poke a hole in the bottom
of the can of paint,
and then just oscillate it
over and around the surface.
Decalcomania, where he would
just put some paint on a canvas,
put another piece of canvas
on top of it, and squish it
together like a sandwich,
and then peel it off and then
work into it that way.
This is all decalcomania.
So the American painters
had never heard of anything
like this.
Certainly, this wasn't coming
from Thomas Hart Benton.
So then, two particularly
important figures--
Matta, the Chilean artist--
and Gorky-- but Gorky had come
to America early.
He had come to New York in '26.
But he had come to America even
before that.
He was up in Boston.
So Matta and Gorky--
Gorky is very important, in part
because he's also the artist who
brought to the Americans
modernist painting in Europe.
He knew Cezanne's work.
He knew Picasso's work,
Braque's work, Matisse, Léger,
Miró.
He's really the conduit
for bringing a lot
of European art and ideas
into America--
and then, Matta, as well.
But of course, Matta was part
of surrealism.
And so with Matta and Gorky,
you have, in some ways,
the last phase of--
as I said to you before,
you can think of Gorky
as either the last surrealist
or the first abstract
expression.
The last phase of surrealism
takes place in New York.
So here is Gorky with André
Breton here.
So it was a direct relationship.
When Breton sees Gorky's work,
he tells him he's a surrealist.
And Gorky said, OK.
So Gorky becomes part
of that group.
Here is Breton
with his famous dinner
I showed you.
When he was about to go off
on a tour to Haiti
and other parts of the world,
the New York group
of surrealists and others
threw a party for him, There's
Max Ernst.
There's Gorky back there.
Here is Duchamp.
There's Matta.
Here's the work of Matta
and Gorky.
Both of these paintings
we have at the National Gallery.
They're on view.
They hang next to each other,
as they should--
Genesis on the left from 1942,
One Year the Milkweed,
from 1944.
Of course, this
spontaneity in Gorky's work,
where he is scrubbing
and pushing the paint
with sponges,
letting it drip and dribble
down the easel, the flow
of gravity--
all of this was very new, very
exciting, this notational kind
of feeling where it's
both painting and sort
of writing or sort
of hieroglyphs, that idea.
This title, One Year
the Milkweed, comes, actually,
from Breton.
So Breton saw the painting.
He said, you know what?
You should call that One Year
the Milkweed.
And so it gets a very surrealist
title, One Year the Milkweed.
We can all think about that
with different ways.
Other paintings that Gorky has
with titles like The Leaf
of the Artichoke is An Owl--
these are stock surrealist
titles that are meant to have
an open-ended kind
of interpretation.
Gorky befriends de Kooning here.
So this was a very important
relationship.
De Kooning had tremendous love,
really, admiration for Gorky.
So here is Gorky in front
of the painting we now have
at the National Gallery.
But this is not finished yet.
So the finished version that we
have hanging in the East
Building actually looks
different than this.
He made a lot of changes.
That's Organization, the title
of the painting.
And then, you can just see
this legacy conduit.
Then we've got the New York
School guys, who now are
gravitating
around the surrealist emigres.
So this very famous photograph
from Life Magazine in 1951
called The Irascibles.
And all the major protagonists,
more or less, are here.
There's Rothko,
and you can go through
and find-- there's de Kooning
back there.
Pollock you can't really see.
There's Pollock.
There's Barnett Newman,
et cetera.
So we now have these young New
York artists who are very
interested in all
of these new ideas
and techniques and abstraction
and spontaneity and automatism
probing and dredging
the subconscious, Freudian
and Jungian ideas--
all of this coming
through the surrealists.
So they talk about this a lot.
So most of these artists
lived in an area
in Lower Manhattan.
They came to be known, in fact,
as the Downtown Group.
So they lived in an area bounded
by 8th and 12th Street
between 1st and 6th Avenue.
And most of their studios
were there.
They were a tight little--
well, they weren't so small.
It was a pretty large group
of people.
Their hangout was the Cedar
Tavern, or Bar, which was up
near 11th Street.
So they would all hang out
at the Cedar Bar.
And of course, this
is legendary.
They would talk
about different ideas.
And this led to the foundation,
or the founding of,
what they came to call The Art
Club.
So they would form a kind
of a actual, formal club
and not just have
these informal discussions
at the bar.
Because those very often got out
of hand, and people
were clubbing each other
over the head with beer bottles
and things.
And The Art Club was located
at 39 8th Street.
And this became a more formal
kind of organization.
And the first thing they decided
was, nobody really knows us.
And they don't know our art.
They don't know what we're
doing.
We're virtually
in the wilderness here.
So we should have an exhibition.
We should schedule
an exhibition, get everybody
together, everybody submit
something.
And that came to be known
as the 9th Street Exhibition.
Now, this is the photograph
of where that exhibition took
place today, which is to say,
this is what the building is
today.
In the time of this exhibition,
it was an abandoned building.
It had been marked
for demolition.
And so they went to the landlord
of the building
at this address--
60 East 9th Street, so this
is what it looks like today--
and they asked if they could
just rent the building for about
three or four weeks.
And so they got it for $70.
By the way--
I do my research--
today, to buy a studio apartment
in this building,
it's just under a half a million
dollars for a studio apartment.
And that's probably an older
figure.
So for $70, they got to rent
the space.
Because it was ultimately going
to be torn down, anyway.
And Leo Castelli was a friend
of all these artists.
And he was somewhat well-off,
even at this time.
So he threw in another $200
to try to make this space usable
for an exhibition-- paint
the walls, plaster, clean it
up to make it presentable.
And that's what happened.
And then the artists asked
Castelli to install the show,
so there would not be-- they
trusted him that he wouldn't
play favorites.
So he wouldn't put
all the Jackson Pollocks
in front and then somebody else
in the corner.
So Castelli was asked
to actually put the show
together.
He didn't choose the objects--
the artists did.
But he put it together.
There were 64 artists.
And before we go to talk
about the show itself, let's go
have a drink.
This is the famous Cedar Tavern
here, and there, which is now
legendary.
Of course, it no longer exists,
although part of it
now exists in Austin, Texas.
Yeah, they bought the bar.
When this was going to be
demolished, somebody
from Austin, they bought the bar
and some of the fixtures
and booths and installed them
in a restaurant
now in Austin, Texas.
So this is the outside.
Here's de Kooning with John
Chamberlain, the sculptor.
I'm convinced here
that Chamberlain is plastered.
I have no proof of this,
but I think he's leaning over
to de Kooning and saying,
(DRUNKENLY) and another thing.
And let me tell you
about sculpture.
This is Barnett Newman
with Clement Greenberg there
at the tavern.
Here is Joan Mitchell, Norman
Bluhm, and Franz Kline.
These guys were being kind of
lionized by at least people
in the Village.
So it was decided they were
going to make a movie
about these guys.
They were photographed a lot,
and then, they were going
to make a movie.
The movie maker here was a guy
named Robert Snyder.
That's him right there.
So here at the table
is Kline, de Kooning.
This is Harold Rosenberg,
the critic.
This is Fairfield Porter.
So he ended up making a movie
about the individuals.
And this was at the Cedar
Tavern.
So this is where they
concocted--
well, they didn't concoct it--
they came up with the idea
of, let's form a group,
The Art Club,
and then let's have
an exhibition.
And here is the poster.
Franz Kline volunteered to make
the poster for the show.
These are all the artists
in the show here.
We've talked about the Armory
Show in 1913, remember.
Next to the Armory Show,
certainly in the history
of American painting
in the 20th century,
this is probably the most
important exhibition that was
held.
This is comparable in terms
of bringing to the attention
of the public not,
now, the works of Europeans,
as the Armory Show did,
but the works of Americans who
were now in New York
and had gotten very little
publicity up at this point
in time.
This is a landmark exhibition
in the history of American art.
This was a study.
So Kline designed the poster.
It became replicated
as a linoleum cut.
This is a study for a painting
called 9th Street from 1951
that Franz Kline had
in the exhibition.
And from that study, ultimately,
he painted a finished painting,
which was not in the exhibition
because he hadn't painted it
yet.
He had done the study.
But I can show you what
that painting looks like.
It's right here.
This was an exhibition in New
York at the Mnuchin Gallery.
It has nothing to do
with our Mnuchin in DC.
This gallery's still there,
obviously.
It's at 45 East 78th Street.
It's the Mnuchin Gallery.
And this was an exhibition
devoted to Franz Kline.
It took place in 2008.
And they had that painting,
which is in a private collection
in New York.
Here is the installation.
So Castelli laid this out.
Here's Jackson Pollock.
So there's the Kline study
I just showed you.
Here, Bradley Walker Tomlin--
everybody who's anybody.
You saw the list of people
on the poster.
They did not sell one thing.
The show opened on May 21, 1951.
There were no sales, as far
as we know.
And really, the show was aimed
not so much at the public
as it was to the critics
and to high-end gallery owners.
Because they hoped
that these gallery owners would
see this work
and then take them on,
bring them into their stable.
But that didn't happen.
But the show was favorably
reviewed, favorably seen,
written about.
One critic, Bruce Altshuler, who
is an art historian and a critic
and a curator,
said about the show, quote,
"It appeared as though a line
had been crossed, a step
into a larger art world whose
future was
bright with possibility."
So in general, the public--
those critics who wrote
about it--
were favorable.
But nothing really came of it
for the artists in the more
practical sense.
Here's two more views
of the installation.
One of the people who
photographed this installation
was Aaron Siskind.
These are his photographs
from 1951.
So now, let's start to go
through some of the protagonists
that make up the New York
School.
And first and foremost,
of course, as the great teacher,
inspiration, to these younger
Americans is Hans Hofmann.
So here is a photograph
of Hofmann in his studio
on the left from 1957.
This appeared in Life Magazine.
They did a spread on Hofmann.
And another photograph
of Hofmann from 1952
in his studio.
You'll recall, way back when we
talked about Robert Henri,
I said that there were three
great teacher-painters
in the history
of American painting
who just sort of loom over
everybody else.
In the 18th century,
it was Benjamin West.
In the late 19th, early 20th
century, it would be Robert
Henri.
And in the 20th century,
it's this guy, Hans Hofmann.
He becomes one of the most
important--
he's a very important painter,
but in some ways, he might even
be more important as a teacher.
Almost every young American
abstract expressionist, if they
didn't literally study with Hans
Hofmann, they knew him.
They talked with him.
They were frequent visitors
to his studio.
So he brings to America--
because he's not American,
he was born in Germany,
and he had had an art school
in Munich before he decided
to leave Germany.
He had been teaching in Germany
starting in 1915, so he already
was an accomplished teacher.
He comes to New York
and opens up an art school.
He actually has two locations.
One is in Provincetown,
Massachusetts.
The other one is in New York
City.
And he, first of all,
introduces these Americans
to all kinds of things they had
no knowledge of, most especially
Kandinsky--
the abstraction of Kandinsky,
improvisational work, what
Kandinsky was doing,
this relationship--
the synesthetic relationship--
of color and music, abstraction.
Hofmann knew all about this.
He taught that.
He knew most of those artists.
So he was bringing all
of this new information
to these Americans.
And he talked about abstraction.
That's probably the biggest
thing.
He said, abstraction is the way
that one really gets in touch
with the deeper meaning of art
and process, interaction of form
and material.
And he came up with a very
famous--
it's not a slogan
but principle--
called push and pull,
that what a painting should have
is push and pull.
It should go back and come
forward.
It should have a kind of tension
between surface and space,
color, clearly demarcated forms
and more purely abstract forms.
So all of this
is very
exciting
to these young Americans.
Now, here is Hofmann.
This photograph is-- in fact,
both of these are--
in his Provincetown studio--
his school, I should say.
So here's Hofmann
with his students
in Provincetown.
And this is same thing--
Provincetown, different class.
I'm going to digress here
for a moment
because it's interesting, just
as a sidelight.
You see this young kid here?
Anybody know who that might be?
STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]
DAVID GARIFF: No, no, no.
STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]
DAVID GARIFF: It's
a tough question.
OK, now, and I don't think
anybody would know who this guy
is.
But this guy is Robert De Niro
Sr., who is the father
of the actor Robert De Niro Jr.
Robert De Niro Sr. is a very
important part of the New York
School.
He was a painter.
He was an abstract painter.
He studies with both Hans
Hofmann, and then he studies--
I mentioned Hofmann
as a great, great teacher,
no question.
And I would put him as probably
the more important
of this period.
But there is one other guy that
has to be mentioned,
and that's Josef Albers.
Albers was presenting-- he also
had come from Germany,
but he had not come to New York.
He had gone to Black Mountain
College.
He had been asked to create
that art education program
in North Carolina.
And here is Albers with a class
of students.
Of course, you couldn't have two
different guys.
You know Albers is
the big square guy, the color.
And Hofmann's throwing paint
around.
So you have
a beautiful dichotomy here
for students.
They could look at Albers,
the theory of color
and all the things he made
students do.
And then you look at Hofmann.
And both Hofmann and Albers
had great respect
for each other.
So Albers is at Black Mountain
from 1933 to 1949.
And so here he is with a class.
And here he is with Robert De
Niro Sr. That is Robert De
Niro's father, who studies
both with Hans Hofmann,
and then he studies with Josef
Albers.
So let's take a little trip down
through the De Niro family
album.
This is Robert De Niro Jr.'s
father, so this is the painter,
Robert De Niro Sr. Here,
this is a photograph from 1940.
And this is Virginia Admiral,
who was another very important
New York school painter.
They met at Hans Hofmann's
class, at his studio,
at his school in New York.
They fell in love.
They got married in 1942.
And they had a little baby.
That is Robert De Niro Jr. So
that's his father
and his mother.
They are both very important
painters in New York
at this time--
Victoria Admiral and Robert De
Niro Sr.
They separated.
When Robert De Niro Jr. was
about two years old, his parents
separated.
And basically, his mother raised
him.
But his father was very present.
The separation was
because Robert De Niro Sr.
realized at a certain point
that he was gay.
And at that point,
he didn't abandon the family
so much as he felt he couldn't
live that life anymore.
But he moved very close
by to Virginia Admiral
and continued to be a big part
of the family life.
Here he is.
That's Robert De Niro Jr.
So this is father and son.
And here they are--
father, mother, and son,
in 1990.
And remember, they we
met at Hans Hofmann's studio,
at his school.
Robert De Niro Jr.'s godfather
is Hans Hofmann.
His parents asked Hofmann to be
the godfather.
This is a work by Virginia
Admiral--
that's at MoMA in New York--
from 1942.
It's called Composition.
This is Robert De Niro Sr. This
is a work at the Hirshhorn,
a Portrait of Mrs. Z, 1959.
Joseph Hirshhorn was
a big admirer of Robert De Niro
Sr. The Hirshhorn has about
seven paintings by Robert De
Niro Sr. He supported
him and was very much
vocal in trying to promote
his career.
If you remember back here,
he's in this exhibition.
He's included
in this exhibition.
What's interesting here--
they misspelled Lee Krasner.
She only has one S, not two.
So De Niro Sr. was very much
a part of this time
and this movement
and especially, as I said,
one of his major patrons
at the time
was Joseph Hirshhorn.
So that was our little De Niro
digression.
Back to Hans Hofmann.
We have one of the great Hans
Hofmanns at the National
Gallery.
It's this painting on the right.
This is called Autumn Gold
from 1957.
This is called Fantasia,
on the left, from 1943.
This is what Hofmann meant
between push and pull,
where you have
these encrusted surfaces,
but you have this tension
between a kind of--
first of all, these are
saturated paintings.
They're thickly encrusted.
They have
this beautiful palette knife
work, as well as thick brush
work.
He certainly, again,
is aware of color theory
and color relationships.
Again, Hofmann went
through a phase
where he was very
influenced by Matisse early on.
So these guys-- he knows all
these guys--
Picasso, Matisse, et cetera.
Here, you see him dribbling
the paint.
And that's something
that Jackson Pollock would pay
a lot of attention
to when he saw this work.
So Hofmann is very important.
He opens up the eyes
to all these young Americans who
had learned, certainly, things
from the surrealists.
But now they were getting
an even more direct
understanding
of European modernism
and, most especially,
abstraction and emphasizing
process--
the act of painting process.
And that brings us to Pollock.
So here we have a famous quote
by Willem de Kooning.
"Every so often, a painter
has to destroy painting.
Cezanne did it.
Picasso did it with Cubism.
Then Pollock did it.
He busted our idea of a picture
all to hell.
Then, there could be
new painting again."
So that's true.
Pollock is a pivotal figure.
He totally changes the nature
and way that artists came
to think about painting.
There is no question about his
importance in this regard,
especially with this group
of paintings-- the so-called
"drip paintings"--
that are executed
within a pretty short period
of time--
1947 to the early '50s.
People think he did that
through his entire career.
That was a phase of his career.
He eventually went back
to working with a brush.
But he shatters the idea--
one
of the first great contributions
is to shatter the idea
of working on an easel.
As soon as you have an easel,
you have direction.
You have
top, bottom, left, right,
center.
And that immediately makes you
think about things
in a particularly formal way.
By taking the canvas
off the easel
and putting it on the floor
and allowing them to work around
it from all four sides,
he shatters
that particular concept
of easel painting that had been
around for centuries, of course.
He stresses process.
He stresses abstraction.
All of these things
are important,
among other things.
He's not from the East.
He's from the West.
He's from Wyoming--
Cody, Wyoming, goes to school
in Arizona and California.
He gets kicked out of school.
He went to Manual Arts High
School in Los Angeles,
but he got kicked out because he
was sort of a delinquent.
And then he comes, at the age
of 18--
1930-- he comes to New York.
His brother, who is also
a painter, had already come
to New York.
They both study at the Art
Students League.
And the artist they study with
is not Hans Hofmann.
They study with Thomas Hart
Benton, so the American
Regionalist.
And we'll come back to him
in a second.
Here's Pollock with Lee Krasner
in his studio.
This is in 1949.
Of course, they'll marry
in 1945.
Pollock's imagery
and inspiration comes
from a whole wealth of places,
coming from the west, especially
Arizona.
He knew Navajo sand painting,
this idea of taking the color
as sand in your hand
and throwing it down
onto the surface.
He was in Jungian--
all these guys were in analysis,
and either they were
with a Freudian,
or they were with a Jungian.
And Pollock was with a Jungian
analyst.
So this idea of symbol,
icon, myth--
all of this
is very important to Pollock.
Very important were
the Mexican painters,
the great muralists--
Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros.
He'll actually assist David
Siqueiros on a large mural
program.
So he's looking and absorbing
a lot of different influences.
And that brings us to a very,
very, very special moment here
at the National Gallery, which
is the fact that we have,
temporarily, this great painting
here at the gallery.
This is not the National
Gallery.
This is where it's normally
seen.
This is the University of Iowa.
And the University of Iowa
has the great Jackson Pollock
mural.
But it is now touring
the country.
And currently, it's here
at the National Gallery.
And one of the reasons it's
touring is because in 2008,
if you'll recall,
there was flooding in Iowa.
There was flooding everywhere
in the Midwest.
Iowa was particularly hard-hit.
And the museum at the University
of Iowa was damaged.
It had a lot of water damage.
So they were concerned
about a lot of the works of art.
So they decided to get this out
of the museum.
And it had needed
some restoration
and conservation, anyway.
So they sent it to the Getty
restoration center
in Los Angeles.
And a lot of things
were done to it.
It had been sagging
in the center--
a lot of different problems.
It had old varnish, et cetera.
So all of that was cleaned up
and made perfectly beautiful
again.
And then, it was decided to not
bring it back to Iowa
until things really got stable.
So it's been sent out.
And currently, we have it here.
I'll come to that in a second.
There are so many legends
about this painting,
and a lot of it is not true--
that Pollock painted it in one
day--
he was just going nuts.
What is true
is that he had a real block.
When this painting was
stretched,
and he looked
at that white surface,
he got frightened.
What am I going to do
on this surface?
And so for days and weeks,
he just stared at this thing,
and he started panicking.
And then, the block seemed
to dissipate, and he started
working.
But this painting
is a reflection
of many, many influences.
So the first one is, definitely,
it's a reflection
of the Mexican muralists
in its scale.
It's the largest Jackson Pollock
painting ever painted.
So this is the great Orozco
mural that's at Dartmouth
College.
It's in their library, painted
from 1932 to 1934.
It's called The Epic of American
Civilization.
Pollock admired
the Mexican muralists,
and there were plenty of murals
to be seen by all three
of them--
Siqueiros, Rivera, and Orozco.
Pollock had worked with Thomas
Hart Benton.
And this is Benton's great mural
that's today at the Met--
it was removed
from its original location--
called America Today from 1930
to '31.
It's 10 panels.
And it's this panoramic view
of American life in the 1920s.
It takes up this entire room.
On the top, as you can see,
eight of the panels
deal with life
in different regions of America.
So there's a panel devoted
to the South, the Midwest,
the West, and New York.
This relationship
is particularly
important because when you look
at the mural
and then you look at the work
of Thomas Hart Benton, one
of the things
that Pollock was certainly
channeling from Benton--
even if it wasn't figuration,
it was the vestige
of figuration,
that these are sort
of human, or human forms.
And there is this movement
across the surface.
This painting by Benton--
of course, Pollock knew this
very well.
Because, in fact, Benton asked
him to model for a number
of the figures.
Pollock modeled for this guy
here--
one of the stokers--
and for a number
of the other figures.
So as a student of Benton's,
Benton asked a number
of his students
if they would model
for the figures
in this painting.
And Pollock was among them.
Here is Pollock confronting
the empty canvas.
So this is it installed here
at the National Gallery.
I'll show you a better picture
of that in a second.
This is a very famous legend--
but in this case, there is truth
to it--
where Pollock was just kind of
paralyzed.
He had never attempted to work
on anything this large.
And of course, this was
a commission from Peggy
Guggenheim.
So Pollock had been
in an exhibition
at Guggenheim's gallery--
remember the Art
of This Century?
We talked about that gallery.
And he had had a painting
in that exhibition.
And it was a juried show.
And among the jurors
for that exhibition at Peggy
Guggenheim's gallery
were Mondrian and Marcel
Duchamp.
They were both in New York
at this time.
This is 1943.
So they had selected Pollock's
work.
And then they went
to Guggenheim, and they said,
wow, you should look
at this kid.
He's really good.
And so then, she got interested
in Pollock.
She gave him a one-person
exhibition.
And then she asked him, she
commissioned him, to paint
a painting-- a big, long
painting for her apartment
in New York in her hallway--
so it was going to be very
narrow--
her hallway in her apartment,
which was at East 61st Street.
She left the subject up
to Pollock.
Paint whatever you want,
but it's got to be big,
and it's got to cover this wall.
So that was the commission.
Pollock mentioned later,
he mentioned about this desire
that he had to paint
large-scale.
He said, quote, "I intend
to paint large, movable pictures
which will function
between the easel and a mural.
I have set a precedent
in this genre
in a large painting for Miss
Peggy Guggenheim, which was
installed in her house.
I believe the easel picture
to be a dying form,
and the tendency
of modern feeling
is towards the wall picture,
or mural."
So he was wanting to compete
against the great Mexican
muralists.
What's interesting
is that Duchamp suggested
to Pollock and to Guggenheim
that he not paint it
on the wall, that he paint it
on canvas so it could be moved,
and they wouldn't have
to destroy it or something
like that.
So that was a good suggestion
from Marcel Duchamp,
that he not paint it
on the wall, as a true mural,
but that he stretch a canvas
that size.
There is another myth
about this.
And the myth is that--
of course, Pollock painted this
in his home, which was
his studio at the time.
He didn't really have
a formal studio.
He had to knock out a wall
in his apartment to paint
the work.
That's true.
So he knocked out a wall to fit
it in.
And then the story that's not
true is that once he painted it,
took it off the stretcher,
rolled it up, and brought it
to Guggenheim's apartment,
and they unrolled it,
it was eight inches too long.
That's not true.
Because the story is that then,
Duchamp suggested--
as a true Dada artist--
let's just cut it.
Let's just snip eight inches
off.
And I'm sure he would have done
that.
But that's not true.
And one of the reasons
we know that is
because during this conservation
at the Getty,
this part of the painting,
the edge, was looked at very,
very carefully.
And there's no indication at all
that this canvas had ever been
cut.
So it was the proper size.
This is the confrontation
with the void here.
If you watch artists paint--
I know many, and I've worked
with and written
about many contemporary
painters,
have been in their studios--
and this thing
about the blank surface--
it's for a writer,
too, but today, we don't work
with a typewriter and paper--
but when you're confronted
with that blank canvas,
especially on this scale,
making that first mark
is terrifying.
Where am I going to put
the first mark?
You often see artists,
they rub their hands over it,
like, OK, this is what I'm going
to paint, but I really have
no idea how I'm going to start.
And that was true with Pollock.
He was definitely paralyzed
about starting.
But then, he did break through.
But he did not paint this in one
day, which is what you sometimes
read.
And we know that, really,
from his brother's account
of having watched his brother
work.
And he probably painted
over a summer.
So it was probably over a two-
to three-month period.
This is where it's installed
now.
I hope you've all seen it.
You really need to take
advantage of its presence here.
And there it is in a little
better photograph.
So a lot's been written about,
what was the influence here?
What was Pollock thinking about?
There is a very famous quote
where Pollock talked about,
I guess we might call it
the subject matter,
but that's sort of stretching
it.
He said, when somebody said,
well, what is this about?
what are you trying to show us?
he said, quote, "It was
a stampede of every animal
in the American West-- cows
and horses and antelopes
and buffaloes.
Everything is charging
across that goddamn surface."
So he was thinking
of the Regionalist.
He was thinking of Benton.
He was thinking of where he had
been born and raised,
in the West and Arizona
and California and Wyoming, et
cetera.
But of course, he translates it
into these incredible,
abstracted--
but these beautiful licorice
forms are very much like Benton.
Benton's figures always look
like they're blowing
in the wind.
They're very tall, and they have
this kind
of serpentine movement.
And I think that's probably
relevant here.
Of course, this is about eight
by 20 feet.
So it's eight feet high, 20 feet
long.
And again, he talks about it--
so we can get
direct information--
Pollock said, quote,
"With no strings as to what
or how I paint it"--
because Guggenheim said,
I don't care what the subject
is--
"With no strings as to what
or how I paint it,
I'm going to paint it in oil
on canvas.
They are giving me a show
November 16, and I want to have
the painting finished
for the show.
I've had to tear out
the partition between the front
and middle room in my apartment
to get the damn thing up.
I have it stretched now.
It looks pretty big,
but exciting as all hell."
So he is both really excited,
but he's sort of frightened,
as well.
I told you about his desire
to begin to paint this mural
painting.
When he finished this painting,
Clement Greenberg saw it.
And Greenberg uttered a pretty
famous quote now.
Greenberg said, quote, "I took
one look at it, and I thought,
now, that's great art.
And I knew Jackson was
the greatest painter
this country had produced."
So of course, this did lead
Greenberg to become
the great promoter--
guru-- of Pollock.
Eventually, that would end.
He would move away from Pollock
to Clyfford Still.
And this would be part
of the decline of Pollock
in his physical and mental
state.
Certainly, when Greenberg says,
OK, no, I don't think Pollock--
I think Clyfford Still is more
important now.
When that happened,
that was a great trauma
for Pollock.
But we'll come to that
a little bit later.
The interesting thing
about the painting,
also, is that you think when we
come in here,
you think you should stay back
and look at it, right, that it
needs, like the billboard
or something,
you need to stand back.
But remember where it was going
to be.
It was going to be
in a narrow hallway.
So clearly, he wanted it to be
a seen up-close.
So when you go to see it,
don't just stand in the back.
Get up in close,
and you'll really see why it's
so dynamic.
This is the first time
this painting has ever been
in Washington DC.
It almost never travels.
Pollock now is starting
to, shall we say, catch fire.
And I'm not going to talk
about all of Pollock's career
because we don't have-- oh, my
god-- we really don't have time.
But this is the famous spread
in Life Magazine in April
of 1949 where they had him stand
in front of one
of his paintings.
That's a big, mural-length
that's today at the Tate
in London.
And the article was titled
"Jackson Pollock,
Is He the Greatest Living
Painter in the United States?"
So that begins the myth
of Pollock now.
It begins his career.
And everybody's thinking
and looking at him.
And here is the painting
at the Tate today
that he was photographed
in front of.
So there it is there.
And there it is at the Tate
in London.
It's called Summertime, Number
9A from 1948.
Writing about this picture,
and sort of explaining it,
he said, when asked,
that it was, quote,
"The modern artist is working
and expressing an inner world--
in other words,
expressing the energy,
the motion,
and other inner forces."
Again, this is not
unlike the mural.
It suggests a kind of a frieze
with kind
of figurative, formal elements.
Pollock often says, my art isn't
just totally abstract.
It can be representationally
abstract or abstractly
representational.
Of course, these are
the famous photographs
by the photographer Hans Namuth,
who, in 1950, asked if he could
come to Pollock's studio
and photograph him at work.
And so this shows us, now,
all of the innovations
of Pollock.
First of all, he's
off the easel.
ed He's on the floor.
These are not
pre-stretched canvases.
He unrolls.
Here's the roll right here.
So there it is.
He just kicks open a roll, let's
it roll across his studio floor,
like from where I am
to that wall--
just lets it roll off.
And then, he starts to work.
He can attack the painting
from all four sides.
He now uses not traditional--
well, he does use
traditional brushes--
but he uses anything that can
somehow transfer the paint
in a kinetic way.
So it could be a brush, a stick,
a trowel, a turkey baster--
anything that he can begin
to kinetically work with.
He works all the way
around the picture.
He steps in his painting.
A lot of Pollocks
have footprints when you look
at them.
He was almost always smoking.
So his ash or cigarette butt
might fall in the painting.
A lot of Pollock paintings
have cigarette butts in them
and things like that.
So that was fine.
It's all part of the process.
He works and he layers
the paint.
So again, it's not what you'd
think.
It's not very easy to make
these things work.
And even Pollock said,
I throw a lot of this stuff
away.
He would work on many canvases
at once--
so the idea, again, that this is
like, I'm doing this in one
sitting is not true.
He would work on a canvas,
get it to a certain completion,
certain state of finished,
tack it up on his wall,
live with it, look at it.
Then he might bring it back down
onto the floor
and continue to paint.
This idea of throwing the paint,
dribbling the paint,
from a distance,
from high up down, is,
again, certainly, it does seem
to relate to Navajo sand
painting--
taking the pigment, the sand,
in your hand
and throwing it down like this.
All kinds of tools.
These are real tools.
This is if you go to his studio,
you can see-- here's
the great turkey baster,
and another one here.
And that begins to create
this incredible weave effect.
This is our painting Lavender
Mist Number 1--
Number 1, 1950, subtitle,
Lavender Mist.
Remember, Breton had titled
a Gorky painting, One Year
the Milkweed.
Greenberg titled this painting.
It has no lavender in it.
But Greenberg said, you should
call it Lavender Mist, and so
Pollock did.
These paintings are really,
they're something new.
So we talked before about when
things kind of lurch you
forward.
And like de Kooning said--
Pollock is definitely
the icebreaker.
That's another phrase de Kooning
used.
He really moves painting
into a whole different place.
That's not to say that Pollock
is a better painter than de
Kooning.
Personally, I don't think he is.
I think the greatest
American painter
of the 20th century
is Willem de Kooning.
And I think in the 20th century,
the three greatest painters are
Picasso, Matisse, and de
Kooning.
That's a personal opinion.
But you can't take away
from Pollock what he did
in terms of changing the rules,
the nature,
opening up a freedom either
to explore the gesture
or the feel--
all of these things.
And in fact, when you see
Pollock working, his approach
to this, it relates to almost
now, he is like a shaman.
He is like a medicine man.
He is performing a ritual.
It has that aspect to it.
The moment
in this ritualistic act
of painting is really more
important, in many ways,
than the product.
So here's Lavender Mist--
Again, chance, intuition,
control.
Believe me, he's thinking.
He may be working quickly,
but he's thinking.
This painting is interesting
because it's signed.
And it does have his signature
down here.
But then, it's signed
in another way, which is up
here.
And I'll show you a detail
in a second.
And he just put his hands
into the paint,
just like in prehistoric art,
where we have stencils where
a prehistoric artist will put
their hand and then blows,
like a stencil.
So there are his handprints.
You can see this one
a little bit.
The other one is here.
So if there is
any other further evidence,
again, of this idea
that it's almost a ritual,
like a shaman, that sort of
emphasizes it.
This is the project that,
ultimately, really wreaks havoc
with Pollock's psyche.
Namuth filmed him, as we just
saw, in his studio.
But then Namuth said, gee, what
I would really like to do is put
a camera underneath glass
and have you paint on the glass
so people can see how
these things are created.
So part of a film--
Namuth took still photographs,
but then he made a film--
and part of the film sequence
is this, what you see here,
in 1951.
The film was titled Jackson
Pollock.
And it shows Pollock working.
This is where Pollock begins
to start to feel like he is
a trained monkey,
that he's performing, well,
like a monkey.
And this time, he's abusing
alcohol.
He's incredibly unfit,
in many ways.
This episode with Namuth
seems to have pushed him
over the edge.
And he started to doubt himself,
doubt what he was doing,
to feel like he was a fraud,
like he was out there just
performing the way a trained
animal might perform.
This had a very bad impact
on Pollock and, ultimately,
probably did lead to his demise
in many ways.
We also have this Number 7
from 1951.
The title is Number 7, 1951
from 1951.
And every abstract expressionist
had a black and white phase.
It's interesting.
They may have been very engaged
in color, but then they seem
to think, well, let's think
about black and white.
De Kooning's is probably
the most important,
when de Kooning has
this black and white phase.
Certainly Franz Kline, Barnett
Newman--
they all do.
They all have a black and white
phase.
And this is Pollock's
black and white phase.
And you can see this difference
of-- this painting
is interesting because this is
a figure here that's kind
of running.
And then, you've
got these strong verticals that
look almost vegetative,
like they're some kind of form,
flower, or whatever.
They also seem to echo--
in 1952, he paints
the great painting called Blue
Poles-- that's in Australia--
where you have these blue poles
that have these pod-like shapes.
But this also shows you
something that's interesting.
And that is this would have been
part of a longer canvas,
right, that he's working on.
Only when he finishes does
he think, OK, I'm going to crop
it here.
So he could very well have
decided-- this could have been
a whole abstract part.
This could have been a more
figurative part.
And then, he decided to cut it
in a way that allowed both parts
to be evident.
So certainly, Pollock
is legendary.
I don't need to prove that.
History has proven that.
But let's look at some
of the other artists
in the movement.
And certainly, Pollock's
inspiration, supporter,
caregiver towards the end,
but more importantly,
another important artist
of the New York School
is Lee Krasner.
So here she is in her studio
on the right from 1938.
This is not in our collection.
This is at the National Museum
of Women in the Arts,
so it is in DC.
It's called The Springs
from 1964.
It refers to the village
near East Hampton, Long Island
where both Krasner and Pollock
lived and worked starting
in 1945.
Pollock dies in 1956, of course.
He's killed in a car crash.
This, of course, leads also
into the mythology
of abstract expressionists.
David Smith is killed in a car
crash.
Pollock is killed in a car
crash.
Rothko commits suicide.
So you have all
of these horrific--
Gorky commits suicide.
So you have all
of these tragic endings
for a number of these artists
that further makes them
into these romantic, sort
of tragic,
artists, which is why it was
very hard later, if you're
Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper
Johns or something, to get out
from under the shadow
of these guys.
And Rauschenberg is part
of this group, initially.
He's at the Cedar Tavern.
And he's there.
He's young.
Not only that, he's gay.
And believe me, it was easier
to be a woman
than it was to be gay
around these guys.
So all of that is something
he's dealing with.
And of course, Rauschenberg
is great.
You've got to love this guy.
So he goes to the tavern.
Every night, these guys
are getting in a fight.
They're brawling.
They're hitting each other.
They're talking about adultery
and this and that and everything
and the women.
They're horribly coarse
and everything.
And Rauschenberg says, I've
got to find another bar.
Essentially, what Rauschenberg
realizes, along with Jasper
Johns,
but it's more Rauschenberg,
I've got nothing in common
with these guys.
And as much as I like going
and sitting there and hearing
their stories and everything,
I've got to find another bar.
So it was tough.
That was tough.
These guys cut a big swath
across American painting
at this time.
So Lee Krasner's art is
is, again, beautifully powerful
in its approach.
It's not even so much more
lyrical, although sometimes it
does seem a little more lyrical.
But she has
her own beautiful touching
and way of weaving these sort
of ovoid forms and string forms
through to create these really--
all of these artists
were concerned with what we now
call all-over painting,
so filling the canvas
left to right, top to bottom,
so that there's no, once you
take it off the easel,
you don't have center, left,
right, top, bottom.
And all-over painting is a part
of abstract expressionism.
This is one that we do have here
at the gallery.
This is Lee Krasner's Cobalt
Night from 1962.
This is a magnificent painting,
really.
Again, it's interesting.
Because in some ways,
although she's married
to Pollock, in some ways,
she actually owes more to de
Kooning
in terms of the gestural nature
of when she paints.
And that does lead us to my guy.
There's no way we're going to do
justice to Pollock,
and certainly no way we're going
to do justice to de Kooning
here.
But this is de Kooning
in his loft studio, 1937, West
22nd Street and de Kooning
in 1950.
De Kooning and Pollock are
titanic figures, certainly,
in the movement.
There was a kind of competition,
maybe friendly competition-- not
always friendly when they were
drunk.
They both were alcoholics.
They both had problems.
They abused alcohol.
In the case of de Kooning,
he is fortunate.
He does live a very, very long
life.
Alcohol doesn't kill him, but he
suffers at the end from
Alzheimer's.
I'm just, again,
trying to stick to paintings you
can see that we have.
So here is Spike's Folly II--
this is part of the Meyerhoff
Collection that we now have
at the gallery--
from 1960.
This is Woman With a Hat
from 1966.
And this is an untitled work
that we just acquired
through the Corcoran collection
Untitled Number Four from 1979.
Now, notice these dates--
'60, '66, '79.
De Kooning's great period
is the '50s, when he created
the Woman series.
So those are the paintings that
are the great iconic de
Koonings.
So we have
some marvelous pictures,
but they're a little bit later
than the period for which he's
most known and talked about.
But certainly, if Pollock
was the dripper--
and sometimes he was called--
I think it was Time Magazine
called him "Jack the Dripper"--
then what you have with de
Kooning
is the ultimate gestural
painter.
And we're very fortunate.
We have a lot of videotape
of de Kooning painting
in his studios,
where you can see him at work.
And he is the ultimate-- he's
not a dribbler.
He is gestural.
But he's a scraper.
He will put paint on, scrape it
off, come back to it.
That surface will look so
tortured.
And he'll start something,
and then he'll realize, like he
said at one time,
it's so hard to get the knee
right in a figure.
So you might see a painting that
looks like it has seven knees,
where he kept changing his mind,
or the mouth.
The mouth was a real focal point
for de Kooning.
He actually would cut mouths out
of magazine ads and put them
on the canvas
and then use that as a place
to go out from the mouth.
He's magnificent.
De Kooning is magnificent.
I don't know if you saw.
It was several years-- and now,
it's probably 10 years,
20 years--
the big retrospective that was
at MoMA, right?
I think some of you
may have seen it.
I went into that exhibition,
and my knees buckled.
I thought I was going to pass
out.
To see his entire life--
that was
every important painting, pretty
much--
to walk through that exhibition,
I can't think
of another experience I've had
in a gallery that was more
meaningful.
Literally, I walked in,
and I felt-- my knees went
to jelly.
So you should look
at that catalog
because it's really something.
So he's the real deal.
And you notice, there's
no uniform style
among these artists.
They have certain things
in common-- all-over painting,
gesture, feel, whatever.
But they're also very
individual.
That gets us to Elaine de
Kooning.
Pollock was with Lee Krasner,
of course.
Willem de Kooning was
with Elaine de Kooning.
So here she is, photographed
on the left from 1945
and on the right from 1980.
She was born in Flatbush in New
York.
Her mother started to take her
to museums when she was four
or five years old.
Her mother was, really,
her first teacher, taught her
how to draw.
She goes briefly to Hunter
College, but she never
graduates.
She studies at two of the lesser
schools in New York
that a number of artists
studied at.
They're not that well-known
there.
It's not like the Art Students
League or Cooper Union.
She studied at a school called
the Leonardo da Vinci Art
School, which a number
of artists did at this time,
and another one that was called
the American Artists School.
Now these are less
well-known today in New York
City.
She then became, because she was
quite attractive, as you can see
here on the left, she was often
an artist's model.
She met Willem de Kooning
in 1936.
They had an incredibly
long and contentious
relationship.
They had an open marriage
by choice, so they both were
involved
with the numerous other
individuals.
They both struggled
with alcoholism.
At a certain point,
they separated for 20 years--
20 years-- but they
never divorced.
They never divorced.
And when de Kooning became ill
later in life,
they were reunited.
She came back, and they were
reunited in 1976.
And she stayed with him--
she died, actually, eight years
before he died.
She's fascinating.
They're all fascinating.
But she's interesting
because she chose to become--
she's a gestural painter,
but she chose to become
a portraitist, something
the abstract expressionists
aren't known for, really--
portraiture.
And she said in 1959, talking
about her portraits, which are
almost exclusively of seated
men, right-- not seated women--
so she's the answer
to her husband's women
paintings.
I'm going to do men.
You did women.
I'm going to do men.
So she said, "When I painted
my seated men,
I saw them as gyroscopes.
I'm enthralled by the gesture
of the silhouette,
the instantaneous illumination
that enables you to recognize
your father or a friend
three blocks away."
So here's the Portrait
of Michael Sonnabend
here, from 1951.
And here is the portrait
of a man named Al Lazar, who was
one of her paramours,
subtitled Man in a Hotel Room,
from 1954.
A lot has been written
about these portraits,
especially in feminist art
history.
Because she seems to be cutting
across traditional ideas
of the female form as an object
of desire
on the part of a male artist,
showing this male
gaze et cetera.
But now she's flipped
the equation.
She's a female painting men.
She doesn't paint them nude.
But she does very often--
they're aggressive.
But it's interesting
because they seem to have
their own sexuality,
but at the same time,
she's kind of controlling
the sexuality.
She spends a lot of time
in the crotch here
and things like that.
So she's really smart.
And they're very, very important
paintings.
And they're
different than her colleagues.
She said about this idea
of closing your legs,
opening your legs,
she said, "Some men sit all
closed up, legs crossed,
arms folded across the chest.
Others are wide open.
I was interested in the gesture
of the body."
So she brings
an abstract expressionist
gestural language to a more
traditional realm of subject
matter.
This is-- we talked about him--
Harold Rosenberg, the critic,
who was also one
of her paramours, from 1956.
And this is her husband.
That's Willem de Kooning
from 1952.
These are both in the National
Portrait Gallery here in DC.
There was a big show devoted
to her portraits
at the National Portrait
Gallery.
I'm going to mention that.
It was in 2015.
So Rosenberg of course,
is, along with Leo Steinberg
and Clement Greenberg,
these are the three guys who are
the--
what do we say?--
philosophers
of abstract expressionism.
Each one approaches the movement
and writes about it differently.
It's Rosenberg who coins
the phrase "action painters."
And what he stresses
is the act of painting.
What Greenberg stresses
is the purity of the painting--
flatness, color.
So there are going to be two
different schools.
And that's going to be important
when we come back to talk
about the Washington Color
School.
Because Greenberg will champion
the DC artists--
Morris Louis, Ken Nolan,
all those guys--
and Rosenberg will champion
the pop artists.
They'll go, and there'll
be a fork in the road,
critically speaking.
These are magnificent.
They're not small, either.
They're rather large.
Here's a portrait of Fairfield
Porter.
She's painting everybody she
knows, as well.
Some of these people
she knew very well.
So this is Fairfield Porter
from 1954.
This is at the Kemper Museum
of Contemporary Art in Kansas
City.
And this is Robert De Niro Sr.
from 1973.
Again, she remarks about why
she's painting men
and the history of this.
She says, quote, "Women painted
women--
Vigée Le Brun, Mary Cassatt,
and so forth.
And I thought, men always
painted the opposite sex,
and I wanted to paint men as sex
objects."
So she goes on,
and she's talking about, now,
all the things that entails--
male privilege, the male gaze,
sort of flipping the equation.
Maybe her most famous portrait--
but I don't think it's her best,
but it's the most famous
because of who was portrayed--
is Kennedy.
So in December of 1962,
she's commissioned by the Harry
S. Truman Library in Missouri
to do a portrait
for their library of JFK.
And this leads not to one
portrait but to dozens--
works on paper and a number
of painted portraits.
Here she is on a ladder working
on this full length--
that's 11 feet.
That's, today, at the National
Portrait Gallery.
This is 1964.
But the commission came about
in 1962, and she was still
painting it.
This is the one that's, today,
at the National Portrait Gallery
that's on view.
That's not the one that was
for the library, which I think
is one of the least interesting.
This is a much more interesting
portrait of JFK--
John F. Kennedy-- from 1963.
And here she is painting him.
This was in his West Palm Beach
sort of White House, where he
would conduct business
in the winter times.
And the problem-- in fact,
the reason she got
this commission, in part
was because Kennedy would not,
certainly, just sit quietly
for a portrait.
There's no way he was going
to sit quietly for two, three,
five, 10 hours.
So they had to find a painter
who could work fast.
Because she was going to just
look at him doing
his normal thing--
talking to people,
signing things.
So he's not paying any attention
to her.
He's here, seated.
And she's trying to capture him
as quickly as she can
during these various sorts
of movements.
And that was the perfect choice.
She was the perfect choice
for that.
Because she really could work
very, very quickly.
So you can see all these images.
This is the one back here that
is--
this one-- this is the one,
if I'm not mistaken, that's
at the library, the Truman
Library.
This was at the National
Portrait Gallery.
And then, there are others that
are at other collections.
This is Bacchus #3 by Elaine de
Kooning, on the right,
from 1978.
It's the first painting that she
used acrylic paint, as opposed
to oil.
And what she did here was,
she was in Paris,
and she was enthralled
by this statue of the Triumph
of Silenus
by Jules Dalou from 1885.
That's in the Luxembourg Gardens
in Paris.
So this figure of Silenus
is right here.
So this actually starts
in nature.
It starts with the form
that she abstracts, then--
the trees, the tree branches,
the sky, and the figure itself.
Here's Franz Kline, somebody
again, different.
Franz Kline, although he does
return to painting in color
in 1955, he's mainly known
for his black and white gestural
paintings.
Don't be fooled here.
These are not black strokes
on a white ground.
He's painting both the black
and the white.
So sometimes the white is coming
over the black.
Sometimes the black is coming
over the white.
So people who reference
sumi calligraphy and things
like that--
certainly, he was aware of that,
about mark making.
But he's not working
on the blank page,
just putting down a sort
of shape.
He's working both ends
of the surface,
or both ends of the equation.
He was born in Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania,
goes to Boston University,
goes off and studies in London.
He dies young.
He dies-- he's 52 years old.
He dies even younger than--
no, Pollock was still younger,
as I think about it.
He was the most jovial, shall
we say, of the group.
He held court at the Cedar Bar,
and he was always there.
And so he was always talking
and entertaining, et cetera.
Coming from Pennsylvania,
he was very much interested
in all of the great forms that
related to coal mining, bridges,
girders, mines,
industrial sites.
And people are always tying
his paintings
to abstracted ideas
of these sort
of industrial forms.
This is one we own,
at the left--
Four Square.
Well, actually, we own both
of these,
but one's at the Meyerhoffs.
On the left is Four Square
from 1956.
That's the one I showed you
next to the David Smith,
remember?
It's this one here.
And then, Turbin-- T-U-R-B-I-N--
from 1959.
Here's what we're talking about.
You can see the white is coming
over the black.
He's working both.
They're really, really--
I like Kline a lot.
I like the gestural guys
because they're gutsy,
and they're right in your face.
And you have to kind of really
take it in, and it's really
coming right at you,
in some ways.
The Turbin painting
is interesting because
of the title.
The title is Turbin--
T-U-R-B-I-N. And art historians
have argued about, what the heck
is that?
Is it a misspelling of turbine?
This painting, we know,
was exhibited only one time,
and it was spelled that way
in the catalog--
T-U-R-B-I-N.
So some art historians think
it was just a misspelling.
They didn't edit the catalog,
and that maybe it was supposed
to be Turbine.
It was Turbin,
and then everybody thought
that was the name
of the painting
because everybody was going
by the previous catalog.
I don't think that's the case.
Other theories-- and this is
where I come down-- is that it
probably relates to a silent
film star whose name was
Turpin--
Ben Turpin-- T-U-R-P-I-N-- who
was a great silent film comedian
in the '20s, along with Charlie
Chaplin, Max Sennett, and all
those guys.
Because we know that Kline loved
those black
and white silent movies.
He loved Charlie Chaplin.
In fact, a lot of these guys
did.
So they watched them very often.
This is Ben Turpin here
from 1920.
He was most famous for being
able to cross his eyes,
like you see here.
And he's sort of--
I don't want to say he's
an offshoot of Charlie Chaplin,
but he's a sort of a competitor.
But the reason I think it's
probably Turpin
is because of a photograph
like this.
Because what Kline used to do
very often-- and those of you
of a certain age won't even know
what I'm talking about--
he would use
an overhead projector.
So he would do a quick ink
sketch with just these sort
of movements.
And then he'd put it
on the overhead projector
and project it large.
And then, he'd think about that
as a larger painting.
But I think,
if you were to just kind
of squint and make this a bunch
of black lines, Turpin
was famous for these kinds of--
he was always very elastic.
And I think they may relate
to that, that starting
from nature,
and then, sort of like we just
saw with Elaine de Kooning,
taking the Bacchus
or the Silenus figure,
and going with it.
I think maybe there's something
to be said for that.
You know, when you look
at paintings like this,
you have to be aware,
they seem like, what can I say
about it?
But there are so many
different things.
One of the things, always,
is edge.
Paintings like this,
you have to be aware of edge
tension.
Is it compressing tension?
Compression?
How does the artist think
about the edge?
Does he think about it?
Maybe he doesn't think about it.
He doesn't care about it.
All that kind of stuff, as well
as-- and of course, what Kline
is using is big, thick house
painting brushes.
So they're the big brushes.
And he uses, very often,
in fact, not oil but enamel
and even house paint.
Early on, when he was so poor,
he couldn't afford good paint,
so he would use house paint
to create these big-- there are
of stories about Kline
and his poverty early on.
So we bid fond farewell to Ben.
Talking about edge tension,
here is Clyfford Still.
His titles are just letters
and numbers.
It's like a catalog.
So the painting on the left
is PH-115 from 1951.
And on the right
is PH-571 from 1951.
Still is fascinating.
Of course, this guy was maybe
the most prolific of the group--
over 1,000 paintings and twice
that number of works on paper.
As you may know today, there's
an entire museum devoted
to Clyfford Still in Denver.
And this was a huge debate.
Because Still and has estate,
after he died, they were very
protective of his work.
They would not allow his work
to be seen, to be exhibited.
They would not allow it to be
published or photographed--
not until he would be given
somebody who would be
willing to build a museum just
for all of his art.
There were lots of contenders.
But the restrictions
and the ordinances
and the expectations
of the estate were so rigid
that most institutions
in various parts of the country
just said, forget it.
Denver didn't.
And they built
a magnificent museum.
And it's almost like--
it's almost overkill, like it's
a temple to Clyfford Still.
But it's a beautiful space.
And so all of his work
now is there,
except for the things that were
already in other collections.
So we have these two Clyfford
Stills here at the National
Gallery.
I mentioned Greenberg switching
from Pollock to Still.
Eventually, what Greenberg seems
to think about is the fact
that the purer painters are not
the gesture painters.
They're not Pollock.
They're not de Kooning.
They're what we call, sometimes,
field painters, the ones who
work more on a flat field--
certainly Rothko, Neumann.
But for Greenberg, it was
Clyfford Still who he felt
had the best kind of synthesis
of this.
Still is interesting.
He did have a very high opinion
of himself.
There's no question of that.
And his paintings are somewhat
hermetic in a certain way.
They have field, but they have
these crusted edges
and surfaces.
Things peek out.
They're very interesting.
They're very intriguing,
the way he plays.
They have a certain--
in his mind,
they had
a certain spiritual, existential
quality, much like we saw
with Kandinsky.
They're layered, and yet they're
flat.
These were things that Greenberg
was particularly interested in.
So these are two that we have.
Then, we have a different type
of artist--
Adolph Gottlieb on the left,
Pictograph, from 1942,
and Bradley Walker Tomlin,
Maneuver for Position,
on the right, from 1947.
There is a whole subset
of the abstract expressionists
who were interested
in pictographs, hieroglyphs,
the idea of mark making,
notation, looking like it's
an alphabet or some kind
of thing that's
very personal, very often
segregated,
in the case of Gottlieb,
into these little boxes.
You'll see David Smith do this
with sculpture.
A lot of artists do it.
Clearly, here, in this case,
especially of Gottlieb,
he was really into Jung.
So he's creating
these mythic, kind
of iconic letters and characters
that we can read in a number
of different ways.
He was interested in myth,
myth-making, things like
alchemy, runes--
you know, those signs
and forms--
and all of these things
that might have a kind
of mystical kind of connotation
to them.
And of course, he's
very interested--
both of these guys--
in Gorky.
So Gorky's visual writing idea
is important.
And the other artist very
important to both is Paul Klee,
The Blue Rider.
And in 1941, MoMA had
a huge retrospective of Paul
Klee.
And we know all these guys went
to that retrospective.
So in 1941, they went to look
at Paul Klee's work
at the Museum of Modern Art.
Tomlin-- this
is an interesting transitional
work.
It's just before he embraces
total abstraction.
One of his motifs was the eye.
And this is one
of the last times you'll see
the eye.
Also, he was very interested
in Gottlieb.
You can see the relationship.
He admired Gottlieb greatly.
There are aspects of Cubism,
abstract expressionism,
and surrealism, really, in works
like this.
He starts to move more and more
not for these blocky glyphs
but towards the idea of almost
writing, like he's writing.
Sometimes he'll scrape
through the paint to make
this kind of notation.
You can see there's all
this variation, and yet, they're
a family.
This is Ad Reinhardt, Untitled,
and then, it's subtitled--
Red and Gray on the left,
from 1950, and then Untitled,
subtitled Yellow and White,
from 1950.
Of course, Reinhardt has
the greatest quote--
one of the greatest quotes--
in 20th century aesthetics,
where he says,
quote, "Art is art,
and everything else
is everything else."
Now, that's actually very
profound.
And if we have trouble
with understanding modern art,
there it is.
Art is art.
In other words,
art is about art.
It's not about the war.
It's not about politics.
It's not about a still life.
It's not about a horse.
It's not about anything
like that.
It is about what makes art.
Everything else is everything
else.
That's a really--
I mean, it sounds funny,
but it's actually quite
profound.
So eventually, of course,
Reinhardt will move, as you may
know,
to the big black paintings.
They're just all black.
They're all black.
So he's really pushing this idea
that what the painting is about
is that painting.
That's what it's about.
And so even though that had been
dealt with, in some ways,
by the Russians earlier
in the century, he's-- here,
though, he's dealing with these
relationships-- horizontal,
vertical.
It's sort of like Mondrian
drunk, except it's not just
the primary colors.
But it's like he can't have
that real rigidity.
So things peel open.
There's a lot of Clyfford Still
in the edges here.
The way he plays with edge
tension is interesting--
if it comes to the edge,
if it doesn't come to the edge.
Again Mondrian-- and believe me,
these guys looked at Mondrian,
they may not have wanted to go
down that road--
but they're thinking about a lot
of what Mondrian--
it's reductive.
This painting is reductive.
He's seeking
certain stable relationships
to the edge, so that you don't
think you're going to go just
flying out of the painting,
that kind of thing.
And there's a lot of push
and pull.
There's a lot
of horizontal-vertical
relationship,
positive-negative space,
high contrast, low contrast.
Every movement needs an egghead.
That is the guy who's really so
smart that he thinks he knows
everything.
And in fact, he does know
everything.
And that's Robert Motherwell,
who is almost as important today
as a writer about art--
important books about Dada,
et cetera.
He's a very eloquent writer.
But he's part of the group.
Here's Motherwell on the left.
And of course, if we talk
about Motherwell at the National
Gallery,
we talk
about the great Reconciliation
Elegy that hangs in the East
Building from 1978.
Motherwell is interesting
because, in some ways,
he's both gestural and field.
He has broad expanses of color,
but he also paints.
You can see
dripping and gestural elements.
So he kind of bridges the two.
And by the way, I'm holding back
from this lecture
a discussion of Rothko
and Neumann because they belong
to the tower.
And I'll come back to them
in a different lecture.
So he is very much about, again,
a certain kind of synthesis
of these two ideas.
He's also a reductive artist,
in many ways.
He says, quote, that the heart
of abstract art, quote--
abstract art is, quote,
"stripped bare of other things
in order to intensify it,
its rhythms, space intervals,
color structure."
Now, Reconciliation Elegy
relates to probably the most
important series by Motherwell
that goes way back to the '60s,
and it was called
the Spanish Elegy series, where
he was speaking to the tragedy
of the Spanish Civil War.
And he creates these forms
that we have here.
Talking about that series,
the Spanish Elegies,
and what it meant, he said,
quote, that it was his,
quote, "Private insistence
that a terrible death happened
that should not be forgot."
And then he goes on to say,
but the pictures were also
quote, "general metaphors
of the contrast between life
and death
and their interrelation."
So the black and white,
these forms that often are sort
of organic biomorphic forms
that look like wombs, that look
like sex organs, all
of this stuff is relevant.
About our picture, of course,
he's said a few things
in his notes.
And one reference to what it was
he was seeking in our painting--
which is much later,
in the '70s, it was commissioned
for the opening of the East
Building--
he said that, quote,
"It's the burden
of an individual's life
in the midst
of the architectural splendor
of this building"--
here in the East Building,
its splendor--
"a building whose collections
were initiated
by the accumulated wealth
of its wealthiest citizens."
So he's making a contrast
between the idea
of the difficulty of life
for all of us, day to day.
How do we reconcile that
to the magnificence
of this building
and the wealth of the building?
Let me show you.
This is, of course, Motherwell
in his studio.
I think it's '52--
yeah, '52, here on the left.
Here he is with his studio
assistants.
I'm going to just show you
the painting, our painting.
He had two studio assistants.
This is his studio in Greenwich,
Connecticut.
And what they are doing here
is the maquette which I'll show
you in a second.
So this is the maquette
of the painting.
These guys now are putting
a large piece of paper,
and they're copying
the maquette.
They're transferring it
to this paper with pencil.
And then, what they do
is they poke holes
like a fresco.
They pounce.
They prick holes through all
of the lines, right?
That gets rolled
over the canvas.
Then, you what's called
pouncing.
You take this little charcoal
bag, just like they did
in the Renaissance,
and you pounce it all
over those holes,
so that when you lift off
the paper,
you've got a dotted line
of the painting.
But of course, Motherwell will
depart from that very often.
Here he is starting out.
This is our picture
in its process.
He starts with some charcoal.
His studio assistants
took his favorite brushes
and cut them, because they had
short handles,
and put them on the end
of these long sticks here.
There's the maquette That's
the model they're following.
But he feels totally free,
of course, to depart from that.
Some color photographs.
His assistant said-- and they
were interviewed
about the process
and everything--
that he really, he may have
looked at the underdrawing,
but that he was very
improvisational.
He almost worked like a jazz
musician.
He would change things
and change his mind as he went
along.
This painting has been
in a number of locations.
If you actually came
to the gallery
at its opening in 1978,
this is where it was.
This is not even here anymore.
This is all gone.
But above, it was hanging here.
So this is where the mural is
today by Pollock, right?
Then, it went here
near the escalator.
And today, it's here,
near the auditorium.
And a little while ago--
well, when we were renovating
the building, this painting
had to come down.
And it's huge.
So here are our handlers--
actually, here they're putting
it up.
Because these were photographs
I was taking.
So they had to take it down.
And now, we're putting it back
up.
And now, we're taking it down
again.
It's down again
because of Rachel Whiteread.
Now, remember this area now
is special exhibitions.
So we can't have Robert
Motherwell in her exhibition.
So for the largest painting,
we have no compunctions
about putting this thing up
and taking it down.
I would really be saying,
do we really have to take it
down?
Can't we put a sheet over it
or something?
Another note he makes-- he made
notations in a notebook
about this painting--
and he says-- it's
comparable to what I just read,
but this is a little different.
They were just these notes.
He said, quote, "Problem--
in the midst
of architectural grandeur,
to strike a personal note,
the note of the human presence,
of a 20th century,
solitary individual,
that terrible burden,
and somehow make it public."
So that's just a note he had
in his notebook.
This is Grace Hartigan
in her studio in 1958.
We have Essex and Hester.
That's up here on the right,
subtitled, Red, from 1958.
We get with Grace Hartigan, Joan
Mitchell,
we get into what we come
to call, because they're
younger, the second generation
abstract expressionists.
She was born in Newark
and then moved to New York City
in 1945.
By 1957, she's considered
the most important female
abstract expressionist.
She's featured in spreads
in Life Magazine
and in Newsweek.
Life Magazine refers to her as,
quote, "the most celebrated
of the young American women
painters."
She marries--
her second marriage-- which
because of various things
her husband did,
they needed to move
to Baltimore.
So then she goes from Newark
to New York to Baltimore
in 1960.
She stays in Baltimore until she
dies in 2008.
She was a teacher, but then she
was the director
of the Hoffberger Graduate
School of Painting
at the Maryland Institute
College of Art in Baltimore.
This painting is a series called
"Place" paintings.
People always wonder what
that name is.
Is it Shakespeare or something--
Essex and Hester.
It's actually a street
coordinate in New York.
It's where her loft apartment
was in New York City.
So she did a series
of paintings-- in fact, many
of the abstract expressionists
titled paintings after
locations--
street locations, the Hamptons,
this, that.
It was very common.
And it's interesting because she
painted this painting after she
moved to the Hamptons.
Yet she's painting this place
back in New York City.
And the reason she moved
was because she wanted a more
open kind of space.
She was kind of getting
claustrophobic in New York City.
This is exactly what de Kooning
did.
De Kooning was in New York City.
Then he finally said,
I got to get out of here.
And he went off to the Hamptons.
De Kooning didn't drive.
He didn't know how to drive.
So these great stories of when
people would take them out
to the Hamptons,
he would sit with the window
rolled down like a dog,
and he'd look out like that.
Remember de Kooning is Dutch.
So his European thing--
he thought, like when he was
interviewed about America,
he thought, I thought it was all
like Hollywood.
It was all bright sunshine
and everything.
Because I was raised on watching
movies in the Netherlands
that were all American movies
and things like that.
In any case, Hartigan is very
important.
She again, owes a lot to Gorky.
So this is a reference
to her loft apartment address
in New York City.
And these paintings may look
simple.
But again, there's
different density of paint,
different brushstroke.
There's calligraphy.
Again, she was very influenced
by Gorky.
Gorky is very important to all
these artists here.
So this is a really wonderful
painting to have.
And she hangs, now, next to Joan
Mitchell.
This painting, I think, now,
is off view.
Here's Joan Mitchell
in her studio in Paris,
on the left, in 1956.
And this is our painting, Piano
Mécanique, from 1958.
With Hartigan, Helen
Frankenthaler-- and I'm going
to come back to Helen
Frankenthaler when we talk about
the DC Color School--
and Krasner and de Kooning,
Elaine de Kooning, these
are the great ladies
of abstract expressionism.
She's born in Chicago,
studies at the Art Institute,
then comes to New York City.
She enrolls at Hans Hofmann's
school in New York City.
She is influenced greatly
by de Kooning,
the gestural work.
But she begins to be very
interested in nature.
So a lot of these artists
still are evoking nature.
She was raised on Lake Michigan.
And she thinks a lot about water
and reflection.
And that carries over
into her work.
But the big thing with Joan
Mitchell is when she decides
to leave America and really live
in France.
And here we have something very
interesting.
Because Joan Mitchell
is probably the most
"Frenchified"
abstract expressionist.
And by that, I mean when you
look at a Joan Mitchell
painting, you think French.
You think Matisse.
You think Monet.
You think
of the great French tradition.
And this gets us into something
that's very interesting, that's
always interested me,
and that is the number
of Americans who chose to work
in post-World War II Paris,
not to be in New York,
and how that affected
their vocabulary.
We think
of this big demarcation.
After the war, everybody goes
to New York.
So what happened in Paris?
They just closed up shop?
That's what we're going to talk
about on Thursday-- post-World
War II Europe.
What was going on?
But a number of Americans,
especially those who had served
in the war on the GI bill,
they could live in Paris very
cheaply, more cheaply
than in New York.
So you had a whole expatriate
population that included Joan
Mitchell, eventually.
And they become part of what
is the European equivalent
of abstract expressionism
which has all
these different names--
Art Informale-- informal art--
Tachism-- touch.
These are all French terms that
were the equivalent
for American abstract
expressionism.
So here is Salut Tom from 1979.
This is huge.
This is up at the moment.
It's four panels.
She had gone to France first
in '48, just after the war,
on a scholarship,
came back to New York,
became a very important part
of the second generation
of abstract expressionists.
But there is always in her--
you can tell a mile away
that it's Joan Mitchell.
Because it's lush.
It's light.
It has this wonderful kind
of evocation.
it looks like Monet,
in many ways.
That's not just accidental.
Because when she moves
in the '50s-- she's still
traveling to Paris.
And then, she moves there
permanently in '59.
And she settles in the house
that Monet used to live in.
Yeah-- on the Seine at Vetheuil.
He had a house there
before Giverny.
She lives in that house
and settles in that house.
And so she's going out
and painting the Seine.
People talk about this painting.
It has a very Water Lily
like feel to it.
Well, people talk about,
is it four separate scenes
that she put together?
Is it one panoramic scene?
You can think about it,
because there are four panels
here, you can think about it
in a lot of different ways.
The reference in the title,
Salut Tom, 1979,
is to Thomas Hess, her friend
who was the curator at the Met
and the editor of ARTnews.
He died very
suddenly and tragically.
He had a heart attack
at his desk at the Met
at the age of 57 in 1978.
Hess, along with Rosenberg,
Greenberg, Steinberg, and all
these other critics
and curators, they were setting
the tone about what
American abstract expressionism
was.
She said about nature, much
like Monet, she said, quote, "I
could never mirror nature.
I would more like to paint what
it leaves me with,
a sort of impression it leaves
me with."
Now, the other painter--
and then, we're going to,
believe me, we're going to end--
who is part of this expatriate
population, he's New York--
well, he's from California,
but then New York, and then he
stays in Paris--
is Sam Francis.
We just took this painting down.
This is White Line from 1958.
San Francis also stays in Paris
after the war.
Here he is with Joan Mitchell.
This is Walasse Ting.
He's a Chinese painter who's
very important.
This is from 1969,
this photograph.
So Francis is, again, a very
important part of--
he's really more French
than American in the sense
of he's
more a part of Art Informale.
Many of his paintings
have white in the center
so that everything spins off
of the relationship
to the blank white.
And here are the ladies.
And I want to end with giving
you some reading--
not that I want you to read it,
but I mean some bibliography.
So here is Joan Mitchell.
There is Grace Hartigan
and Helen Frankenthaler.
This is in 1960.
This is Elaine de Kooning
with Joan Mitchell in 1975.
And the reason I'm ending
with this
is because over the past five,
six years, finally,
the women have been getting
the credit and the publications
and the biographies
and the exhibitions
that they deserve.
So I do want to mention several
of these to you.
In 2016, at the Denver Art
Museum,
there was a beautiful exhibition
called the Women of Abstract
Expressionism.
All these ladies were in it.
The book I had hoped to read
this summer,
but I haven't gotten to it,
there is, now,
the first biography of Elaine
de Kooning by a woman
named Cathy Curtis.
It's called A Generous Vision,
the Creative Life of Elaine de
Kooning from 2017.
Another new book that talks
about all of the ladies
together by Mary Gabriel,
it's called Ninth Street Women--
Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning,
Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell,
and Helen Frankenthaler--
Five Painters and the Movement
That Changed Modern Art.
That was from this year.
That just came out--
2018.
There is a biography of Joan
Mitchell.
It's by Patricia Albers.
It's called Joan Mitchell, Lady
Painter, 2011.
Cathy Curtis, before she wrote
about Elaine de Kooning,
she wrote the biography of Grace
Hartigan.
So it's called Restless
Ambition--
Grace Hartigan, Painter, 2015.
And then, Gail Levin, who we
normally associate with Edward
Hopper--
she's written a lot on Hopper--
but she wrote
the first biography of Lee
Krasner.
And that was only as recently
as 2012.
So those are things you should--
I really am looking forward
to the Elaine de Kooning
biography.
I think that's going to be
really interesting.
In any case, that's the New York
School.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
