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0:13
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,
0:45
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
1:23
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.
1:49
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
2:22
there between the Franz Kline and the David Smith. Another David Smith looking deeper into the space.
2:33
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
3:07
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,
3:39
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.
4:14
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.
4:50
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
5:27
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
5:59
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
6:35
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.
7:11
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
7:47
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.
8:20
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
8:51
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.
9:28
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.
9:54
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.
10:36
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
11:12
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.
11:46
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.
12:00
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
12:33
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.
12:55
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
13:31
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
14:05
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.
14:19
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
14:55
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.
15:29
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.
15:54
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
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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.
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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
17:36
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
18:14
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
18:51
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
19:21
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.
19:57
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--
20:41
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.
21:20
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.
21:52
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.
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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.
22:55
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.
23:28
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.
24:03
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.
24:38
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.
25:02
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.
25:17
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
25:56
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
26:27
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.
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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
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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
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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--
28:36
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--
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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
29:48
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?
30:05
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
30:44
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
31:16
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,
31:54
and then he studies with Josef Albers. So let's take a little trip down through the De Niro family album.
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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--
32:48
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.
33:22
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
34:05
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.
34:45
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
35:20
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
35:55
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
36:30
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.
37:03
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.
37:34
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.
38:05
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
38:43
and throwing it down onto the surface.
38:49
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,
39:30
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.
40:04
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.
40:35
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.
40:58
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
41:35
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
42:10
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
42:45
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--
43:15
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
43:46
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
44:19
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,
44:49
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,
45:25
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--
45:59
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--
46:30
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
47:03
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.
47:36
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.
48:11
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.
48:42
Everything is charging across that goddamn surface."
48:48
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.
49:18
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
49:51
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.
50:28
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.
51:04
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.
51:35
This is the first time this painting has ever been in Washington DC. It almost never travels.
51:44
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
52:17
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,
52:50
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.
53:30
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.
54:06
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.
54:40
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.
55:11
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.
55:37
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.
56:07
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,
56:37
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
57:11
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.
57:28
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.
58:06
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,
58:40
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,
59:16
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.
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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--
1:00:22
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.
1:00:52
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.
1:01:30
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--
1:02:08
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
1:02:39
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.
1:03:05
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
1:03:40
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
1:04:10
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
1:04:50
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
1:05:27
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
1:06:03
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.
1:06:35
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
1:07:04
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
1:07:35
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
1:08:06
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.
1:08:35
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.
1:09:09
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.
1:09:43
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
1:10:17
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."
1:10:31
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.
1:11:05
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,
1:11:42
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
1:12:18
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.
1:12:55
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--
1:13:08
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.
1:13:45
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.
1:14:13
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.
1:14:53
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,
1:15:26
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
1:15:54
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.
1:16:24
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,
1:17:01
the sky, and the figure itself.
1:17:08
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.
1:17:46
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.
1:18:16
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,
1:18:53
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,
1:19:29
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
1:20:02
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.
1:20:36
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
1:21:11
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,
1:21:48
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.
1:22:14
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.
1:22:41
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.
1:23:31
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.
1:24:05
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.
1:24:38
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.
1:25:14
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.
1:25:47
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
1:26:18
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
1:26:56
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,
1:27:28
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.
1:28:11
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.
1:28:48
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
1:29:20
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
1:29:54
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.
1:30:20
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
1:30:51
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.
1:31:28
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.
1:32:03
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.
1:32:38
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."
1:33:09
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
1:33:43
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,
1:34:18
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.
1:34:45
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.
1:34:59
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.
1:35:18
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.
1:35:53
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
1:36:30
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.
1:37:02
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
1:37:39
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.
1:38:14
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
1:38:46
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.
1:39:15
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,
1:39:43
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.
1:40:10
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--
1:40:42
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.
1:41:16
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
1:41:50
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,
1:42:19
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.
1:42:55
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
1:43:25
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
1:43:54
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
1:44:26
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.
1:45:01
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.
1:45:24
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,
1:46:01
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,
1:46:33
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
1:47:07
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
1:47:38
School. Thanks very much. [APPLAUSE]
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