Here is a really great expressionist I found on ARTBREAK
I was born in Venezuela, on December 15th, 1968. I have lived in Venezuela, Miami and now, I reside in Barcelona. From each place that I have lived in, I have learned a lot of things, which, every time more and more, make me feel centred to show my experiences through different colours and forms in my creations.
Painting has completely changed my life. I am able to spend real intimate time with myself. While I paint I submerge in another world and I can feel how I connect, deeply and purely with my center. Listening to my ’self’, to the things it has to say…putting them on canvas, that’s the only language it knows to express them, so that the audience can feel free to explore the emotions that my art provoke in them.
My art is a response to my way of seeing and being part of this world. It tries to explain the internal search of any human being. I try to show, in a visual manner, the internal fights that we all endeavour to evolve and to survive every day. I feel painting as a spiritual experience, a way of knowing myself, a way of personal grow.
Since we are living immersed in a stream of negative emotions everyday, I try, in a subtle way, to make the spectators go into a self intuitive trip along with their emotions and sensations, waiting for them to experience them freely and perceive positive messages, and that at least for a moment, they are conscious of the present moment.
On December 7, 1892, Stuart Davis was born to two Philadelphia artists. His mother, Helen Stuart Foulke, was a prominent sculptor who exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His father, Edward Wyatt Davis, was a newspaper art editor who employed many of the period’s great American Realists– John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, and Everett Shinn. In the company of his parents and their famous artist friends, the young Davis grew up surrounded by art.
At the age of 16, Davis dropped out of high school to study with Robert Henri at the artist’s school in New York City. His parents weren’t the least bit worried over his decision, as they were close friends of Henri and could not have thought of a more experienced mentor for their son. For the next three years, Davis remained at Henri’s school, where he learned above all, to capture “life in the raw.” Under the direction of artist John Sloan, the teenage Davis gained additional experience as an illustrator for the socialist weekly, The Masses.
In 1913, he was invited to participate and attend the International Exhibition of Modern Art (also known as the Armory Show). Davis later recalled that he was “enormously excited by the show” and was deeply affected by the post-Impressionist works by Gaugin, Van Gogh, and Matisse that were on display. Upon his return from the exhibition, the young artist vowed to become a “modern” artist.
After the Armory Show, Davis redeveloped his style by loosening up his brushwork and perspective. Shortly after, he held his first solo-exhibition which was then followed by a string of shows at the Whitney Studio Club. In 1922, he became a member of the Modern Artists of America. As an established, “modern” artist, Davis gained entrance into the circles of the New York avant-garde. Over the years, he became close friends with abstract painters Charles Demuth, Arshile Gorky, John Graham and the poet William Carlos Williams.
In 1927, Davis encountered a crossroads in his career when he mounted an electric fan, a rubber glove and an eggbeater to a table. The Eggbeater Series, was then debuted at the Valentine Gallery. Upon the success of the show, benefactor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney urged Davis to travel to Paris. With her financial help, he was able to go abroad for a year with his girlfriend Bessie Chosak. Once in Paris, he found a studio in the Montparnasse district, painted many Paris street scenes, and married Bessie Chosak.
In 1929, Davis returned from Paris to a changed New York. His mentor Robert Henri had passed away that year and the Great Depression was at hand. Amidst these hardships, his wife, Bessie Chosak Davis, died in 1934 from an infection that was brought on by a botched abortion.
Like many Americans of his time, Davis also suffered financially from the Great Depression. When President Roosevelt announced the debut of the first federally supported art program in 1933, Davis was one of the first artists to sign up. Between 1933-39, he completed several government commissioned murals under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Program (PWAP), the Federal Art Project (FAP), and the Works Progress Administration (WAP). With the financial support of the government, Davis was able to continue his exploration in formalism and American subject matter.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he taught at the Art Students League and at the New School for Social Research to supplement his income and promote his ideas on art theory. By the 1950s, Stuart Davis was already a fixed icon in American art. He was enjoying international success and married his second wife, Roselle Springer, who would later give birth to his only child, George Earle. Together, Davis and his wife would frequent local jazz nightclubs. Davis, a longtime fan of jazz and swing music, drew inspiration from the genres and was even friends with famous musicians, such as Duke Ellington.
Stuart Davis continued to enjoy success as an artist well into his later years. He received honors as a representative of the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and 1954. In addition, he was awarded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum International Award in both 1958 and 1960. On June 24, 1964, he died suddenly from a stroke, leaving behind a legacy of paintings and a reputation as one of America’s first modernists.
II. AN ANALYSIS OF THE ARTIST’S WORK
When the teenage Stuart Davis first moved to New York City, his talent in the American Realist tradition was exceptional. Robert Henri praised his work, and he was often compared to his colleague, Thomas Hart Benton, who was five years older than he. However, Davis’ artistic direction took a different course after he witnessed the Armory Show of 1913. From this point forward, it can be said that Stuart Davis and Thomas Hart Benton became lifelong rivals, artists of polar opposites. Whereas Benton became famous as a leader of the Regionalist movement, Davis would go on to paint abstract paintings and become a forefather of the Pop Art movement.
Davis’ shift to abstraction was not an immediate one. He took time in his quest to become a “modern” artist. He explored both Post-Impressionist and Fauvist canvases. It was not until the 1920s that Davis first began to truly research the European techniques of abstraction and Synthetic Cubism. The crown of Davis’ attempts to master Cubism occured during 1927 and 1928, when he mounted an eggbeater, electric fan, and a rubber glove to a table. He then called the Eggbeater Series and the paintings that followed, his “formula pictures,” claiming that the formula involved stripping down his observations of nature to their very core. In doing so, he could paint the same subject matter over and over again, with triumph.
For Davis, every object played an important role in perceiving the modern world, right down to the eggbeaters, gas pumps, matchbooks, and billboards used and seen in everyday life. His subjects come right out of the Jazz nightclubs that he visited and the metropolitan streets of New York City that he enjoyed. Even the specific language of American life during the 1940s and 1950s comes through in his paintings. Phrases such as “The Mellow Pad” and “Swing Landscape” are apt titles for his compositions of squiggly lines and flashy colors.
By painting the jargon and images of American life, Davis was one of the rare painters of the 20th century who successfully transformed a European style of painting (Cubism) into something truly American. However, by the time the Abstract Expressionists took the New York art world by storm in the 1950s, Davis’ art struggled to maintain its modernist edge. Another decade would pass before Davis’ visionary presence would be cemented in art history. In the1960s, artists of the Pop Art movement admired his attention to mass culture. Long before painters such as Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, Davis was painting soap boxes, billboards and gas pumps with a tongue-in-cheek wit that was ahead of his time.
Morris Louis was perhaps the greatest exponent of Colour Field painting. He was a notorious perfectionist with many paintings being destroyed that did not meet his exacting standards.
Born Morris Louis Bernstein in 1912 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, he was raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1933, moved to New York for six years to work on the Federal Art Project then returned to Baltimore in 1940. After seven years there he moved to Washington, first to the suburb of Silver Spring then in 1952 to the city itself.
Although keeping himself detached from the New York art scene it was a trip to the city in 1953 that led him to appropriate the technique he first saw used in the work of Helen Frankenthaler. She applied liquid paint onto unprimed canvas, it was then allowed to flow across and soak into the canvas, the result being a stain of paint as opposed to a layer of paint applied on the surface. Louis experimented on this basis creating paintings of extraordinary vibrancy.
Many of the leading American abstract painters of the 1950s and 60s, Louis included, were exponents of Colour Field painting, where whole works consisted of large expanses of more or less unmodulated colour. Louis painted a number of pictures using this technique beginning with ‘Veils’ (1954). In ‘Where’ (1960) his style moved towards colours positioned in rainbow-like bands on a bare canvas.
By the end of the Fifties his reputation was confirmed. He had his first foreign exhibition in 1960 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Sadly, however, he died of lung cancer just two years later. His paintings remain widely exhibited.
“With Louis, fully autonomous abstract painting came into its own for really the first time, and did so in paintings of a quality that matches the level of their abstraction.” John Elderfield (from the introduction to the Art Council’s Exhibition of Louis’ work in 1974).
Did the Abstract Expressionist hide his name amid the swirls and torrents of a legendary 1943 mural?
By Henry Adams
Smithsonian magazine, November 2009
It was my wife, Marianne Berardi, who first saw the letters.
We were looking at a reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s breakthrough work, Mural, an 8-by 20-foot canvas bursting with physical energy that, in 1943, was unlike anything seen before.
The critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock’s principal champion, said he took one look at the painting and realized that “Jackson was the greatest painter this country has produced.” A Museum of Modern Art curator, the late Kirk Varnedoe, said Mural established Jackson Pollock as the world’s premier modern painter.
I was researching a book about Pollock’s lifelong relationship with his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, the famed regionalist and muralist, when I sat puzzling over a reproduction of Mural after breakfast one morning with Marianne, herself an art historian. She suddenly said she could make out the letters S-O-N in blackish paint in the upper right area of the mural. Then she realized JACKSON ran across the entire top. And finally she saw POLLOCK below that.
The characters are unorthodox, even ambiguous, and largely hidden. But, she pointed out, it could hardly be random coincidence to find just those letters in that sequence.
I was flabbergasted. It’s not every day that you see something new in one of the 20th century’s most important artworks.
I’m now convinced that Pollock wrote his name in large letters on the canvas—indeed, arranged the whole painting around his name. As far as I can tell, no one has previously made this assertion. Nor is there evidence that Pollock himself, who was loath to talk about his art and left behind few written records, ever mentioned this coded gesture.
I’ve shared my theory with several Pollock experts. They’ve had mixed reactions, from “no way” to “far-fetched” to “maybe.”
“It’s feasible,” says Sue Taylor, an art historian at Portland State University, who has studied Pollock’s 1942 canvas Stenographic Figure, which includes written symbols. “Pollock would often begin with some sort of figurative device to which he would then respond—and eventually bury under layers of paint. Letters and numbers, moreover, frequently appear in works of the early 1940s.”
It may not be possible to answer the question definitively unless scientists use X-ray scanning or some other method to trace which pigments were put down first. At the moment there are no plans to do such an analysis.
If my theory holds up, it has many implications. Mural, commissioned by the collector Peggy Guggenheim for her New York City apartment, is the stuff of legend. Owned by the University of Iowa since Guggenheim donated it in 1948, the painting is said to be worth $140 million. (A later Jackson Pollock painting, Number 5, 1948, reportedly sold in 2006 for $140 million—the highest price ever paid for a work of art.) Mural is so central to the Pollock mystique that in the 2000 movie Pollock, the artist (played by Ed Harris), having stared perplexedly at a giant empty canvas for months, executes Mural in a single session the night before it’s due to be delivered. That (standard) version of events, originally advanced by Pollock’s wife, the artist Lee Krasner, reinforces the image of Pollock as an anguished, spontaneous genius. But the art critic Francis V. O’Connor has debunked the story, saying Pollock probably executed Mural during the summer of 1943, not in one night in late December.
Pollock’s possibly writing his name in Mural testifies to an overlooked feature of his works: they have a structure, contrary to the popular notion that they could be done by any 5-year-old with a knack for splatters. In my view, Pollock organized the painting around his name according to a compositional system—vertical markings that serve as the loci of rhythmic spirals—borrowed directly from his mentor, Benton.
Pollock had studied under Benton for two years and once told a friend that he wanted Mural to be comparable to a Benton work, though he didn’t have the technical ability to make a great realistic mural and needed to do something different.
I have found no evidence that Pollock wrote his name in such fashion on any other canvas. In a way, that makes sense. To Pollock, I think, Mural announced that he was replacing Benton, a father figure whom he once described as “the foremost American painter today.” It was Pollock’s way of making a name for himself.
El Lissitzky was born Eleazar Markovich Lisitskii in Vitebsk in 1890. From 1909 until 1914 Lissitzky studied architecture in Darmstadt. In 1919 Lissitzky became a professor at the art school in Vitebsk, where he met Marc Chagall and Kasimir Malevich. At that time Lissitzky turned to the Suprematist theory of art and the UNOWIS group, beginning to work on a series of abstract paintings he called ‘Proun’ ['For the New Art']. Between 1921 and 1925 Lissitzky worked in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland but became a professor at the Moscow Art Academy in 1921.
He founded the international journal ‘Vesc’ in 1922 and devoted himself increasingly to typography and exhibition design. Between 1923 and 1925 Lissitzky designed the ‘Wolkenbügel’ project [office blocks for Moscow, some with splayed legs straddling streets]. In 1925 Lissitzky returned to Moscow and taught at the post-Revolutionary art school Vkhutemas.
Between 1926 and 1934 Lissitzky designed several exhibitions. Lissitzky worked on the journal ‘The USSR in Architecture’, for which Lissitzky and his wife, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, designed a great many issues. Lissitzky was a Russian avant-garde artist who did not limit himself to developing a form of abstract painting but rather extended the new functionalism to photography, book design, architecture and urban planning. His enormous versatility enabled El Lissitzky to forge links between the Russian Constructivists and Neo-Plasticism (De Stijl), the Bauhaus and Dada. As a painter and architect, Lissitzky was both personally and artistically close to the painter and architectural model-maker Kasimir Malevich. El Lissitzky died in Moscow in 1941.
I was very impressed by this Hungarian painter’s work so I decided to include him here. I love his use of colours and textures.
“I am the type to turn inward. For me the problems are in their most vivid form. The release created by these crushing extremes does not always remain in the physical realm. This force leads to the path of spirituality and mysticism, but certain desires to know and the drive for experience pulls one back to the earth. This struggle between opposites is reflected in my paintings.
My paintings – from a certain point of view – are inner sounding music. My feelings and thoughts are reflections of allegorical pictures. I’d like my art to help others gain self-realisation, so that they can observe themselves as they are in reality. This could help, for deeper thinking and create a desire for higher existence.” Kalman Maklary
Painting – although it has its own broad and trodden tracks – to me is a mission of the narrow path.Old times are changing to give way to the new.The old way of the artistic expression has served its time,and by now is over.Modern art is only beginning now,and it is being built on entirely new foundations inspired by the intellect.It is the duty of the artist to give expression to such aspect of the world which otherwise can only be found in cosmic consciousness. Kalman Maklary
Pierre Alechinsky is a Belgian artist. He was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1927. In 1944 he attended the l’Ecole nationale supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts décoratifs de La Cambre, Brussels where he studied illustration techniques, printing and photography. In 1945 he discovered the work of Henri Michaux, Jean Dubuffet and developed a friendship with the art critic Jacques Putman. In 1949 he joined Christian Dotremont, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn to form the art group Cobra. He participated both the Cobra exhibitions and went to Paris to study engraving with Stanley William Hayter in 1951. In 1954 he had his first exhibition in Paris and started to become interested in oriental calligraphy.
By 1960 he had exhibited in London, Berne and at the Venice Biennial, and then in Pittsburg, New York, Amsterdam and Silkeborg as his international reputation grew. he worked with Wallace Ting and continued to be close to Christian Dotremont. He also developed links with Andre Breton. His international career continued throughout the seventies and by 1983 he became Professor of painting at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 1994 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Free University of Brussells, and in 1995 one of his designs was used on a Belgian stamp.
It was my wife, Marianne Berardi, who first saw the letters.
Pierre Alechinsky is a Belgian artist. He was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1927. In 1944 he attended the l’Ecole nationale supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts décoratifs de La Cambre, Brussels where he studied illustration techniques, printing and photography. In 1945 he discovered the work of Henri Michaux, Jean Dubuffet and developed a friendship with the art critic Jacques Putman. In 1949 he joined Christian Dotremont, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn to form the art group Cobra. He participated both the Cobra exhibitions and went to Paris to study engraving with Stanley William Hayter in 1951. In 1954 he had his first exhibition in Paris and started to become interested in oriental calligraphy.
