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109-551: The New York School of Abstract Expressionism was the first American style of art to have international importance. The San Francisco Bay Area was the center for an independent variant of Abstract Expressionism. The Bay Area Figurative movement was in response to both. Spanning two decades, this art movement is often broken down into three groups, or generations: the First Generation, the Bridge Generation, and

218-601: A surrealist , he was also one of the first painters of the New York School who used the technique of staining. Gorky created broad fields of vivid, open, unbroken color that he used in many of his paintings as grounds. In Gorky's most effective and accomplished paintings between the years 1941–1948, he consistently used intense stained fields of color, often letting the paint run and drip, under and around his familiar lexicon of organic and biomorphic shapes and delicate lines. Another abstract expressionist whose works in

327-421: A bond measure that specifically funded the art center, the civic center construction plans were the first in the nation to include a community art center. Richmond's Civic Center was designed by architect Timothy Pflueger. The complex, which encompasses City Hall, Hall of Justice, Auditorium, Richmond Art Center, and Public Library, was completed in 1951. The low, linear forms reflect the mid-century modern style of

436-423: A book on the artist, "In Living Color, The Art & Life of Henrietta Berk", edited by Cindy Johnson and published by Cool Titles. Bruce McGaw was born in 1935 and was the only artist from the second generation to be included in the 1957 Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting exhibition. He studied at California College of Arts and Crafts and took one of the first classes taught by Diebenkorn in 1955. McGaw had

545-476: A close relationship with Diebenkorn, who even met with McGaw's parents to show them his support for their son's works. McGaw also studied with Leon Goldin , where he worked with abstraction. Figuration was not a furtive process for McGaw. Like other second-generation artists, he was not confined to any particular style and moved from one style to the other. One of McGaw's first mature figurative paintings clearly showed influences from Diebenkorn but McGaw also showed

654-502: A courtyard garden and public outdoor space. The building has four galleries, including a 2,200 square foot main gallery, as well as six studio and multipurpose spaces. In the courtyard of the building, many sculptures by artist John Roeder (1877-–1964) were installed after his death in 1964. The Executive Director of Richmond Art Center is José R. Rivera, since 2020. Richmond Art Center provides arts classes for adults, teens, youth and families. On-site classes and workshops are taught in

763-534: A different way from gestural abstract expressionism. Although abstract expressionism spread quickly throughout the United States, the major centers of this style were New York City and California, especially in the New York School , and the San Francisco Bay area . Abstract expressionist paintings share certain characteristics, including the use of large canvases, an "all-over" approach, in which

872-547: A late member of the Uptown Group , wrote catalogue forewords and reviews, and by the late 1940s became an exhibiting artist at Betty Parsons Gallery . His first solo show was in 1948. Soon after his first exhibition, Barnett Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image." Utilizing his writing skills, Newman fought every step of

981-449: A list of "the men in the new movement". Paalen is mentioned twice; other artists mentioned are Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Hofmann, Baziotes, Gorky and others. Robert Motherwell is mentioned with a question mark. Another important early manifestation of what came to be abstract expressionism is the work of American Northwest artist Mark Tobey , especially his "white writing" canvases, which, though generally not large in scale, anticipate

1090-477: A lot of new features of his own. He liked working on a very small scale and broke the body into standard torso views or odd, synecdochal parts. Joan Brown created colorful, expansive paintings depicting her life and experiences in San Francisco, where she lived and worked in for nearly all her life. Her time as a figurative artist was intense and productive and provided some of the most important works of

1199-564: A philosophical and a physical connection to the way the color field painters like Newman, Rothko and Still construct their unbroken and in Still's case broken surfaces. In several paintings that Pollock painted after his classic drip painting period of 1947–1950, he used the technique of staining fluid oil paint and house paint into raw canvas. During 1951 he produced a series of semi-figurative black stain paintings, and in 1952 he produced stain paintings using color. In his November 1952 exhibition at

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1308-474: A reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism, other forms of Geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde circles. Greenberg became the voice of Post-painterly abstraction; by curating an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. Color field painting , Hard-edge painting and Lyrical Abstraction emerged as radical new directions. Since

1417-656: A shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists . The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates . Key figures in the New York School , which was the center of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky , Jackson Pollock , Franz Kline , Mark Rothko , Norman Lewis , Willem de Kooning , Adolph Gottlieb , Clyfford Still , Robert Motherwell , Theodoros Stamos and Lee Krasner among others. The movement

1526-465: A slow transformation from abstract paintings to figures, it is believed that Park's abstractions disappeared instantly. An interview with Park's aunt suggested that Park drove his abstract paintings to a dump and released or ritually destroyed them. His colleagues did not even know about this transformation until the following year. In 2004, Hackett Freedman Gallery in San Francisco held an exhibition of 35 of David Park's works from 1953 to 1960. These were

1635-406: A work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Picasso 's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture near the turn of the century via Cubism and constructed sculpture, with influences as disparate as Navajo sand paintings , surrealism, Jungian analysis, and Mexican mural art, Pollock redefined what it was to produce art. His move away from easel painting and conventionality

1744-462: A youthful interest in music which slowly faded away as he grew older. On his trip to M. H. de Young Memorial Museum , he decided to become a portrait painter. He later went on to serve in the army where he managed to keep up with his art scene. He did not consider himself avant-garde or part of a specific movement. Oliveira's early figurative works tend to have more detail and color which can be seen in his Seated Man with Dog . His works completed in

1853-409: Is Surrealism , with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic , or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock 's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson , Max Ernst , and David Alfaro Siqueiros . The newer research tends to put the exile-surrealist Wolfgang Paalen in the position of the artist and theoretician who fostered the theory of

1962-458: Is closely associated with Action Painting because of his style, technique, and his painterly touch and his physical application of paint, art critics have likened Pollock to both Action painting and color field painting. Another critical view advanced by Greenberg connects Pollock's allover canvasses to the large-scale Water Lilies of Claude Monet done during the 1920s. Art critics such as Michael Fried , Greenberg and others have observed that

2071-571: Is difficult to explain or interpret because it is a supposed unconscious manifestation of the act of pure creation. In practice, the term abstract expressionism is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even applied to work which is not especially abstract nor expressionist. Pollock's energetic action paintings , with their "busy" feel, are different both technically and aesthetically, to De Kooning's violent and grotesque Women series. Woman V

2180-591: Is in the collection of MoMA , used greatly reduced references to nature, and they painted with a highly articulated and psychological use of color. In general, these artists eliminated recognizable imagery, in the case of Rothko and Gottlieb sometimes using symbols and signs as a replacement of imagery. Certain artists quoted references to past or present art, but in general color field painting presents abstraction as an end in itself. In pursuing this direction of modern art , artists wanted to present each painting as one unified, cohesive, monolithic image. In distinction to

2289-470: Is one of a series of six paintings made by de Kooning between 1950 and 1953 that depict a three-quarter-length female figure. He began the first of these paintings, Woman I , in June 1950, repeatedly changing and painting out the image until January or February 1952, when the painting was abandoned unfinished. The art historian Meyer Schapiro saw the painting in de Kooning's studio soon afterwards and encouraged

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2398-582: Is one of the originators of the Color Field movement that emerged in the late 1950s. Frankenthaler also studied with Hans Hofmann . Hofmann's paintings are a symphony of color as seen in The Gate, 1959–1960. He was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, both in his native Germany and later in the US. Hofmann, who came to the United States from Germany in the early 1930s, brought with him

2507-730: Is remarkable considering the challenging times for female artists in the 1960s and the glass ceiling she fought so hard to break. Berk attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland from 1955 to 1959, where she studied with Richard Diebenkorn and Harry Krell. Some of Berk's most noted works are Me or Facade (1960), Picnic (1961), Golden Gate (1961), Three Figures (1962), Racing (1964), Leaning Figure (1967), and Lagoon Valley Road (1968). A retrospective exhibit of her work opened at The Hilbert Museum at Chapman University June 13, 2020, in conjunction with

2616-614: The "all-over" look of Pollock's drip paintings. The movement's name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism , the Bauhaus , and Synthetic Cubism . Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic. In practice,

2725-519: The Bauhaus , and Synthetic Cubism . Abstract Expressionism was seen as rebellious and idiosyncratic, encompassing various artistic styles, and was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York City at the center of the Western art world , a role formerly filled by Paris . Contemporary art critics played a significant role in its development. Critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg promoted

2834-406: The California College of Arts and Crafts , where he officially enrolled in 1952. Some of Neri's important works are Untitled Standing Figure (1956–57) and College Painting No. 1 (1958–59). Abstract Expressionism Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s,

2943-938: The Charles Egan Gallery , the Sidney Janis Gallery , the Betty Parsons Gallery , the Kootz Gallery , the Tibor de Nagy Gallery , the Stable Gallery , the Leo Castelli Gallery as well as others; and several downtown galleries known at the time as the Tenth Street galleries exhibited many emerging younger artists working in the abstract expressionist vein. Action painting was a style widespread from

3052-590: The Ninth Street Show , a famous exhibition curated by Leo Castelli on East Ninth Street in New York City in 1951. Besides the painters and sculptors of the period the New York School of abstract expressionism also generated a number of supportive poets, including Frank O'Hara and photographers such as Aaron Siskind and Fred McDarrah , (whose book The Artist's World in Pictures documented

3161-603: The San Leandro studio in 1959, in his own words, "became the very foundation of [his] whole identity as a painter in [his] country." Some of Nathan's important works are Seated Man with Dog (1957), Man Walking (1958), and Adolescent by the Bed (1959). Henrietta Berk (1919–1990) painted mostly in oil. Her work was noted for its strong colors and shapes. Berk developed her own unique approach to art with daring use of color and unique interpretation of shape and light. Her work

3270-558: The Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City Pollock showed Number 12, 1952 , a large, masterful stain painting that resembles a brightly colored stained landscape (with an overlay of broadly dripped dark paint); the painting was acquired from the exhibition by Nelson Rockefeller for his personal collection. While Arshile Gorky is considered to be one of the founding fathers of abstract expressionism and

3379-419: The 1930s and 1940s. In 1953 Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland were both profoundly influenced by Helen Frankenthaler 's stain paintings after visiting her studio in New York City. Returning to Washington, DC., they began to produce the major works that created the color field movement in the late 1950s. In 1972 then Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler said: Clement Greenberg included

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3488-490: The 1940s call to mind the stain paintings of the 1960s and the 1970s is James Brooks . Brooks regularly used stain as a technique in his paintings from the late 1940s. Brooks began diluting his oil paint in order to have fluid colors with which to pour and drip and stain into the mostly raw canvas that he used. These works often combined calligraphy and abstract shapes. During the final three decades of his career, Sam Francis ' style of large-scale bright abstract expressionism

3597-523: The 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with abstract expressionism (some critics have used the terms action painting and abstract expressionism interchangeably). A comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French tachisme . The term was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 and signaled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg

3706-628: The Bay Area Figurative Movement and not just any contemporary figurative sculpture in America. Neri, only two years younger than Nathan Oliveira, had a similar childhood and like Oliveira had no interest in art as a kid. The only reason Neri took a course in ceramics in school was to lighten his load. His ceramics teacher was Roy Walker who encouraged him to pursue art further by taking advanced classes. Neri soon dropped his engineering classes and in 1951 started taking courses at

3815-748: The Bay Area art scene for over forty years, Petersen has taught generations of artists not only painting but also printmaking and photography . He lives in the Bay Area and continues to paint actively. Petersen's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country, and is represented in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art , New York City; Whitney Museum of American Art , New York City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden , Washington, D.C.; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco ; and Philadelphia Museum of Art . Nathan Oliveira (1928–2010) had

3924-623: The CIA's International Organizations Division (IOD) and ex-executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art said in an interview, "I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War." Against this revisionist tradition, an essay by Michael Kimmelman , chief art critic of The New York Times , called Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics and

4033-452: The City of Richmond granted Salmi an old Health Department building to use for classes and exhibitions. Early classes included outdoor sketching, block printing, flower arrangement, color, woodcarving, and leather tooling. In the 1940s, Salmi and other artists petitioned the City of Richmond to include a permanent art center as part of the new downtown Civic Center development. With funds from

4142-492: The Cold War , asserts that much of that information concerning what was happening on the American art scene during the 1940s and 50s, as well as the revisionists' interpretation of it, is false or decontextualized. Other books on the subject include Art in the Cold War , by Christine Lindey, which also describes the art of the Soviet Union at the same time, and Pollock and After , edited by Francis Frascina, which reprinted

4251-897: The Fifth Annual Oil and Sculpture Exhibition at the Richmond Art Center and won the $ 200 first prize for it. This feat earned him a solo show at the Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles. However, it was a one-person show of paintings and drawings in January 1956 at the California School of Fine Arts gallery that Bischoff believed had the biggest impact on his future. Some of Bischoff's important works are Figure at window with Boat (1964), Playground (1954), and The River (1953). Out of all

4360-406: The First Generation artists, it was Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) who took the biggest risk by turning to figuration in 1955. Diebenkorn was nationally recognized for his abstract work. James Johnson Sweeney 's exhibition "Younger American Painters", resulted in his work was extensively shown by dealers in Los Angeles and Chicago. Along with his national reputation for his abstract work, Diebenkorn

4469-601: The Kimmelman article. Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923–2002), a member of the Montreal-based surrealist-inspired group Les Automatistes , helped introduce a related style of abstract impressionism to the Parisian art world from 1949. Michel Tapié 's groundbreaking book, Un Art Autre (1952), was also enormously influential in this regard. Tapié was also a curator and exhibition organizer who promoted

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4578-748: The Movement. Brown earned a BFA and MFA from the California School of Fine Arts (which became the San Francisco Art Institute). It was there that she met a key mentor, artist Elmer Bischoff , and began gaining recognition for her paintings. In 1960, she was the youngest artist exhibited as part of Young America 1960 (Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Some of Joan Brown's works are Woman and Dog in Room with Chinese Rug (1975) and Noel at

4687-462: The New York avant-garde was still relatively unknown by the late 1940s, most of the artists who have become household names today had their well-established patron critics: Clement Greenberg advocated Jackson Pollock and the color field painters like Clyfford Still , Mark Rothko , Barnett Newman , Adolph Gottlieb and Hans Hofmann ; Harold Rosenberg seemed to prefer the action painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline , as well as

4796-472: The New York School during the 1950s), and filmmakers—notably Robert Frank —as well. Although the abstract expressionist school spread quickly throughout the United States, the epicenters of this style were New York City and the San Francisco Bay area of California . At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on

4905-559: The Second Generation. Many of the "First Generation" artists in this movement were avid fans of Abstract Expressionism , and worked in that manner, until several of them abandoned non-objective painting in favor of working with the figure. Among these First Generation Bay Area Figurative School artists were David Park , Richard Diebenkorn , Rex Ashlock , Elmer Bischoff , Glenn Wessels , Wayne Thiebaud , Raimonds Staprans , and James Weeks . The "Bridge Generation" included

5014-522: The Table with a Large Bowl of Fruit (1963). Manuel Neri was a sculptor. Neri explored abstraction during the early stages of his career, like all the younger Bay Area Figurative artists. It was only after he left school in 1959 that he took up figuration. It allowed him to synthesize his interests in color and form and to play with the ambiguities of content. It is the non-specificity of his figures and their abstract qualities that make his sculptures part of

5123-520: The US formed a bridge between abstract expressionism and Pop art. Minimalism was exemplified by artists such as Donald Judd , Robert Mangold and Agnes Martin . However, many painters, such as Jules Olitski , Joan Mitchell and Antoni Tàpies continued to work in the abstract expressionist style for many years, extending and expanding its visual and philosophical implications, as many abstract artists continue to do today, in styles described as Lyrical Abstraction , Neo-expressionist and others. In

5232-780: The World of Arts and Letters , (published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War ) details how the CIA financed and organized the promotion of American abstract expressionists as part of cultural imperialism via the Congress for Cultural Freedom from 1950 to 1967. Notably Robert Motherwell's series Elegy to the Spanish Republic addressed some of those political issues. Tom Braden , founding chief of

5341-469: The art was political, the message was largely for the insiders. While the movement is closely associated with painting, collagist Anne Ryan and certain sculptors in particular were also integral to abstract expressionism. David Smith , and his wife Dorothy Dehner , Herbert Ferber , Isamu Noguchi , Ibram Lassaw , Theodore Roszak , Phillip Pavia , Mary Callery , Richard Stankiewicz, Louise Bourgeois , and Louise Nevelson in particular were some of

5450-424: The artist to persist. De Kooning's response was to begin three other paintings on the same theme; Woman II , Woman III and Woman IV . During the summer of 1952, spent at East Hampton , de Kooning further explored the theme through drawings and pastels. He may have finished work on Woman I by the end of June, or possibly as late as November 1952, and probably the other three women pictures were concluded at much

5559-462: The artists Henrietta Berk , Nathan Oliveira , Theophilus Brown , Paul Wonner , Roland Petersen , John Hultberg , and Frank Lobdell . Many "Second Generation" artists of this movement studied under the First Generation artists, or were late starters. Among these Second Generation artists were Bruce McGaw , June Felter , Henry Villierme , Joan Brown , Manuel Neri , and Robert Qualters . Many Bay Area schools and institutions were important to

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5668-440: The assumptions that he held about art as well as life. When asked about this in an interview, he said, “Until then art had been an external acquisition; [but now it] became more of a quest.” It was around this time that he was hired as a short-term replacement at the school of fine arts. Just like his abstract work, Bischoff achieved great success with his early figurative works. Bischoff entered his painting Figure and Red Wall in

5777-405: The canvas was "an arena in which to act". While abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock , Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena within which to come to terms with the act of creation, earlier critics sympathetic to their cause, like Clement Greenberg , focused on their works' "objectness". To Greenberg, it was the physicality of

5886-487: The canvas was not a picture but an event. In the 1940s there were not only few galleries ( The Art of This Century , Pierre Matisse Gallery, Julien Levy Gallery and a few others) but also few critics who were willing to follow the work of the New York Vanguard. There were also a few artists with a literary background, among them Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman , who functioned as critics as well. While

5995-583: The capitals of Europe in upheaval, with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris, formerly the center of European culture and capital of the art world, the climate for art was a disaster, and New York replaced Paris as the new center of the art world. Post-war Europe saw the continuation of Surrealism , Cubism , Dada , and the works of Matisse. Also in Europe, Art brut , and Lyrical Abstraction or Tachisme (the European equivalent to abstract expressionism) took hold of

6104-457: The center's dedicated spaces for ceramics, weaving, metalwork, printing, painting and youth arts. Richmond Art Center also partners with non-profit organizations, community groups and West Contra Costa Unified School District to provide intensive art education programs off-site. In 2020, COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders temporarily closed Richmond Art Center's facility to the public and the organization launched online arts instruction. Below

6213-447: The definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art. The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Pollock, de Kooning , Franz Kline , Rothko , Philip Guston , Hans Hofmann , Clyfford Still , Barnett Newman , Ad Reinhardt , Richard Pousette-Dart , Robert Motherwell , Peter Voulkos , and others opened

6322-568: The development and refinement of this art movement, including the San Francisco Art Institute , California College of Arts and Crafts , and the University of California, Berkeley . David Park (1911–1960) was arguably the most important painter of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Park was an Abstract Expressionist painter, based in San Francisco, and one of the first to move towards the figurative style of painting. In

6431-584: The development of such movements as Pop art and Minimalism . Throughout the second half of the 20th century, influence of AbEx can be seen in diverse movements in the U.S. and Europe, including Tachisme and Neo-expressionism , among others. The term " abstract expressionism " is believed to have first been used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm in reference to German Expressionism. Alfred Barr used this term in 1929 to describe works by Wassily Kandinsky . Technically, an important predecessor

6540-444: The early 20th century such as Wassily Kandinsky . Although it is true that spontaneity or the impression of spontaneity characterized many of the abstract expressionists' works, most of these paintings involved careful planning, especially since their large size demanded it. With artists such as Paul Klee , Kandinsky, Emma Kunz , and later on Rothko, Newman, and Agnes Martin , abstract art clearly implied expression of ideas concerning

6649-586: The emotional energy and gestural surface marks of abstract expressionists such as Pollock and de Kooning, the Color Field painters initially appeared to be cool and austere, effacing the individual mark in favor of large, flat areas of color, which these artists considered to be the essential nature of visual abstraction, along with the actual shape of the canvas, which later in the 1960s Frank Stella in particular achieved in unusual ways with combinations of curved and straight edges. However, Color Field painting has proven to be both sensual and deeply expressive albeit in

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6758-408: The epitome of aesthetic value. He supported Pollock's work on formalistic grounds as simply the best painting of its day and the culmination of an art tradition going back via Cubism and Cézanne to Monet , in which painting became ever-'purer' and more concentrated in what was 'essential' to it, the making of marks on a flat surface. Pollock's work has always polarised critics. Rosenberg spoke of

6867-502: The figure to articulate their highly personal and powerful evocations. James Brooks' paintings were particularly poetic and highly prescient in relationship to Lyrical Abstraction that became prominent in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Clyfford Still , Barnett Newman , Adolph Gottlieb and the serenely shimmering blocks of color in Mark Rothko 's work (which is not what would usually be called expressionist and which Rothko denied

6976-536: The first stain pictures, one of the first large field pictures in which the stain technique was used, perhaps the first one. Louis and Noland saw the picture unrolled on the floor of her studio and went back to Washington, DC., and worked together for a while, working at the implications of this kind of painting. In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s, several new directions, like the Hard-edge painting exemplified by John McLaughlin , emerged. Meanwhile, as

7085-529: The floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. The radical Anti-Formalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s including Fluxus , Neo-Dada , Conceptual art , and the feminist art movement can be traced to the innovations of abstract expressionism. Rereadings into abstract art, done by art historians such as Linda Nochlin , Griselda Pollock and Catherine de Zegher critically shows, however, that pioneer women artists who have produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by

7194-731: The late 1940s and 1950s. Richmond Art Center's new facility opened in 1951. Hazel Salmi was the founding director at Richmond Art Center from 1936 until 1960. From 1960 to 1965, Rudy Turk served as the director. Artist Tom Marioni , sometimes under the pseudonym Allan Fish, served as the Curator of Richmond Art Center from 1968 until 1971. Richmond Art Center became a focal point for West Coast Conceptualism during his time. Notable exhibitions Marioni organized included Paul Kos' first solo exhibition Participationkinetics (1969). Under Marioni's curatorship, Terry Fox created one of their seminal works, Levitation (1971). In 1971 Marioni

7303-519: The legacy of Modernism . As a young artist in pre-First World War Paris, Hofmann worked with Robert Delaunay , and he knew firsthand the innovative work of both Picasso and Matisse. Matisse's work had an enormous influence on him, and on his understanding of the expressive language of color and the potentiality of abstraction. Hofmann was one of the first theorists of color field painting, and his theories were influential to artists and to critics, particularly to Clement Greenberg, as well as to others during

7412-457: The mid-1970s it has been argued that the style attracted the attention, in the early 1950s, of the CIA , who saw it as representative of the US as a haven of free thought and free markets, as well as a challenge to both the socialist realist styles prevalent in communist nations and the dominance of the European art markets. The book by Frances Stonor Saunders , The Cultural Cold War—The CIA and

7521-446: The more established artists' work. In 1955, both Brown and Wonner rented studio spaces within the same building which was also the building where Diebenkorn worked. Diebenkorn, Bischoff and Park joined Brown and Wonner to hold life-drawing sessions. They were occasionally joined by James Weeks and Nathan Oliviera. Wonner's figurative works were displayed in an exhibition held at the California School of Fine Arts gallery late in 1956. From

7630-442: The newest generation. Serge Poliakoff , Nicolas de Staël , Georges Mathieu , Vieira da Silva , Jean Dubuffet , Yves Klein , Pierre Soulages and Jean Messagier , among others are considered important figures in post-war European painting. In the United States, a new generation of American artists began to emerge and to dominate the world stage, and they were called Abstract Expressionists . The 1940s in New York City heralded

7739-447: The official accounts of its history, but finally began to achieve long overdue recognition in the wake of the abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Abstract expressionism emerged as a major art movement in New York City during the 1950s and thereafter several leading art galleries began to include the abstract expressionists in exhibitions and as regulars in their rosters. Some of those prominent 'uptown' galleries included:

7848-694: The onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who didn't flee perished. Among the artists and collectors who arrived in New York during the war (some with help from Varian Fry ) were Hans Namuth , Yves Tanguy , Kay Sage , Max Ernst , Jimmy Ernst , Peggy Guggenheim , Leo Castelli , Marcel Duchamp , André Masson , Roberto Matta , André Breton , Marc Chagall , Jacques Lipchitz , Fernand Léger , and Piet Mondrian . A few artists, notably Picasso , Matisse , and Pierre Bonnard remained in France and survived. The post-war period left

7957-535: The other movements of the sixties and seventies and it influenced all those later movements that evolved. Movements which were direct responses to, and rebellions against abstract expressionism began with Hard-edge painting ( Frank Stella , Robert Indiana and others) and Pop artists , notably Andy Warhol , Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein who achieved prominence in the US, accompanied by Richard Hamilton in Britain. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in

8066-517: The overall feeling in Pollock's most famous works – his drip paintings – read as vast fields of built-up linear elements. They note that these works often read as vast complexes of similarly-valued paint skeins and all-over fields of color and drawing, and are related to the mural-sized Monets which are similarly constructed of close-valued brushed and scumbled marks that also read as fields of color and drawing. Pollock's use of all-over composition lend

8175-656: The paintings of Gottlieb, and Pollock in that decade as well. Color Field painting initially referred to a particular type of abstract expressionism, especially the work of Rothko, Still, Newman, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt and several series of paintings by Joan Miró . Greenberg perceived Color Field painting as related to but different from Action painting. The Color Field painters sought to rid their art of superfluous rhetoric. Artists like Motherwell, Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann , Helen Frankenthaler , Sam Francis , Mark Tobey , and especially Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, whose masterpiece Vir heroicus sublimis

8284-419: The paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them as documents of the artists' existential struggle. Rosenberg's critique shifted the emphasis from the object to the struggle itself, with the finished painting being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which was in the act or process of the painting's creation. This spontaneous activity

8393-440: The post-war era who voiced support for abstract expressionism. During the early-to-mid-sixties younger art critics Michael Fried , Rosalind Krauss , and Robert Hughes added considerable insights into the critical dialectic that continues to grow around abstract expressionism. During the period leading up to and during World War II, modernist artists, writers, and poets, as well as important collectors and dealers, fled Europe and

8502-461: The presence of Piet Mondrian , Fernand Léger , Max Ernst, and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery , and Peggy Guggenheim 's gallery The Art of This Century , as well as other factors. Hans Hofmann in particular as teacher, mentor, and artist was both important and influential to the development and success of abstract expressionism in the United States. Among Hofmann's protégés

8611-452: The same time. The Woman series are decidedly figurative paintings . Another important artist is Franz Kline . As with Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists, Kline was labelled an " action painter " because of his seemingly spontaneous and intense style, focusing less, or not at all, on figures or imagery, but on the actual brushstrokes and use of canvas; as demonstrated by his painting Number 2 (1954). Automatic writing

8720-425: The sculptors considered as being important members of the movement. In addition, the artists David Hare , John Chamberlain , James Rosati , Mark di Suvero , and sculptors Richard Lippold , Raoul Hague, George Rickey , Reuben Nakian , and even Tony Smith , Seymour Lipton , Joseph Cornell , and several others were integral parts of the abstract expressionist movement. Many of the sculptors listed participated in

8829-478: The seminal paintings of Arshile Gorky ; Thomas B. Hess, the managing editor of ARTnews , championed Willem de Kooning . The new critics elevated their protégés by casting other artists as "followers" or ignoring those who did not serve their promotional goal. In 1958, Mark Tobey became the first American painter since Whistler (1895) to win top prize at the Venice Biennale . Barnett Newman ,

8938-400: The social protests of these painters. Abstract expressionism arose during the war and began to be showcased during the early forties at galleries in New York such as The Art of This Century Gallery . The post-war McCarthy era was a time of artistic censorship in the United States, but if the subject matter were totally abstract then it would be seen as apolitical, and therefore safe. Or if

9047-456: The spiritual, the unconscious, and the mind. Why this style gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s is a matter of debate. American social realism had been the mainstream in the 1930s. It had been influenced not only by the Great Depression , but also by the Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera . The political climate after World War II did not long tolerate

9156-462: The spring of 1951, Park won a prize for a figurative canvas that he submitted to a competitive exhibition. Park's turn to figurative style baffled some of his colleagues, as at the time, abstract painting was the only way to go for progressive artists. His move prompted a rise in figurative art which became one of the most important postwar developments on the West Coast. Rather than going through

9265-538: The term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist. California abstract expressionist Jay Meuser , who typically painted in the non-objective style, wrote about his painting Mare Nostrum , "It is far better to capture the glorious spirit of the sea than to paint all of its tiny ripples." Pollock's energetic " action paintings ", with their "busy" feel, are different, both technically and aesthetically, from

9374-539: The transformation of painting into an existential drama in Pollock's work, in which "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event". "The big moment came when it was decided to paint 'just to paint'. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value—political, aesthetic, moral." One of the most vocal critics of abstract expressionism at the time was The New York Times art critic John Canaday . Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg along with Greenberg and Rosenberg were important art historians of

9483-575: The triumph of American abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Matisse, Picasso, Surrealism, Miró , Cubism , Fauvism , and early Modernism via eminent educators in the United States, including Hans Hofmann from Germany and John D. Graham from Ukraine. Graham's influence on American art during the early 1940s was particularly visible in the work of Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, and Richard Pousette-Dart among others. Gorky's contributions to American and world art are difficult to overestimate. His work as lyrical abstraction

9592-639: The unknown over the known, the veiled over the clear, the individual over society and the inner over the outer. Richmond Art Center Richmond Art Center is a nonprofit arts organization based in Richmond, California , founded in 1936. In 1936, Richmond-resident Hazel Salmi began teaching classes under the Emergency Education Program (EEP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1938,

9701-541: The very beginning Wonner was committed to conventions of representation, and identified line as a firm descriptive boundary and edge. Some of Brown's works are Male Nude Seated (1960) and Sun and Moon (1960), while Wonner's works include Side of the house, Malibu (1965) and Mountain Near Tucson (1963). In the 1960s, Roland Petersen embarked on his Picnic series, with their saturated colors, thick layered pigment , and geometric compositions. An active figure in

9810-606: The viewer-dependent possibility space through his paintings and his magazine DYN . Paalen considered ideas of quantum mechanics , as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of the totemic vision and the spatial structure of native-Indian painting from British Columbia and prepared the ground for the new spatial vision of the young American abstracts. His long essay Totem Art (1943) had considerable influence on such artists as Martha Graham , Isamu Noguchi , Pollock , Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman . Around 1944 Barnett Newman tried to explain America's newest art movement and included

9919-507: The violent and grotesque Women series of Willem de Kooning 's figurative paintings and the rectangles of color in Rothko's Color Field paintings (which are not what would usually be called expressionist, and which Rothko denied were abstract). Yet all four artists are classified as abstract expressionists. Abstract expressionism has many stylistic similarities to the Russian artists of

10028-423: The way to reinforce his newly established image as an artist and to promote his work. An example is his letter on April 9, 1955, "Letter to Sidney Janis : — it is true that Rothko talks the fighter. He fights, however, to submit to the philistine world. My struggle against bourgeois society has involved the total rejection of it." Strangely, the person thought to have had most to do with the promotion of this style

10137-664: The whole canvas is treated with equal importance (as opposed to the center being of more interest than the edges). The canvas as the arena became a credo of Action painting, while the integrity of the picture plane became a credo of the Color field painters. Younger artists began exhibiting their abstract expressionist related paintings during the 1950s as well including Alfred Leslie , Sam Francis , Joan Mitchell , Helen Frankenthaler , Cy Twombly , Milton Resnick , Michael Goldberg , Norman Bluhm , Grace Hartigan , Friedel Dzubas , and Robert Goodnough among others. Although Pollock

10246-507: The work of artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, in particular Jackson Pollock, through their writings. Rosenberg's concept of the canvas as an "arena in which to act" was pivotal in defining the approach of action painters . The cultural reign of Abstract Expressionism in the United States had diminished by the early 1960s, while the subsequent rejection of the Abstract Expressionist emphasis on individualism led to

10355-465: The work of both Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in a show that he did at the Kootz Gallery in the early 1950s. Clem was the first to see their potential. He invited them up to New York in 1953, I think it was, to Helen's studio to see a painting that she had just done called Mountains and Sea, a very, very beautiful painting, which was in a sense, out of Pollock and out of Gorky. It also was one of

10464-410: The works of Pollock and Hans Hofmann in Europe. By the 1960s, the movement's initial effect had been assimilated, yet its methods and proponents remained highly influential in art, affecting profoundly the work of many artists who followed. Abstract expressionism preceded Tachisme , Color Field painting , Lyrical Abstraction , Fluxus , Pop Art , Minimalism , Postminimalism , Neo-expressionism , and

10573-1073: The works that marked the final years of his life and the exhibition was held to celebrate his life as well as his return to figure painting in 1950, which was instrumental in starting the movement. Some of the earlier works in the exhibition suggest that Park responded to the art of Max Beckmann and his influence is particularly visible in The Band (1955). Over the years, Park's palette turned towards an ebullient chromaticism, but his carving approach to paint handling could be seen in his work throughout until finally he decided to give up oils in 1959. Some of David Park's important works are Mother in Law (1954–55), Violin and Cello (1939), Torso (1959), and Figure in Chair (1960). Elmer Bischoff (1916–1991), in his late thirties and forties, had an extensive phase of what he called " Picassoesque mouthings". After returning from war in 1945, he felt impelled to challenge all

10682-528: The years after World War II, a group of New York artists started one of the first true schools of artists in America, bringing about a new era in American artwork: abstract expressionism. This led to the American art boom that brought about styles such as Pop Art . This also helped to make New York into a cultural and artistic hub. Abstract Expressionists value the organism over the static whole, becoming over being, expression over perfection, vitality over finish, fluctuation over repose, feeling over formulation,

10791-414: Was Clement Greenberg , who became an enormously influential voice for American painting, and among his students was Lee Krasner , who introduced her teacher, Hofmann, to her husband, Jackson Pollock. During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all Contemporary art that followed him. To some extent, Pollock realized that the journey toward making

10900-543: Was a "new language. He "lit the way for two generations of American artists". The painterly spontaneity of mature works such as The Liver is the Cock's Comb , The Betrothal II , and One Year the Milkweed immediately prefigured Abstract expressionism, and leaders in the New York School have acknowledged Gorky's considerable influence. The early work of Hyman Bloom was also influential. American artists also benefited from

11009-482: Was a New York Trotskyist: Clement Greenberg. As long-time art critic for the Partisan Review and The Nation , he became an early and literate proponent of abstract expressionism. The well-heeled artist Robert Motherwell joined Greenberg in promoting a style that fit the political climate and the intellectual rebelliousness of the era. Greenberg proclaimed abstract expressionism and Pollock in particular as

11118-482: Was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—the placing of unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artist materials and industrial materials; linear skeins of paint dripped and thrown; drawing, staining, brushing; imagery and non-imagery—essentially took art-making beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed

11227-471: Was abstract), are classified as abstract expressionists, albeit from what Clement Greenberg termed the Color field direction of abstract expressionism. Both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell can be comfortably described as practitioners of Action painting and Color field painting. In the 1940s Richard Pousette-Dart 's tightly constructed imagery often depended upon themes of mythology and mysticism; as did

11336-459: Was also a beloved abstractionist among the locals in Sausalito. After that he focused on figurative art but it was not until 1956 that he attempted complex figurative paintings. His earliest figurative works seemed to loosely be based on self-portraits. He returned to abstraction in the mid-1960s. Theophilus Brown (1919–2012) and Paul John Wonner (1920–2008) both felt strongly influenced by

11445-750: Was an important vehicle for action painters such as Kline (in his black and white paintings), Pollock, Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly , who used gesture, surface, and line to create calligraphic, linear symbols and skeins that resemble language, and resonate as powerful manifestations from the Collective unconscious . Robert Motherwell in his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series painted powerful black and white paintings using gesture, surface and symbol evoking powerful emotional charges. Meanwhile, other action painters, notably de Kooning, Gorky, Norman Bluhm , Joan Mitchell , and James Brooks , used imagery via either abstract landscape or as expressionistic visions of

11554-424: Was closely associated with Color field painting. His paintings straddled both camps within the abstract expressionist rubric, Action painting and Color Field painting. Having seen Pollock's 1951 paintings of thinned black oil paint stained into raw canvas, Frankenthaler began to produce stain paintings in varied oil colors on raw canvas in 1952. Her most famous painting from that period is Mountains and Sea . She

11663-475: Was fired by the Head of Parks following a controversial performance by one of Judy Chicago's students that was part of the exhibition California Girls (1971). For many years Richmond Art Center operated as a division of the City of Richmond's Parks and Recreation Department. In 1950 Richmond Art Center became an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Richmond Art Center's facility is a u-shaped building wrapping around

11772-478: Was not limited to painting but included influential collagists and sculptors, such as David Smith , Louise Nevelson , and others. Abstract Expressionism was notably influenced by the spontaneous and subconscious creation methods of Surrealist artists like André Masson and Max Ernst . Artists associated with the movement combined the emotional intensity of German Expressionism with the radical visual vocabularies of European avant-garde schools like Futurism ,

11881-446: Was the "action" of the painter, through arm and wrist movement, painterly gestures, brushstrokes, thrown paint, splashed, stained, scumbled and dripped. The painter would sometimes let the paint drip onto the canvas, while rhythmically dancing, or even standing in the canvas, sometimes letting the paint fall according to the subconscious mind, thus letting the unconscious part of the psyche assert and express itself. All this, however,

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