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117-549: Betty Parsons (born Betty Bierne Pierson , January 31, 1900 – July 23, 1982) was an American artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism . She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde. Betty Bierne Pierson was born on January 31, 1900, the second of three daughters. She came from a wealthy New York family that divided its time between New York City, Newport , Palm Beach , and Paris. At

234-601: 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

351-740: A British art student, Adge Baker, with whom she had a romantic relationship. The two separated in 1932, but remained lifelong friends. In 1933, after losing her alimony support in the Great Depression , Parsons returned to America. She first traveled to Santa Barbara, California, where she taught sculpture classes for a short time. In 1936, she moved back to New York and had her first solo exhibition in New York at Midtown Gallery. Her watercolor paintings were well-received, and referred to in one review as "delightful" and "interestingly conceived". She would have nine more one-woman shows at Midtown over

468-539: A bold, subjective abstraction when she began to make constructions from bits of wood and other materials that washed up on the beach near her home; most often her constructions reflected the area around her North Fork home, but sometimes the pieces reflected her travels to the Caribbean and abroad. During her lifetime, Parsons' received important solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1968),

585-502: A concrete floor whose proportions fitted their ordered works. Helen Frankenthaler , the painter, who met Parsons in 1950, said, "Betty and her gallery helped construct the center of the art world. She was one of the last of her breed." Many of the Abstract Expressionist artists she had launched left her gallery for more commercial galleries, such as Sam Kootz and Sidney Janis . Art critic B. H. Friedman noted, "She

702-480: A contemporary gallery in the Wakefield Bookshop at 64 East 55th Street. This was her first job managing a gallery on her own; she had full curatorial control regarding artists and exhibitions. She was soon representing many contemporary artists, including Saul Steinberg , Adolph Gottlieb , Alfonso Ossorio , Hedda Sterne , Theodoros Stamos , and Joseph Cornell . In September 1944, after four years at

819-534: 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

936-547: 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

1053-449: 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

1170-564: 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

1287-474: 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

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1404-673: A season, from September to May, with each show lasting only two to three weeks. At a time when the market for avant-garde American art was minuscule, Parsons was the only dealer willing to represent artists like Jackson Pollock after Peggy Guggenheim closed her Art of This Century gallery and returned to Europe in 1947. Parsons showed work by William Congdon , Clyfford Still , Theodoros Stamos , Ellsworth Kelly , Mark Rothko , Hedda Sterne , Forrest Bess , Michael Loew , Lyman Kipp , Judith Godwin , and Sari Dienes, among others. In 1950, she gave Barnett Newman , whom she had met in 1943, his first solo show; Rothko and Tony Smith assisted with

1521-418: A variety of formations. Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman , who organized their colors in a relatively simple way (Rothko in the form of nebulous rectangles, Newman in thin lines on vast fields of color), Still's arrangements are less regular. In fact, he was one of the few painters who combined practices of Color Field paintings with that of Gestural, Action Paintings . His jagged flashes of color give

1638-406: 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

1755-431: 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 the viewer-dependent possibility space through his paintings and his magazine DYN . Paalen considered ideas of quantum mechanics , as well as idiosyncratic interpretations of

1872-454: 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 is Surrealism , with its emphasis on spontaneous, automatic , or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock 's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor

1989-458: 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

2106-515: 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

2223-591: 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

2340-470: 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

2457-582: 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

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2574-614: 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,

2691-704: The Anita Shapolsky Gallery , New York; Spanierman Gallery, New York; and Virginia Miller Galleries in Coral Gables, Florida. Parsons is now represented by Alexander Gray Associates, New York, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Parsons' work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art , New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum , Washington, DC; and the Museum of Modern Art , New York; Her personal papers and those from

2808-736: The Art Students League . He attended Spokane University from 1926 to 1927 and returned in 1931 with a fellowship, graduating in 1933. That fall, he became a teaching fellow, then faculty member at Washington State College (now Washington State University ), where he obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1935 and taught until 1941. He spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation (now Yaddo ) in Saratoga Springs , New York. In 1937, along with Washington State colleague Worth Griffin, Still co-founded

2925-535: The Betty Parsons gallery. Still returned to San Francisco, where he became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute ), teaching there from 1946 to 1950. In 1950, he moved to New York City, where he lived most of the decade, the height of Abstract Expressionism, but also a time when he became increasingly critical of the art world. In

3042-938: 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

3159-750: The Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1963 and at the Marlborough-Gerson gallery, New York, in 1969 to 1970. In 1975, a permanent installation of a group of his works opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art . In 1979, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art organized the largest survey of Still's art to date and the largest presentation afforded by this institution to

3276-573: The Nespelem Art Colony that produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting Colville Indian Reservation Native American life over the course of four summers. In 1941 Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where he worked in various war industries while pursuing painting. He had his first solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ) in 1943. He taught at

3393-590: 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

3510-592: The San Francisco Museum of Art . In 1947, Jermayne MacAgy, assistant director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor , gave him a solo show there. The artist then declined all public exhibitions from 1952 to 1959. A first comprehensive Still retrospective took place at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery , Buffalo, New York, in 1959. Later solo exhibitions of Still's paintings were presented by

3627-558: 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

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3744-526: The Whitechapel Gallery in London. Abstract Expressionism The movement 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

3861-419: 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

3978-490: 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

4095-523: 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

4212-640: The Betty Parsons Gallery are held at the Archives of American Art . Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson . In 2016 her biography was included in the exhibition catalogue Women of Abstract Expressionism organized by the Denver Art Museum . In 2023 her work was included in the exhibition Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-1970 at

4329-623: 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

4446-492: 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

4563-601: 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

4680-696: The Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey (1974) and Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London (1980). Following her death, the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center of East Hampton showed her paintings on paper in 1992; that same year, the Fine Arts Gallery of the Southampton Campus of Long Island University exhibited painted wood "constructions". Her work has also been exhibited at a number of other galleries, including

4797-462: 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

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4914-472: 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

5031-587: The Richmond Professional Institute (RPI), now Virginia Commonwealth University , from 1943 to 1945, then went to New York City. Mark Rothko, whom Still had met in California in 1943, introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim , who gave him a solo exhibition at her gallery, The Art of This Century Gallery , in early 1946. The following year Guggenheim closed her gallery and Still, along with Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists, joined

5148-520: 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

5265-526: The Wakefield Gallery, Parsons was invited to start and manage a contemporary art division in the gallery of art dealer Mortimer Brandt. When Brandt moved to England after the war, Parsons subleased the space from him and opened her own gallery at the urging of her artists. The Betty Parsons Gallery opened in 1946 at 15 East 57th Street in Manhattan. The gallery regularly exhibited twelve shows

5382-780: 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

5499-739: The age of ten, Parsons was enrolled in Miss Chapin's school for girls in New York. She remained at the Chapin School for five years but was a mediocre student who was easily bored. In 1913, Parsons visited the Armory show , the International Exhibition of Modern Art. She was delighted and inspired by what she saw and described this pivotal moment years later: "It was exciting, full of color and life. I felt like those paintings. I couldn't explain it, but I decided then that this

5616-516: 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 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 "

5733-469: 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

5850-424: 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

5967-623: The artworks contained within the Clyfford Still Estate (roughly 825 paintings on canvas and 1575 works on paper – drawings and limited-edition fine-art prints). The Clyfford Still Museum , an independent nonprofit organization, opened under the directorship of Dean Sobel in November 2011. The museum also houses the complete Still archives of sketchbooks, journals, notebooks, the artist's library, and other archival materials, inherited upon Patricia Still's death in 2005. The building

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6084-405: 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

6201-487: 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

6318-583: 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

6435-467: 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 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

6552-447: 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

6669-625: The early 1950s, Still severed ties with commercial galleries. In 1961 he moved to a 22-acre farm near Westminster , Maryland , removing himself further from the art world. Still used a barn on the property as a studio during the warm weather months. In 1966, Still and his second wife purchased a 4,300-square-foot house at 312 Church Street in New Windsor, Maryland , about eight miles from their farm, where he lived until his death. Still married Lillian August Battan circa 1930. They had two daughters, born in 1939 and 1942. The couple separated in

6786-444: 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

6903-586: 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

7020-408: 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

7137-616: The exhibit was planned to show at the Portland Art Museum and then embark on a two-year international tour. In March 2011, a Maryland court with jurisdiction over Patricia Still's estate ruled that four of Still's works could be sold before they officially became part of the museum's collection. In November 2011, Sotheby's in New York sold the four works; PH-351 (1940) for US$ 1.2 million, 1947-Y-No. 2 (1947) for US$ 31.4 million, 1949-A-No. 1 (1949) for US$ 61.7 million and PH-1033 (1976) for US$ 19.6 million. The proceeds from

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7254-537: The explicit requirement that none of these works of art will be sold, given, or exchanged but are to be retained in the place described above exclusively assigned to them in perpetuity for exhibition and study." After Still's death in 1980, the Still collection of approximately 2,400 works was sealed off completely from public and scholarly access for more than twenty years. In August 2004, the City of Denver , Colorado announced it had been chosen by Patricia Still to receive

7371-502: 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

7488-536: 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

7605-529: 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

7722-498: The format that he would intensify and refine throughout the rest of his career – a large-scale color field applied with palette knives. Among Still's well known paintings is 1957-D No. 1, 1957 (right), which is mainly black and yellow with patches of white and a small amount of red. These four colors, and variations on them (purples, dark blues) are predominant in his work, although there is a tendency for his paintings to use darker shades. In 1943, Still's first solo show took place at

7839-600: The grounds of incompatibility, and as a result, her family disinherited her. Parsons remained in Paris and enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière , where she studied under the sculptors Émile-Antoine Bourdelle (formerly an assistant to Auguste Rodin ) and Ossip Zadkine . In the summers, she studied painting with Arthur Lindsey on the coast of Brittany. She bought a small house in Montparnasse where she lived with

7956-575: The groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko , who continued to paint in figurative- surrealist styles well into the 1940s. Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada . In 1925 he visited New York, briefly studying at

8073-636: The impression that one layer of color has been "torn" off the painting, revealing the colors underneath. Another point of departure with Newman and Rothko is the way the paint is laid on the canvas; while Rothko and Newman used fairly flat colors and relatively thin paint, Still uses a thick impasto , causing subtle variety and shades that shimmer across the painting surfaces. His large mature works recall natural forms and natural phenomena at their most intense and mysterious; ancient stalagmites, caverns, foliage, seen both in darkness and in light lend poetic richness and depth to his work. By 1947, he had begun working in

8190-506: The installation. In 1951, on Clifford Still's recommendation, she boldly gave Robert Rauschenberg his first solo show, and although failing to sell a single work, it was Rauschenberg's gift of one of them to John Cage who had visited her gallery, that lead to many of their major collaborative impacts on the contemporary arts scene. Later in the 1950s, Smith and Newman helped to remodel Parsons' gallery, creating an almost cube-shaped main space framed by white walls with subtly curved corners and

8307-489: The late 1940s and divorced in 1954. In 1957, Still married Patricia Alice Garske, who had been one of his students at Washington State and was sixteen years his junior. Having developed his signature style in San Francisco between 1946 and 1950 while teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, Still is considered one of the foremost Color Field painters – his non-figurative paintings are non-objective, and largely concerned with juxtaposing different colors and surfaces in

8424-519: 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

8541-457: 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

8658-414: The movement combined the emotional intensity of German Expressionism with the radical visual vocabularies of European avant-garde schools like Futurism , 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

8775-442: 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

8892-534: The next twenty years. Following her one-woman show at the Midtown Galleries, owner Alan Bruskin offered Parsons her first gallery job: selling art on commission. That position was short-lived and, in the fall of 1937, Parsons began working at the gallery of Mary Quinn Sullivan , a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1940, Parsons left Sullivan's gallery and took a position managing

9009-447: 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:

9126-694: 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

9243-535: 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

9360-517: 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

9477-656: 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

9594-419: 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

9711-440: 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

9828-461: 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

9945-608: The sales, US$ 114 million, went to the Clyfford Still Museum "to support its endowment and collection-related expenses." In the decade prior to the sale, only 11 of Still's works came up at auction. The Clyfford Still Museum opened on November 18, 2011. In December 2011, a visitor to the museum was accused of causing $ 10,000 worth of damage to Still's 1957-J no.2 oil painting. In 2013, the Clyfford Still Museum Research Center

10062-452: 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

10179-425: 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

10296-478: 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 ,

10413-400: 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

10530-456: 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

10647-465: The spot. Parsons nurtured the artists who assisted her and they were encouraged to show at her gallery. Richard Tuttle had his first show a year after he began assisting Betty Parsons. Thomas Nozkowski worked for her after graduating from Cooper Union . Parsons showed his sculptures. In 1980, Ib Benoh began working for Betty Parsons as her assistant and that same year she included him in a group show, adding Benoh to her list of gallery artists. Parsons

10764-538: 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

10881-482: 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

10998-539: 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

11115-575: 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

11232-452: The unknown over the known, the veiled over the clear, the individual over society and the inner over the outer. Clyfford Still Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter , and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists , who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II . Still has been credited with laying

11349-507: 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

11466-423: 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

11583-664: 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

11700-767: The work of a living artist. Still received the Award of Merit for Painting in 1972 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters , of which he became a member in 1978, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 1975. Still wrote a will in 1978 that left a portion of his work, along with his archives, to his wife Patricia and stated: "I give and bequeath all the remaining works of art executed by me in my collection to an American city that will agree to build or assign and maintain permanent quarters exclusively for these works of art and assure their physical survival with

11817-465: 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

11934-410: 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

12051-528: 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,

12168-414: 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

12285-534: Was Mark Rothko's last assistant) among others. She ran the gallery until her death in 1982, after which it was taken over by her former gallery assistant Jack Tilton (1951–2017) who then transformed it into his own establishment. Her friend of many years, painter Lee Hall became a partner at Betty Parsons Gallery starting in 1983 and Hall later wrote Parsons biography. Parsons was generous in promoting artists. She never refused walk-in artists with their artwork. Always encouraging and caring, she often gave critiques on

12402-543: 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

12519-482: 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

12636-482: 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

12753-471: 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

12870-461: Was also a painter, but her great love was sculpture, which she couldn't afford. In 1959, Tony Smith designed her waterfront house-studio on the North Fork of the east end of Long Island, New York , perched on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound, where Parsons worked on her art in her time off from the gallery. Her painting style changed in 1947, turning from small landscapes and portraits into

12987-750: 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

13104-424: 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

13221-414: Was designed by Allied Works Architecture, led by Brad Cloepfil . The museum is recognized as a successful implementation of contemporary architecture and an icon for the city of Denver. From January 24 to April 17, 2016, the Denver Art Museum hosted a temporary exhibit called "Case Work", which showcased the design process used for this museum and other major works by Allied and Cloepfil. After Denver,

13338-404: Was launched. Its aim is to explore the period of art and history in which the abstract painter worked. Plans include a fellowship program, cross-disciplinary scholarly publications, and research symposia. "I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit." "It's intolerable to be stopped by

13455-426: Was resentful. She had struggled so long to get them established, and other dealers capitalized on her efforts." She later moved on to a younger generation of American artists, including Mino Argento , José Bernal , Ib Benoh , Jasper Johns , Agnes Martin , Richard Pousette-Dart , Jeanne Reynal, Walter Tandy Murch , Leon Polk Smith , Richard Tuttle , Robert Yasuda , Jack Youngerman , and Oliver Steindecker (who

13572-446: 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,

13689-420: Was the world I wanted... art." Although her parents disapproved, she soon began studying art in the studio of Gutzon Borglum , whom she described as a poor teacher. In 1919, Parsons married Schuyler Livingston Parsons, an affluent, New York City socialite ten years her senior. Her family hoped that Parsons would settle down into a conventional lifestyle, but the couple divorced in Paris, only three years later on

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