Art Lovers discussion

In August I’m just going to continue with the little history of Non-objective, or Abstract art, because in the forties and fifties there was a real explosion of artworks in these styles.
For these years it’s going to be even harder to limit ourselves to one artist or one artwork per year.
Prepare yourself for 31 more years of interesting art!

So no guessing game ;-) we’ll leave that for next month!

Enjoy!

For 1939 I have a very nice Kandisky 29 years after the first painting of him I posted on July 3d for 1910. Two German artists and an Austrian who also had the Mexican nationality.


Wassily Kandinsky
(1866 - 1944)

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist.
Kandinsky is generally credited as the pioneer of abstract art. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—Kandinsky began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily...




Complex Simple
1939
Oil on canvas
100.0 × 81.0 cm
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou


Otto Freundlich
(1878 – 1943)

Otto Freundlich was a German painter and sculptor of Jewish origin. A part of the first generation of abstract painters in Western art, Freundlich was a great admirer of cubism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Fr...



Grün-Rot
1939
Oil on canvas
65x54,5
Museum Ludwig, Köln

Willi Baumeister
(1889 – 1955)

Willi Baumeisterwas a German painter, scenic designer, art professor, and typographer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi_B...


Stone garden
1939


Wolfgang Paalen
(1905 – 1959)

Wolfgang Robert Paalen was a German-Austrian-Mexican painter, sculptor and art philosopher. A member of the Abstraction-Création group from 1934–35, he joined the influential Surrealist movement in 1935 and was one of its prominent exponents until 1942. Whilst in exile in Mexico, he founded his own counter-surrealist art-magazine DYN, in which he summarized his critical attitude towards radical subjectivism and Freudo-Marxism in Surrealism with his philosophy of contingency. He rejoined the group between 1951 and 1954, during his sojourn in Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgan...




Combat des Princes Saturniens III
1939
Oil on canvas
100 x 73 cm

For 1940 I have three artists,; two Americans and one from Hungary:


Vajda Lajos
(1908- 1941i)

Lajos Vajda was a Hungarian painter. He was a student of István Csók at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1927-30. He studied together with Dezsõ Korniss at Fernand Léger in Paris in 1930-34 where he was introduced to cubism and surrealism.
He lived and worked in Szentendre, Hungary. Following the method of composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály he collected folk art motifs in Szentendre and Szigetmonostor for his artworks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lajos_V...



Sliver Gnome
1940
Pastel on paper
74 x 92 cm
Hungarian national Gallery


Lee Krasner
(1908 – 1984)

Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage, who was married to Jackson Pollock. This somewhat overshadowed her contribution at the time, though there was much cross-pollination between their two styles. Krasner’s training, influenced by George Bridgman and Hans Hofmann, was the more formalized, especially in the depiction of human anatomy, and this enriched Pollock’s more intuitive and unstructured output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kra...



Seated Nude
1940
Charcoal on paper
(63.5 x 48.0 cm)

MoMA




Richard Pousette-Dart
(1916 – 1992)

Richard Warren Pousette-Dart was an American artist most recognized as a founder of the New York School of painting. His artistic output also includes drawing, sculpture, and fine-art photography.



Desert
1940
Oil on Canvas
109 x 182.8 cm
MoMA

For 1941 a French painter and reprise from 1924:

Auguste Herbin
(1882 – 1960)

Auguste Herbin was a French painter of modern art. He is best known for his Cubist and abstract paintings consisting of colorful geometric figures. He co-founded the groups Abstraction-Création and Salon des Réalités Nouvelles which promoted non-figurative abstract art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste...



Synchromy in Dark Blue
1941
Oil on canvas
(70.8 x 91.5 cm)
MoMA


Joan Miró

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his native city of Barcelona in 1975, and another, the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, was established in his adoptive city of Palma de Mallorca in 1981.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Miró



Dones rodejades pel vol d'un ocell (Woman Encircled by the Flight of a Bird)
1941
Oil on canvas

Two days ago, for 1940 we had Lee Krasner, now it’s her husbands turn:
And another female American artist

Jackson Pollock
(1912 – 1956)

Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement.
He was widely noticed for his technique of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface (‘drip technique’), enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was also called ‘action painting’, since he used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy and fluency of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US$200 million in a private purchase.


Male and female
1942
Oil on Canvas
186 x 124 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Jackson Pollock lived a short and troubled life that ended at the age of 44 in an alcohol related automobile accident. In 1942 he created Male and Female. During this period, Mr. Pollock was under intense psychoanalysis. It is believed by many that the therapists treating him encouraged his art-making as a means of treatment.
Male and Female appears to have been a part of this exercise. Pollock was heavily influenced by fellow painters, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. It is obvious that the distortion of the human form present in Male and Female stems from the similar Surrealist and Cubism art forms of the aforementioned artists. The work is currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Perle Fine
(1905–1988)
Perle Fine (Poule Feine) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter. Fine was most known by her combination of fluid and brushy rendering of the materials and her use of biomorphic forms encased and intertwined with irregular geometric shapes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perle_Fine


Ideomorphic Composition #1
1942

I like Perle Fine's work and Auguste Herbin's use if color..

Only one name for 1943: a French artist
Jean Fautrier
(1898-1964)

Jean Fautrier was a French painter, illustrator, printmaker, and sculptor. He was one of the most important practitioners of Tachisme.
He first exhibited his paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1922 and at the Fabre Gallery in 1923. It was at the Galerie Fabre that he met art dealer Jeanne Castel, his first collector and friend. In 1923 he began producing etchings and engravings. His first solo exhibition was at the Galerie Visconti in Paris, in 1924.
In 1927, he painted a series of pictures (still lifes, nudes, landscapes) in which black dominates. In 1928 he met André Malraux through Castel. Malraux asked Fautrier to illustrate a text of his choice, but copyright issues kept him from using his first choice, Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘’Les Illuminations’’, and he settled instead with Dante’s Inferno. He produced 34 lithographs, but the publication, proposed by Gallimard, was deemed impossible and the project was abandoned in 1930. Until 1933 he divided his efforts between sculpture and painting. Short on funds, he spent the years 1934–1936 living in the resort of Tignes, where he made his living as a ski instructor and started a jazz club.
Fautrier's career was upended in 1943 by his arrest for participating in the Resistance movement. Once released, he took refuge in a psychiatric hospital in the suburbs of Paris, where his friend, writer Jean Paulhan, arranged for him to have a studio space. There he created his Hostages (Otages) series, inspired by the tormenting experience of hearing Nazi troops abuse and execute prisoners in the forest surrounding the asylum. Comprising anonymous, featureless heads and abstracted floating torsos, Fautrier's hostages were described by the writer and politician André Malraux as "the most beautiful monument to the dead of the Second World War."



Otage (Hostage)
1943

For 1944 I have three names, all American artists:


Mark Rothko
(1903 - 1970)

Mark Rothko was an American painter of Russian Jewish descent. Although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any art movement, he is generally identified as an abstract expressionist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ro...



Untitled
1944
Watercolour and ink on paper
Unconfirmed: 53 x 35 cm
Tate

Untitled c.1944 is one of a small group of watercolours that Rothko made during a vital period in his work in the mid-1940s. On a base of grey and grey-blue washes, he used black ink to mark out suggestive forms that are residually figurative. Rothko’s watercolour technique has been described by art historian Bonnie Clearwater, and her general observations closely fit this work:

“Using generous soft-bristled brushes he applied the watercolour [and] gouache … Before the paint dried, he would return with black ink in order to define forms or to gesture automatic lines. When introduced into areas still wet with paint, the ink would bleed, resulting in the black bursts that spot some of these works … As a final step he would frequently scratch and gouge the paper with a razor blade, the back of a brush or some other sharp implement, exposing the white paper beneath the pigment.”
(Clearwater 1984, p.30.)

As well as the preliminary washes and linear elements, Untitled also shows the results of the bleeding and scratching described by Clearwater. The painting is further animated by the addition of an area of blue in the lower half, with curls and smudges of red scattered across the composition.
In the mid-1940s Rothko remained on the cusp of abstraction, to which he would devote himself from the end of that decade onwards, for the rest of his career. Early in 1945, however, he specified a desire to retain what he described as ‘the anecdote’, explaining: ‘I love both the object and the dream far too much to have them effervesced into the insubstantiality of memory and hallucination’



Louis Schanker
(1903–1981)

Louis Schanker was an American abstract artist.
He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish environment in the Bronx, New York. His parents, Sam, a tailor, and Fannie Schanker, were of Romanian descent. He had five siblings. At an early age he had an interest in both art and music He took art courses at Cooper Union, The Educational Alliance and The Art Students League with Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Milton Avery amongst others. During this time he shared a coldwater studio with the Soyer brothers, Chaim Gross and Adolph Gottlieb. In 1920 he traveled across the country. He lived the hobo life, joined the Sparks and then Barnum and Bailey circuses, later working as a thresher in the wheat fields of the Great Plains. There are elements in his works such as the circus murals done for the Neponsit Beach Children's Hospital and the print "Man Cutting Wheat" that reflect these experiences. Around 1924 he returned to New York, leased another studio and resumed his friendships and artwork. Schanker spent 1931 and 1932 attending classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, painting and traveling in Paris, Italy and Spain and returned as something of a Cubist. He had his first show in 1933 at the Contemporary Arts Gallery and first exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 1936.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_S...


Abstract Composition
1944
Mixed-media on cream wove paper
36 x 54 cm


Hans Hofmann
(1880 – 1966)

Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter, renowned as an artist and teacher in a career that spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of the currents of Symbolism, Neoimpressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 (along with Jackson Pollock’s in late 1943) as a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded the development of abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's recognition grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963) that traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Ho...
http://www.hanshofmann.org/


The Wind
1944 (other sources give 1942, so date not certain)
111.4 x 70.5 cm
University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
Gift of the artist (1965.16)

1945, and another two American artists, although the first one was born in Italy and the second is a reprise from July 12th, the post for 1919.

Enrico Donati
(1909 – 2008)

Enrico Donati was an Italian-American Surrealist painter and sculptor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_...



Arcimboldo
1945
Oil on canvas
Sold by Sotheby's London
2018-02-28
$123,948



Georgia OKeeffe
(1887 - 1986)

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist. She was best known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been recognized as the "Mother of American modernism".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia...



Goat’s horn with red
1945
Pastel on paperboard, mounted on paperboard
(70.7 × 80.4 cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972

For 1946 I have three names: one French artist and two Dutchmen, one who went to America and one who stayed home:

Alfred Manessier
(1911 - 1993)

Alfred Manessier was a non-figurative French painter, stained glass artist, and tapestry designer, part of the new Paris School and the Salon de Mai.



Soirée d'octobre (Octobre evening)
Oil on canvas
100 x 81,5 cm


Karel Appel
(1921 – 2006)


Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_A...




Little Moon Men
1946
Oil on canvas


Willem de Kooning
(1904 - 1997)

Willem de Kooning was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter Elaine Fried.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_...




Judgment Day
1946
Oil and charcoal on paper
56 x 72cm
The Met

4 names for 1947, from Poland to Portugal and from France to America:


Jean Bazaine
(1904 – 2001)

Jean René Bazaine was a French painter, designer of stained glass windows, and writer. He was the great great grandson of the English Court portraitist Sir George Hayter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Re...



The Big Tree in the Country - Trees and Plains
1947
Oil on canvas



Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos
(1923 – 2006)

Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos or Mário Cesarinywas a Portuguese surrealist poet. He published several major works during a career spanning 50 years. Cesariny was also a painter, but his work became more centered on poetry in the 1950s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1...




Figuras de sopro
1947
Platex
Indian ink, Oil and Industrial varnish




Steve Wheeler
(1912-1992)
No Wiki page…
Steve Wheeler was an Artist, author, and visionary born Stephen Brosnatch in Slovakia and emigrated with his family to New Salem, Pennsylvania, when he was a young boy. Leaving school at sixteen to work in the coalmines with his father, Wheeler continued to read and study voraciously. His readings on art were a particular passion, and he soon determined to leave the mines to become an artist. He left Pennsylvania for Chicago to study with his uncle, a commercial illustrator, and probably also took art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1931 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he may have continued his training at the Carnegie Institute. In 1932 Wheeler began studies in New York at the Art Students League and with Hans Hofmann, under whom he developed his own theories of space in painting. Hofmann played an integral role in shaping Wheeler's ideas about art, emphasizing the importance of Cubism, abstracting from nature, two-dimensionality and the push-pull of positive and negative space. Hofmann's ideas were a revelation for Wheeler, but ultimately he became dissatisfied with simply reworking the ideas of older artists. He wanted to expand on the Cubists' concept of space and needed a new pictorial language with which to do so. 




Print Number One, Two Smiles in the book Hello Steve
1947
Screenprint
26 x 33 cm (sheet)

In 1947 Wheeler produced Hello Steve, a limited edition book of 13 silkscreen prints and essays that expressed his highly personal artistic theories. The subjects of the prints included several of these archetypes that recur in his paintings, drawings, and writings.
The book includied prose by John Storck and an essay by Adam Gates on wove paper.




Tamara de Lempicka
(1898 – 1980)
Tamara Łempicka was a Polish painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_...



Surrealist Hand
1947
Oil on canvas

3 artists for 1949, a Frenchmen we already saw a couple of days ago, one from Spain, sorry Catalonia and another American:

Alfred Manessier
(1911 - 1993)

Alfred Manessier was a non-figurative French painter, stained glass artist, and tapestry designer, part of the new Paris School and the Salon de Mai.



David
1948
Oil on canvas
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam



Modest Cuixart
(1925 - 2007)

Modest Cuixart i Tàpies was a Catalan painter. He is, along with poet Joan Brossa and painters Joan Ponç, his cousin Antoni Tàpies and Joan-Josep Tharrats, the founder of surrealist et dada review Dau al Set in 1948.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modest_...





Linneus escriba
1948
I did not find more info other than in 2009 this artwork was used for a wine bottle:



Philip Guston

Philip Guston (pronounced like "rust"), born Phillip Goldstein (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, an art movement that included many abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning so-called "pure abstraction" in favor of more representational, simplified renderings of personal symbols and objects. His existential, lugubrious images after 1968 employed a limited palette.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_...


The Tormentors
1948
oil on canvas
103.84 cm x 153.67 cm
SFMOMA
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/82.34

We had Guston in the quiz already in april:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Two artists for 1949, one female one male, one from Portugal and one from America.

Barnett Newman
(1905 - 1970)

Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. His paintings are existential in tone and content, explicitly composed with the intention of communicating a sense of locality, presence, and contingency.



Concord
1949
Oil and masking tape on canvas
228 x 136.2 cm
The MET

In 1948 Barnett Newman began painting in a new and unique format. Abandoning the use of various other abstract elements on the canvas, Newman instead laid down one or more vertical bands, usually with the help of masking tape. These "zips," as he came to call them, become the organizing principle behind the work, the decisive elements that structure the entire picture.

Concord was painted during Newman's most prolific year. He exhibited the painting in his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, which was installed with the help of his friend, Mark Rothko. Concord's green layer of paint is uncharacteristically brushy, and it was perhaps with its atmospheric wash in mind that Newman titled the picture after the town famous for Henry David Thoreau's Walden, where he and his wife, Annalee, had honeymooned fourteen years earlier.



Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
(1908 –1992)
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva was a Portuguese abstract painter. She was considered a leading member of the European abstract expressionism movement known as Art Informel. Her works feature complex interiors and city views using lines that explore space and perspective. She also in tapestry and stained glass.


Bibliothèque
1949
Oil on Canvas
114,5 x 147,5 cm

For 1950, we have a famous American female artist and two more unknown European male artists:

François Arnal
(1924 – 2012)

François Arnal was a French painter and sculptor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françoi...



Les boxeurs (The boxers)
1950
Oil on canvas
72,50 x 59 cm


Öyvind Fahlström
(1928–1976)

Öyvind Axel Christian Fahlström (1928–1976) was a Swedish Multimedia artist. Fahlström was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as the only child to Frithjof Fahlström and Karin Fahlström. In July 1939 he was sent to Stockholm to visit some distant relatives and after World War II he started to study and later on to work as a writer, critic and journalist. From 1960 until 1976 he was married to the Swedish Pop painter Barbro Östlihn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Öyvind_...


untitled
1950
Watercolour and ink on paper
21 x 14.8 cm

Helen Frankenthaler
(1928 – 2011)

Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s until 2011), she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as Color Field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.


Playa
1950
Oil on canvas
86 x 81 cm

When I first went to graduate school I was doing stain paintings heavily influenced by Helen Frankenthaler. I still like her work a lot.

I like a lot of Frankenthaler’s work. Some of her color combinations are odd, I’m sure intentionally dissonant. I like her shapes and contours but sometimes her choices of color surprise me.

Hi guys, pic(s) of the day coming up, give me a couple of minutes, just (10 PM european) got home from a city trip. Can you guess where?

Back to business ;-)
Two male painters for 1951: an Englishman and an American:


Cy Twombly
(1928 – 2011)

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly Jr. was an American painter, sculptor and photographer. He belonged to the generation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Twombly is said to have influenced younger artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente, and Julian Schnabel. His works are in the permanent collections of modern art museums globally, including the Menil Collection in Houston, the Tate Modern in London and the New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was commissioned for the ceiling at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.


Untitled
1951
Oil-based house paint on canvas
101,6 x 121,9 cm
Cy Twombly Foundation © Cy Twombly Foundation, courtesy Archives Nicola Del Roscio.


Terry Frost
(1915–2003 )
Sir Terence Ernest Manitou Frost RA was a British abstract artist, who worked in Newlyn, Cornwall. Frost was renowned for his use of the Cornish light, colour and shape to start a new art movement in England. He became a leading exponent of abstract art and a recognised figure of the British art establishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_F...



Green, Black and White Movement
1951
Oil on canvas
111 x 86 cm
Tate, London
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/...

For 1952 I have a reprise from 1947, an Italian artist who lived most of his live in Paris and a Cuban artist:

Alberto Magnelli 
(1888 - 1971) 

Alberto Magnelli was an Italian modern painter who was a significant figure in the post war Concrete art movement.
Born in Florence on July 1, 1888. In 1907 he started painting and, despite lacking formal art education. In 1930 he moved to Paris, where he joined the Abstraction-Création group and became friends with Wassily Kandinsky, Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber. Following the invasion of France by the Nazis, Magnelli and his future wife, Susi Gerson, went to live in Grasse with several other artists including the Arps. Some of the group, including Gerson, were Jewish so they were forced to hide. Despite this, the group was able to produce a number of collaborative works.
Following the Second World War, Magnelli returned to Paris which was to be his home for the rest of his life. He became a major figure in the post war concrete art movement and influenced artists such as Victor Vasarely, Nicolas de Staël as well as the concrete artists in South America such as Hélio Oiticica. He again exhibited at the Venice Biennale, this time with a whole room. Major galleries organised retrospectives of his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto...


Mystère Vert (Mysterious Green)
1952
Oil on canvas
55x46 cm
Collezione privata, Milano 
Auction Date: Dec 15, 2015 4:30pm CET
Prezzo Partenza: €16000



René Portocarrero
(1912-1985)

René Portocarrero (born Havana, 24 February 1912; died Havana, 7 April 1985) was a Cuban artist recognised internationally for his achievements.
As well as a painter and sculptor, Portocarrero worked as a ceramicist, scenic designer and book illustrator, publishing his own Las Máscaras (The Masks) in 1935 and El Sueño (The Dream) in 1939. He was also a muralist, producing public artworks for the Havana Prison, a church in Bauta, Cuba, the Cuban National Hospital, the Cuban National Theatre and the Hotel Tryp Habana Libre. His artworks form part of the permanent collections of galleries in Argentina (Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires), Brazil (Museums of Modern Art, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), Canada (National Gallery, Ottawa), France (Modern Arts, Paris), Peru (Instituto de Arte Contemporaneo, Lima), the United States (Museums of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco; Milwaukee Art Center; Union Panamericana, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Art Museum, Indianapolis), Uruguay (Bellas Artes, Montevideo) and Venezuela (Bellas Artes, Caracas), as well as his native Cuba (Museo Nacional, Havana).


Composition
1952
Mixed media on paper, signed and dated lower left
37 x 26.5 cm


Jean Bazaine
(1904 – 2001)

Jean René Bazaine was a French painter, designer of stained glass windows, and writer. He was the great great grandson of the English Court portraitist Sir George Hayter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Re...



Rocks, trees and plain
1952
Oil on canvas
88,8 x 116 cm
Sotheby's Paris, France, May 26, 2008

All this abstract art has been fun this month.

Ruth wrote: "All this abstract art has been fun this month."

Thank you! I find it fun to do and doing this I discovered at least a dozen names I never heard of before. ;-)

For 1953 I have an American I used last month in the “who did this” quiz and a Frenchman we already encountered in 1950:

François Arnal
(1924 – 2012)
François Arnal was a French painter and sculptor. Born and raised in a rural area of France, he was educated in Toulon high school and studied law at the University of Aix-en-Provence. Towards the end of the war he joined the resistance, where the Dutch refugee Conrad Kickert taught him the rudiments of painting.
After the war he took up painting seriously and moved to Paris, where he associated with established artists such as Pierre Dmitrienko, Serge Rezvani and Bernard Quentin, becoming involved in the lyrical abstraction movement. In 1960 he turned his attention to sculpture and spent much of his time in the United States, working and exhibiting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Françoi...


Le mont chauve
1953
Huile sur unalit (oil on hardboard)

90 x 123
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgium, Brussels

Clyfford Still
(1904 – 1980)

Clyfford Still 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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyffor...





Untitled
1953
Oil on canvas
235 x 174 cm
Tate

‘My paintings have no titles because I do not wish them to be considered illustrations or pictorial puzzles’, Still wrote. ‘If properly made visible they speak for themselves.’ In a letter discussing this work, he explained that the red at the lower edge was intended to contrast with and therefore emphasise the depths of the blue. He saw the yellow wedge at the top as ‘a reassertion of the human context - a gesture of rejection of any authoritarian rationale or system of politico-dialectical dogma.’

See also:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Ruth wrote: "All this abstract art has been fun this month."

I agree!

Dirk wrote: "Ruth wrote: "All this abstract art has been fun this month."

Thank you! I find it fun to do and doing this I discovered at least a dozen names I never heard of before. ;-)

For 1953 I have an Amer..."

Okay, I can deal with this one, being Clyfford Still...

For 1954 I have a Belgian artist but who lived and worked most of his life in France, an French artist and two American artists male and female. and the lady is the first artist we encounter still living today almost 100 years old!:


Gustave Singier
(1909 – 1984)

Gustave Singier was a Belgian non-figurative painter active in France as part of the new Paris School of Lyrical Abstraction and the Salon de Mai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave...



Collines
1954
22. x 29 cm




Jean Le Moal
(1909 - 2007)

Jean Le Moal was a French painter of the new Paris school, designer of stained glass windows, and one of the founder members of the Salon de Mai.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Le...




Les Arbres (The trees)
1954
Oil on canvas

100 x 100 cm


Mark Tobey
(1890 – 1976)
Mark George Tobey was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophically from most Abstract Expressionist painters. His work was widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School. Senior in age and experience, he had a strong influence on the others; friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions. Similar to others of the Northwest School, Tobey was mostly self-taught after early studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1921, Tobey founded the art department at The Cornish School in Seattle, Washington.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Tobey



Canticle
1954
casein on paper
45 x 29 cm
Smithsonian American Art museum

Abstraction and spirituality are intimately entwined in the delicate works of Mark Tobey, whom, along with Morris Graves, Life magazine described as a mystical painter. Canticle refers to liturgical hymns from the bible. Tobey acknowledged that the abstract harmony of music was an important source of inspiration: “When I play the piano for several hours, everything is clarified in my visual imagination afterwards.” The intricate pattern of delicate marks that animate the surface (critics called it “white writing”) was inspired by the artist’s study of Arabic and Japanese calligraphy.

Mary Abbott
(born July 27, 1921)

Mary Abbott is an American artist known as a member of the New York School of abstract expressionists in the late 1940s and 1950s. Her abstract and figurative work were also influenced by her time spent in St. Croix and Haiti, where she lived off and on throughout the 1950s.



All Green,
1954
Oil paint on linen
142 × 114 cm.
Denver Art Museum

I’ve the Mark Tobey. Obsessive mark making is me.

Two artists for 1955: both American, one male, one female. But the lady choose to travel a lot to France and finally settled there.


Franz Kline
(1910 – 1962)

Franz Kline was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, and Lee Krasner, as well as local poets, dancers, and musicians came to be known as the informal group, the New York School. Although he explored the same innovations to painting as the other artists in this group, Kline's work is distinct in itself and has been revered since the 1950s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_K...




Orange Outline
1955
Oil On Paperboard Mounted On Canvas
96.5 x 101.6 cm
North Carolina Museum of Art
for more see:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Joan Mitchell
(1925 – 1992)

Joan Mitchell was an American "second generation" abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. She was a member of the American abstract expressionist movement, even though much of her career took place in France. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Shirley Jaffe, Elaine de Kooning, and Sonia Gechtoff, she was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections across the United States and Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mi...


I’m very happy to post this next pic for it is my personal favorite abstract work of art!



Hudson River Day Line
1955
Oil on canvas
200.7 x 210.8cm
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio


Hudson River Day Line references a section of the Hudson River near the island of Manhattan, New York. Fluid, shimmering yellows and blues evoke sunlight flickering on water. Moreover, a sensation of floating, motion, and a fluid space suggest a scenic voyage.

For 1956 I have a Greek artist, one from Israel, an American and a Frenchmen

Alekos Kontopoulos
(1904 - 1975)

Alekos Kontopoulos was a Greek painter. After his high school studies, he trained under the icon painter G. Sarafianos. In 1923 he came to Athens and studied at the School of Fine Arts under Georgios Jakovides, Dimitrios Geraniotis, Pavlos Mathiopoulos and Nikolaos Lytras. He graduated in 1929 and the following year went to Paris where he stayed until 1932, taking lessons from P. Le Doux and H. Morisset. At the same time he copied works at the Louvre and travelled to Belgium to study Flemish painting.

Returning to Greece he associated himself with the circle New Pathfinders and in 1934 participated in the founding of the group Free Artists. In 1935 he went back to Paris, where he attended lessons at the School of Fine Arts and the Colarossi and Grande Chaumiere Academies and in 1937 became a member of the group Paris- Montparnasse. In 1939 he returned to Greece and two years later was appointed to the National Archeological Museum where he worked until 1969.
No wiki page.




Night is Coming
1956
Oil on canvas
106 x 80 cm
National Gallery, Athens, Greece
http://www.nationalgallery.gr/en/the-...





Avigdor Arikha
(1929 - 2010)

Avigdor Arikha (April 28, 1929 – April 29, 2010) was a Romanian-born French–Israeli painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and art historian.
In the late 1950s, Arikha established himself as an abstract painter, but he eventually came to think of abstraction as a dead end. In 1965 he stopped painting and began drawing, only from life, treating all subjects in a single sitting. He engaged in drawing and printmaking only for the next eight years. In 1973, he resumed painting and became "perhaps the best painter from life in the last decades of the 20th century", as he was hailed in an obituary in Economist magazine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avigdor...



Untitled
1956
oil on canvas
27 x 23 cm



Robert Goodnough
(1917 – 2010)


Robert Goodnough was an American abstract expressionist painter. A veteran of World War II, Goodnough was one of the last of the original generation of the New York School; (although he has been referred to as a member of the "second generation" of Abstract Expressionists), even though he began exhibiting his work in galleries in New York City in the early 1950s. Robert Goodnough was among the 24 artists from the total of 256 participants who were included in the famous 9th Street Art Exhibition, (1951) and in all the following New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals from 1953 to 1957.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...



Mambo
1956
Oil on canvas
121.3 x 121.3 cm


Roger Bissière
(1886–1964 )


Roger Bissière was a French artist. He designed stained glass windows for Metz cathedral and several other churches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_B...



Lithograph in colors realized by Marcel Durassier, after a work on paper by Roger Bissière. Ed. Gallery Beyeler, Basle.
Illustration size : 33,5 x 47 cm
Paper size (or piece size) : 50 x 65 cm
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Agen



In the last decade of his life Bissière became interested in the formal structures of line and colour. During this period the landscape and architectural references he employed in his earlier work became less and less obvious. In their place are more general references to space and atmosphere which are created through the use of translucent colour and a grid structure. The image in this etching is characteristic of his painting at this time.

For 1957 I have three male artists: one from Mexico, one born in Germany but later America and one born in America:


Gunther Gerzso
(1915 - 2000)
Gunther Gerzso was a Mexican painter, designer and director and screenwriter for film and theatre.
Gerzso was born in Mexico City, in the times of the Revolution. His parents were Oscar Gerzso (Hungarian: Gerzsó Oszkár), a Hungarian immigrant, and Dore Wendland, German by birth. After his father's death a few months after Gunther was born, his mother married a German jeweler. The economic crisis during the revolution caused the family to flee to Europe in 1922. The family returned to Mexico two years later and her mother divorced. Not being able to provide for the children,[citation needed] she sent Gunther to Lugano, Switzerland to live with his uncle Dr. Hans Wendland, who was an influential name in the art world. Gunther, then a teenager, met Paul Klee[1] and lived among his uncle's collection of paintings which included works by Pierre Bonnard, Rembrandt, Paul Cézanne, Eugène Delacroix and Titian. During his time in Lugano, he also met Nando Tamberlani, noted set designer who would introduce him to the world of theater.


Paisaje
1957
oil on masonite
109.22 x 66.04 cm.


Jimmy Ernst
(1920 – 1984)

Hans-Ulrich Ernst known as Jimmy Ernst, was an American painter born in Germany.
Jimmy Ernst was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany, the son of Surrealist painter Max Ernst and Luise Straus, a well-known art historian and journalist. His parents divorced in 1922 and Ernst remained with his mother in Cologne. He visited his father in France in 1930, where he met many artists, including Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, Joan Miró, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy, as well as his father's lover Leonora Carrington. In February 1933, a month after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the SS searched Luise Straus' apartment. As a noted intellectual and a Jew she was regarded as suspect by the new regime. Ernst was sent to live with his grandfather, Luise's father, while his mother moved to Paris. In June 1938, Jimmy sailed to New York from Le Havre on the liner SS Manhattan.
There he met many European exiles and the city's avant-garde. In 1940, he petitioned the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) to secure the release of his father from internment. The ERC secured his release in 1941 and Max Ernst arrived in New York from Nazi occupied France. In 1944, unknown to Jimmy, his mother was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp from Drancy, a detention camp near Paris. She did not survive.


Untitled
1957


Sam Francis
(1923–1994)
Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker.
Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California, the son of Katherine Lewis Francis and Samuel Augustus Francis, Sr. The 1935 death of his mother, who had encouraged his interest in music affected him deeply, but he later developed a strong bond with his stepmother, Virginia Peterson Francis.
Francis served in the United States Air Force during World War II before being injured during test flight maneuvers. He was in the hospital for several years, and it was while there, after being visited by artist David Park in 1945, that he began to paint. Once out of the hospital he returned to Berkeley, this time to study art. He received both his BA degree (1949) and MA degree (1950) from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied botany, medicine and psychology.
Francis was initially influenced by the work of abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still. His loose style was most influenced by the work of Jackson Pollock. He later became loosely associated with a second generation of abstract expressionists, including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, who were increasingly interested in the expressive use of color.


Untitled
1957

Oh, yes, Sam Francis. Very big here In California, especially when I was I grad school. I like his work. Don’t know th other two, but I like both those paintings.

Ruth wrote: "Oh, yes, Sam Francis. Very big here In California, especially when I was I grad school. I like his work. Don’t know th other two, but I like both those paintings."

You certainly know Jimmy Ernst's father, Max?
I must admit it was a surprise for me too and I like his work.

Yes, when I saw the name Ernst I immediately thought of Max.

For 1958 I have a American female artist and a Frenchman:


Alma Thomas
(1891 – 1978)

Alma Woodsey Thomas (September 22, 1891 – February 24, 1978) was an African-American Expressionist painter and art educator best known for her colorful abstract paintings. She lived and worked primarily in Washington, D.C. and The Washington Post described her as a force in the Washington Color School. The Wall Street Journal describes her as a previously "underappreciated artist" who is more recently recognized for her "exuberant" works, noteworthy for their pattern, rhythm and color. Thomas remains an influence to young and old as she was a cornerstone for the Fine Arts at Howard University, started a successful art career later in her life, and took major strides during times of segregation as an African-American female artist.



Untitled,
1958
acrylic on paper,
8 x 9 1/2 inches



Jean Dubuffet
(1901 – 1985)


Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.


I live in a country laughing
1958

Already 1959, just ten more years to cover this month…
Today we have a reprise from yesterday, a Belgian who was born in the Netherlands and a female American artist:


Judith Godwin
(born 1930 Suffolk, Virginia)

Judith Godwin is an American abstract painter, associated with the Expressionist movement.

Godwin's first solo exhibition was in 1950 at Mountcastle's in Suffolk, VA. At the suggestion of her RPI college instructor Jewett Campbell, she moved to New York City in 1953 to attend the Art Students League and study under Hans Hofmann, who influenced her work heavily. She studied with Hoffman in his studio on 8th Street, and has noted his wife Miz as another important influence. Godwin has said: "I think the main thing with Hoffman was that I felt completely free to do whatever I wanted to do." Notable classmates of this era were Will Barnet, Harry Sternberg, and Vaclav Vytlacil. Godwin credits Hofmann for making her feel at home after moving to New York, as well as with challenging her conservative color palette and technique. Hofmann is also credited with helping Godwin move away from the influence of cubism and towards abstract expressionism. James Brooks invited her to participate in the Stable Gallery Invitational show. In the late 1950s, through Kenzo Okada, she met and was invited by Betty Parsons to join her new gallery, Section Eleven, becoming the youngest woman to ever show her work there. At Betty Parsons' show, Godwin met the director for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, James Johnson Sweeney. He was interested in Godwin and asked her to send a small collection of her work. He received Abstraction 1954 and Abstraction #15. He enjoyed her work, although at the time did not include them to the Guggenheim Collection. She shared a studio with Franz Kline. She also met other prominent male artists such as Mark Rothko and Marcel Duchamp. Her success in mid-century Abstract Expressionism is notable, as there were few women celebrated among the movement associated with well-known male artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In a 1981 interview, Godwin stated: "when I first went to New York in the early 50's, there were just a few thousand painters living there... now there are tens of thousands so many people trying to gain notice, its unbelievable how competitive it is...." She credits her professor, Jewett Campbell, with her desire to move to New York City.
In the 1980s she maintained three studios, one in a barn in Connecticut, one in Greenwich Village, NY, and one in Suffolk, VA.
In 1999 Godwin was a panelist for "Hans Hofmann as Artist and Teacher" symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_...



epic
1959
Oil on canvas
208 x 254 cm



Bram Bogart
July 12, 1921 – May 2, 2012
Bram Bogart (also know as Bram Van den Bogaart) was a Belgian expressionist painter most closely associated with the COBRA group.
Following his education Bogart took a job with an advertising concern in Rotterdam. Subsequent to World War Two the then twenty-five-year-old painter settled in Paris, France where he was among the founders of Art Informel. At first he experimented with cubism and figurative drawing, depicting flowers, still life and self-portraits. In the 1950s he began to concentrate on working with impasto. With thick layers of boldly applied and colourful paint, he developed an expressionist style which became more abstract with time.
In 1961 he and his later to be wife Leni permanently relocated to Belgium and in 1969 he became a Belgian citizen. Here he began to experiment with a more three-dimensional medium, a mix of mortar, siccative, powdered chalk, varnish, and raw pigment, applied to large, heavy wooden backing structures.
Bogart exhibited frequently in Antwerp and Ghent. In 1971 he represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale.
In 2011 the Bogart presented an exhibition in celebration of his 90th birthday, a display of his Monochrome paintings, held at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London. A retrospective of his work was also exhibited at Galerie Jean-Luc and Takako Richard in Paris. Bogart died May 2, 2012 in Sint-Truiden, Belgium at the age of 90.


Des Briques
1959


Jean Dubuffet
(1901 – 1985)
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement Art Brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.



Soul of the Underground
1959
Oil on aluminum foil on composition board
149,6 x 195 cm
MoMA

For 1960 I have selected an Italian and a reprise of one of my favorite abstract artists…


Antonio Corpora
(1909 - 2004)

Antonio Corpora (1909–2004) was a Tunisian born Italian painter who followed the Tachisme style of Abstract art.
Corpora was born in Tunis, Tunisia on August 15, 1909 to Sicilian parents. He trained at the Tunis Institute of Fine Arts under the mentorship of Armand Vergeaud. In 1930, Corpora moved to Paris, eventually settling in Rome in 1939. In Rome, Corpora joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, a post-cubist Italian art movement.
In the 1930s, Corpora's style was abstract and geometric, heavily influenced by Cubism and Fauvism. His work later shifted more towards abstract expressionism and Tachisme.


musicalit-dell-aurora
1960

Joan Mitchell
(1925 – 1992)

Mitchell is recognized as a principal figure—and one of the few female artists—in the second generation of American Abstract Expressionists.[8] By the early 1950s, she was regarded as a leading artist in the New York School. In her early years as a painter, she was influenced by Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and later by the work of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, Jean-Paul Riopelle, among others.[9]
Her paintings are expansive, often covering multiple panels. Landscape was the primary influence on her subject matter. She painted on unprimed canvas or white ground with gestural, sometimes violent brushwork. She has described a painting as "an organism that turns in space".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Mi...




Le Chemin Des Ecoliers
1960
Oil on canvas
195.6 × 96.5 Size (cm)

In 1950s New York, Joan Mitchell was a lively, argumentative member of the famed Cedar Bar crowd, alongside Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and other notable first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionist painters. Based on landscape imagery and flowers, her large-scale paintings investigate the potential of big, aggressive brushstrokes and vivid color to convey emotion. "I try to eliminate clichés, extraneous material," she once said. "I try to make it exact. My painting is not an allegory or a story. It is more like a poem." Mitchell, who moved to France in 1959, has had numerous museum exhibitions, and examples of her work hang in nearly all the important public collections of modern art.

André Masson
(1896 – 1987)
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.
His early works display an interest in cubism. He later became associated with surrealism, and he was one of the most enthusiastic employers of automatic drawing, making a number of automatic works in pen and ink. Masson experimented with altered states of consciousness with artists such as Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Georges Bataille, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Malkine, who were neighbors of his studio in Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_M...



Games Centaurs
1961


Keith Vaughan
(1912 – 1977)

John Keith Vaughan , generally known as Keith Vaughan, was a British painter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_V...


Bather: August 4th 1961
1961
Oil on canvas
102 x 91 cm

Tate, London

The artist wrote (22 June 1962) that he considered this one of his best works. He felt he had achieved a special balance between the purely abstract and the figurative elements which had hitherto pushed his work into one or other of these categories. ‘The background was a state of chronic dissatisfaction with the “image” in my work which dates from about 1956. At that time I had drawings and plans for dozens of figure paintings which I suddenly found myself unable to believe in sufficiently to carry out. Probably the impact of the American show about that time [Modern Art in the United States, January–February 1956, at the Tate Gallery had something to do with it. I wanted to go beyond the specific, identifiable image - yet I did not want to do an “abstract” painting. I wanted something which had the controlled ambiguity and vitality of a de Kooning but not the “gestural” expressionistic quality.... The Aug 4 Bather was the first break through. Every attempt up to then had finally resolved itself into another figure painting or an “abstract”.... I worked it by a slightly new procedure which consisted of painting towards an image - but destroying the image (with a paint scraper) every time it began to form and threatened to “set” the picture. This kept it loose - but not abstract.’
The artist worked on the picture steadily for six weeks, then put it aside for a fortnight. On taking it up again he completed the outlying areas and much later, around Christmas 1961, softened the contrasts between the descending dark rectangular forms in the left centre.

Today, for 1962, a reprise for jimmy Ernst, max Ernst’s son, another American and a Romanian who lived most of his live in France.

Alexandre Istrati
(1915 – 1991)

Alexandre Istrati was a Franco-Romanian painter. He won numerous prizes, including 1953 the Prix Kandinsky.
He married fellow Romanian abstract expressionist painter, Natalia Dumitresco.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...


Apparition,
1962
Oil on canvas
195 x 130 cm



Frank Lobdell
(1921 - 2013)

Frank Lobdell was an American painter, often associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.
n 1950, he left the U.S. for Paris, where he painted and studied at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in 1950-51. After returning to the Bay Area, he taught at CSFA from 1957 to 1964. He was Visiting Artist at Stanford University in 1965, and taught as Professor of Art at Stanford from 1966 until his retirement in 1991.


15 april
1962
177.80 x 155.57 cm
Oakland Museum of California.



Jimmy Ernst
(1920 – 1984)

The son of Surrealist Max Ernst, Jimmy Ernst attended several European craft schools and served an apprenticeship in printing and typography before immigrating to the United States in 1938. He worked in advertising agencies and art galleries for several years, and not until age twenty did he decide to become a painter. Ernst's early canvases were tinged with Surrealism, and his first solo show featured organic abstractions. His interpretations of jazz themes during the 1940s, in which discrete color areas were used to approximate syncopation and rhythm, yielded in the 1950s to experiments with line that determined his future directions. In his mature work, Ernst used complex inter-locking webs of line to manipulate pictorial space and to create architectonic structures. Always abstract, his later paintings possess the spatial quality of panoramic cityscapes.
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/jim...


Silence at Sharpeville
1962
167.6 x 183.4 cm.
Smithsonian American Art Museum

For 1963 I have once more two French artists relatively unknown (no English Wikipage), and an American.

Huguette Arthur Bertrand
(1922 - 2005)


Huguette Arthur (Aimée) Bertrand was the leading female member of the influential Abstraction-Lyrique group, which included artists such as Camille Bryen, André Lanskoy and Pierre Soulages and was the European equivalent of American Abstract Expressionism. Arriving in Paris after the Liberation, Arthur Bertrand quickly became immersed into the avant-garde circles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and began exhibiting at the Salon des Moins des Trente Ans. In 1947 she was awarded the Laureate du Concours which enabled her to spend several months in Prague. By 1949 her paintings had reached pure abstraction which she exhibited for the first time at the Salon de Mai. At this time she also became involved with an elite group of avant-garde artists known as Les Mains Éblouies  and exhibited with them at Galerie Maeght, they included Deyrolle, Dewasne, Poliakoff, and Magnelli.
 
Arthur Bertrand held her first solo show at Galerie Niepce in 1951 which was curated by Julien Alvard, and in 1953 joined Galerie Arnaud where she exhibited in a series of influential exhibitions under the collective title “Divergences”.  She soon established a reputation for her powerfully energised gestural paintings. Her emphatically expressive style emerged directly from the “automatic writings” of the Surrealists such as André Breton, and strives to allow expression of the sub-conscious in an attempt to manifest a pure reality devoid of references to the material world in which we perceive our existence. But despite the apparent rapid execution the artist produced relatively few works during her life, aspiring to complete perfection she tended to spend two to three years on a painting before she was satisfied with it and this only heightens the aura that surrounds her work.The artist is represented in a number of major museums of modern art including: Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Musée d’Art et Industrie, Saint-Étienne; Eilat.
http://www.haninafinearts.com/artists...



Composition
1963
Oil on canvas
76 x 94 cm


Jean Degottex
(1918 -1988)

Jean Degottex est un peintre français abstrait, connu notamment pour sa proximité initiale avec le mouvement de l'Abstraction lyrique des années 1950 et 1960. Selon ses propres termes, son œuvre est progressivement passée du geste et du signe, à l'écriture, puis de l'écriture à la ligne. Considéré comme un artiste majeur de l’abstraction de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, il s'inspire de la calligraphie extrême-orientale et de la philosophie zen pour aboutir à l'effacement du sujet créateur.


Jean Degottex is an abstract French painter, known for his initial proximity to the movement of lyrical Abstraction of the 1950s and 1960s. In his own words, his work gradually shifted from gesture and sign to writing, then from writing to the line. Considered a major artist of the abstraction of the second half of the twentieth century, he is inspired by Far Eastern calligraphy and Zen philosophy to lead to the erasure of the creative subject.

Wiki only in French:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_De...



Ecriture, 10.2.63
1963
Oil on canvas
195 x 129,8 cm
Centre Pompidou


Paul Jenkins
1923 - 2012

Paul Jenkins was an American abstract expressionist painter.
Throughout the 60s, his work was shown worldwide, at major galleries and museums in Tokyo, London, New York, Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere. In 1963, he took over Willem de Kooning's light-infused loft at Union Square in New York City where he worked until the end of 2000.
”I do not stain and I do not work on unprimed canvas. This is more significant than it may appear. Staining or working on un-primed canvas results in an inkblot-like effect where the paint penetrates the canvas and spreads out on its own. When I work on primed canvas, I can control the flow of paint and guide it to discover forms. The ivory knife is an essential tool in this because it does not gouge the canvas, it allows me to guide the paint.”
— Paul Jenkins, Artist Statement


PHENOMENA: YELLOW STRIKE
1963
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
(152.6 - 101.3 cm)
PROPERTY FROM THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, SOLD TO BENEFIT THE ACQUISITIONS FUND
Sotheby’s 21 May 2014
34,375 USD

Jenkins I know, but not the others. I rather like the example of Bertrand.

Ruth wrote: "Jenkins I know, but not the others. I rather like the example of Bertrand."

Bertrand was new for me too. And I like her!
If you google her for images you can see she has a lot of nice work:

https://www.google.com/search?q=hugue...

Or you can watch this short YouTube clip (don't need the sound, is just some heavy Rock)

https://youtu.be/0KRUsvLz1l4

Today a reprise for Hans Hofmann, an Italian artist and a Romanian who lived most of her life in France



Natalia Dumitresco
(1915 - 1997)

Natalia Dumitresco was a French-Romanian abstract painter associated with the Réalités Nouvelles salon of Paris after the Second World War, a movement influenced by the art of Wassily Kandinsky and Alberto Magnelli. Other abstract expressionist painters associated with the Réalités Nouvelles include Serge Poliakoff and Alexandre Istrati. Dumitresco later married Alexandre Istrati.
After a number of years working in black and white, she tackled the problem of colors, showing originality and a great freshness of colors in her compositions.
She and her husband are buried in the same grave with Constantin Brâncuși.


On Me Fait Signe (I am signed)
1964
92 x 73 cm

Emilio Vedova
(1919 – 2006)

Emilio Vedova was a modern Italian painter, considered one of the most important to emerge from his country's artistic scene, Arte Informale.


Untitled
1964
Mixed media on paper,
48 x 25 cm


Hans Hofmann
(1880 – 1966)

Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter, renowned as an artist and teacher in a career that spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of the currents of Symbolism, Neoimpressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means. The influential critic Clement Greenberg considered Hofmann's first New York solo show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944 (along with Jackson Pollock’s in late 1943) as a breakthrough in painterly versus geometric abstraction that heralded the development of abstract expressionism. In the decade that followed, Hofmann's recognition grew through numerous exhibitions, notably at the Kootz Gallery, culminating in major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1957) and Museum of Modern Art (1963) that traveled to venues throughout the United States, South America, and Europe. His works are in the permanent collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Ho...
http://www.hanshofmann.org/



Nulli Secundus (Second to none)
1964
Oil on canvas

213 x 131 cm

'Nulli Secundus', Latin for second to none, is a painting of Hofmann's late period. Hofmann emigrated to the U.S.A from Germany in 1930 and in 1934 set up an art school in New York. He was a widely influential teacher. However, it was only after he closed his school in 1958 that his painting blossomed. Hofmann tended to work out the compositions of his paintings by pinning coloured paper shapes to his canvas. His work is a synthesis of Cubism, Fauvism and geometric abstraction. He regularly evoked nature but was keen to respect the inherent differences between pictorial experiences and those of the natural world. He wrote: 'In nature, light creates color: in the picture, color creates light.'

An all-American quartet for 1965:


Gladys Goldstein
(1918–2010)

Baltimore artist Gladys Goldstein wrote, "My canvases are not explicit statements, but hints of things that are, or were, or might have been—of memories, of feelings."
Although her work is abstract, Goldstein's primary source of inspiration was nature. She created the impression of light emanating from within her paintings and captured the essence, rather than the appearance, of the natural world. In an artistic career spanning more than 70 years, Goldstein worked with oils, acrylics, watercolor, drawing, collage, and handmade paper. Goldstein was also the first American artist to use the Mexican printmaking technique mixographia to create and reproduce textured prints.
The exhibition Capturing the Essence: The Art of Gladys Goldstein celebrated the opening of the Gladys Goldstein Gallery in the College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center at UMUC. The gallery holds the university's permanent display of contemporary abstract art.


Untitled
1965
Oil on canvas
91 x 56 cm


Robert Motherwell
(1915 – 1991)

Robert Motherwell () was an American painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...



Elegy to the Spanish Republic
1965
Oil on canvas
(208.2 x 351.1 cm)
MoMA

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 108 describes a stately passage of the organic and the geometric, the accidental and the deliberate. Like other Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell was attracted to the Surrealist principle of automatism—of methods that escaped the artist's conscious intention—and his brushwork has an emotional charge, but within an overall structure of a certain severity. In fact Motherwell saw careful arrangements of color and form as the heart of abstract art, which, he said, "is stripped bare of other things in order to intensify it, its rhythms, spatial intervals, and color structure."
Motherwell intended his Elegies to the Spanish Republic (over 100 paintings, completed between 1948 and 1967) as a "lamentation or funeral song" after the Spanish Civil War. His recurring motif here is a rough black oval, repeated in varying sizes and degrees of compression and distortion. Instead of appearing as holes leading into a deeper space, these light-absorbent blots stand out against a ground of relatively even, predominantly white upright rectangles. They have various associations, but Motherwell himself related them to the display of the dead bull's testicles in the Spanish bullfighting ring.
Motherwell described the Elegies as his "private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot. But," he added, "the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death, and their interrelation."

Beauford Delaney
(1901 – 1979)

Beauford Delaney was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s. Beauford's younger brother, Joseph, was also a noted painter.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufor...


Untitled (Yellow Abstract), 1965
Gouache on paper
29 × 21 cm


Arnold Weber, American
(1931 - 2010)

Born and bred in the Bronx, he moved to Manhattan as a young man. In 1969, he moved to Rosebank, where he lived until shifting to Todt Hill for a short time before settling in Middletown in 2004.
As a young man, Mr. Weber joined the U.S. Army and served for four years in North Carolina during the Korean War, attaining the rank of corporal.
Afterward, he took work as a graphic artist for the Army Corps of Engineers, which he continued for 35 years until his 2002 retirement.
Along with graphic design, Mr. Weber enjoyed painting; he had degrees from a variety of schools, including Columbia University, the New School, and the Cooper Union Art School.
He also became an educator in his own craft, teaching painting and drawing everywhere from the Art Lab at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden to Bellevue Hospital and Bronx Community College.
“Arnold was a wonderful soul who never said a bad word about anyone, and never complained about his medical conditions once in his life,” said his son Brian. “He was an amazing and prolific artist who produced thousands of oil and watercolor paintings.”



Ochre Abstract
1965
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 101cm

Really like the Goldstein. She’s new to me.

Again mostly American artists today with again a reprise but this must be the longest period in between from the second post of July till almost the last post of August: from 1909 to 1966:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...



Agnes Martin
(1912 – 2004)

Agnes Bernice Martin was a Canadian-born American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence".[1] Although she is often considered or referred to as a minimalist, Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist. She was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998.


The Field
1966
Ink and pencil on paper
22 x 22 cm
MoMA

A bit strange that MoMA has this on the website under the title “the field” while if you look closely you can see that it is signed as “the city”…


George Ayers Cress
(1921 - 2008

George Ayers Cress was an American painter  born in Anniston, Ala., to Glen H. Cress, Sr. and Lola Ayers King. Educated at Emory University and the University of Georgia, he moved to Chattanooga in 1951 to join the faculty of the University of Chattanooga where he taught for 56 years. He served as chair of the Department of Art and was Guerry Professor Emeritus of Art. His lifelong creative force as a painter was both unique and prolific. He continued to challenge himself with new directions throughout his life. His paintings been exhibited across North America and are in many private and public collections in the United States and Europe. He has received numerous awards and recognitions as an artist and art educator throughout his illustrious career.  



Untitled
1966
Oil on canvas
130.81 x 105.41 cm


Leonardo Nierman
(born 1932)

Leonardo Nierman full name Leonardo Nierman Mendelejis, is a Mexican artist mostly known for his painting and sculpture. He at first wanted to be a violinist, but gave it up after twenty years when he compared a recording of his playing with that of Yehudi Menuhin. However, his musical training has been a major influence on his painting and sculpture, reproducing movement and harmony as Nierman sees similarities between the two disciplines. Nierman has had exhibitions in Mexico and abroad and over sixty recognitions of his work, half of which are from outside Mexico. His work is abstract but still with discernible images from nature such as birds, water, lightning and more. His paintings are in pure colors while his sculptures are generally of metal, often silver-toned.



Bird Fury
1966
Oil on masonite



Max Ernst

(1891 - 1976)


Max Ernst was a German (naturalised American in 1948 and French in 1958) painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was a primary pioneer of the Dada movement and Surrealism. He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images— and 'grattage', an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. He is also noted for his novels consisting of collages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ernst



A Swallow's Nest
1966
Oil on canvas
134 x 168 cm

We're nearing the end of the month and I have still a lot of pics, so let's post 5 today...

Timothy Hasenstein
(born November 19, 1940)

Timothy Hasenstein is an American painter, sculptor and educator who was influenced by the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. Hasenstein was a protégé of Milton Resnick, who was artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison while he was doing graduate work.


Painting
1967
: 48.5\"x 36\

Colette BRUNSCHWIG
(Born 1927)

Colette Braunschweig is a French painter
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette...
No Wiki page in English.


Abstract Composition,
1967
Oil on canvas
75 x75 cm


Fank Stella
(born May 12, 1936)


Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.[1] Stella lives and works in New York City.


[title not known]
1967
Lithograph on paper
38 x 55 cm
Tate

Part of Black Series II
Frank Stella's Black Series II is a portfolio of eight lithographs. They were published by Gemini G.E.L in an edition of one hundred and the Tate copy is number five. The lithographs transpose the compositions of Stella's diamond-pattern Black Paintings (1959-1960) into prints. Stella gave them the same names as the paintings they were based upon: Tuxedo Park, Gezira, Point of Pines, Zambesi, Jill, Delphine and Hippolyte, Gavotte and Turkish Mambo. The Black Series I of the same year similarly assembled twelve of his Black Paintings with rectilinear compositions. The Black Paintings (1959-1960) are Stella's most important and radical contribution to post-war abstract painting, only rivalled by the shaped canvases executed in aluminium and copper paint between 1960 and 1961.

Frank Auerbach
(born 29 April 1931)

Frank Helmut Auerbachis a German-British painter. Born in Germany, he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.
In Britain, Auerbach became a pupil at Bunce Court School, near Faversham in Kent, where he excelled in not only art but also drama classes. Indeed, he almost became an actor, even taking a small role in Peter Ustinov's play House of Regrets at the Unity Theatre in St Pancras, at the age of 17. But his interest in art proved a stronger draw and he began studying in London, first at St Martin's School of Art from 1948 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. Yet, perhaps the clearest influence on his art training came from a series of additional art classes he took at London's Borough Polytechnic, where he and fellow St Martin's student Leon Kossoff were taught by David Bomberg from 1947 until 1953.


Figure on a Bed
1967 - 1970
Oil paint on board
77 x 102 cm
Tate

This is one of several paintings of the same subject Auerbach made during the second half of the 1960s. Other versions of the painting, Reclining Figure in the Studio 1966, Figure on Bed 1967 and Figure on a Bed 1968 (all private collection), share a composition based on largely monotone, horizontal bands of colour.

Frieder Nake
(born December 16, 1938 in Stuttgart, Germany)

Frieder Nake is a mathematician, computer scientist, and pioneer of computer art. He is best known internationally for his contributions to the earliest manifestations of computer art, a field of computing that made its first public appearances with three small exhibitions in 1965.


no title
1967
Computer plotter print on paper
48 x 48 cm

Tate

This print is part of a portfolio called matrix multiplications containing twelve images, produced by the German artist Frieder Nake (Tate P80806–P80817). The portfolio itself is made of thin, dark brown card with a text on the front providing general information about the work, including the description ‘computer graphics’. A longer text inside the portfolio explains that the images were made using a computer and discusses this process. Also included is a programme sheet bearing the code from which Nake produced the images (Tate P80818). All of the prints feature compositions of small square outlines of various different colours, which are thinly applied onto white paper. Each composition is surrounded by a thick border of blank paper. In some compositions the squares only have vertical and horizontal lines, while in others they are oriented at slanted angles. Some of the compositions totally fill the area within the border with squares, while others leave one or two blank corners or are organised into a diagonal band running from one corner to another. In most of the images some squares are printed over each other, although the extent of this varies significantly. Along the bottom of each picture is a typed text reading ‘NAKE/TR4/Z64 1967 MATRIZENMULTIPLIKATION’, followed by a numerical designation denoting the number of the ‘sheet’ and the ‘series’.

All European artists for 1968, that’s been awhile ;-)


Frank Bowling

born 1934

Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling OBE RA known as Frank Bowling, is a Guyana-born British artist. His paintings relate to Abstract expressionism, Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.
A move to New York in the mid-1960s exposed Bowling to his American contemporaries and soon won him a place in the 1971 Whitney Biennial. As Maya Jaggi writes: "unlike contemporaries who founded British pop art, Bowling took a singular path, from Bacon-esque figurative painting to an abstract art touched by personal memory and history.... Encouraged by the US critic Clement Greenberg, he found a freedom in abstract art, alongside Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman."[2] Between 1969 and 1972 Bowling was a contributing editor of Arts Magazine.
Bowling now spends part of each year between London and New York, where he maintains studios.





Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman
1968
Acrylic paint on canvas
236 x 129 cm
Tate

Bowling began using acrylics in the late 1960s because the fast drying nature of the paint allowed for more malleability and the practice of staining created a sense of diffusion between the different tones. As the size of his paintings increased in this period, Bowling moved from upright easel painting to working directly on canvases spread out on the studio floor or pinned to the wall. This allowed him to use broader brush strokes and play with loose overlays and stencils. The outlined maps in this work were produced using readymade stencils which Bowling employed in numerous paintings of the same period, such as Mother’s House on South America 1968. Bowling was influenced by the use of maps in paintings by the American artists Jasper Johns and Larry Rivers, whom he befriended after moving to New York from London in 1967.


Jeremy Moon
1934–1973
Jeremy Moon was a British abstract painter born in Altrincham, Cheshire in 1934. He read law at Cambridge University and worked in advertising before becoming an artist in 1961. He lived and worked in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey between 1966 and 1973. He died following a motorcycle accident near Kingston in November 1973.


No. 9/68
1968
Acrylic paint on canvas
180 x 195 cm
Tate

Moon’s work of the late 1960s is characterised by compositions based on a hard-edged and rigidly geometrical, non-representational visual language and the use of unmodulated colour. In 1970, the artist commented: ‘the need to keep the picture completely abstract is very important to me’ (quoted in Jeremy Moon, 1976, p.7). Untitled [9/68] is a large, almost square canvas. In this work, a diagonal yellow line divides the composition into two. On each side of the line, a differently oriented yellow grid covers the entire surface. While the background is white, twenty spaces between the lines in the upper right are coloured variously pink, lavender, and three tones of blue.



Malcolm Hughes
(1920 – 1997)

Malcolm Hughes (22 July 1920 – 19 September 1997) was a British constructive artist.[1] He was born in Manchester[2] and during the second world war, he was a radio operator in the Royal Navy.[1] After the war he became influenced by British abstract artists of the period[2] whilst training at the Regional College of Art in Manchester and then later at the Royal College of Art in London. Whilst he was a student in London his work was in the socialist realism style and he was involved in painting a large mural at the Royal Courts of Justice. By the 1960s he had developed his own form of constructivism and his work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris.[1]




Square Relief. White
1968
Oil on board
610 x 610 x 60 mm
Tate

Malcolm Hughes was one of a group of international constructivist artists who have upheld a purist, non-figurative approach to making art. Central to their work has been the development of an abstract language of idealised forms. Such art communicates in a very direct way, through form, line, surface and colour. The artist described this and related reliefs as exploring ideas about sequence, rhythm and repetition, light and physical space. 'The conceptual means employed tend to be those of extraction and reduction from a given sequence of numbers. Sometimes these are taken in one direction only; at others, alternating direction and superimposition are used.



Maurice Wyckaert
(1923–1996)

Maurice Wyckaert was a Belgian artist, born in 1923, in the city of Brussels. He is a neo-expressionistic, lyrical abstract painter, gouache designer and printmaker. He was educated at the Academy of Brussels (1940-47 and 1949-50) and in Sint-Joost-ten-Node and the Vrije Atelier of Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe. He debuted with wonderful expressionistic still life, reminiscent of Jean Brusselmans. Much early work dealt with stills of vegetables. Later Wyckaert became interested by William Turner and James Ensor and their ideas of luminism.




Rolling Clouds
1968
Oil on canvas
200 cm x 169 cm
Mu.ZEE Ostend


His meeting with Asger Jorn (1914 - 1973) in 1956 made a deep impression on Maurice Wyckaert (1923 - 1996). It shows in his paintings beginning in the 1960’s. Under the influence of the Danish artist, Wyckaerts use of colour becomes more expressive and he also begins to work with thicker layers of paint.
At the same time, Wyckaert focuses more and more exclusively on his favourite genre, the landscape. In these landscape paintings, the bright colour palette forms the structuring factor; the energy and the vitality of nature are depicted through this as well. The work of Wyckaert is neither figurative, nor abstract. He departs from the reality in order to consequently conduct a purely pictorial or material investigation into the workings of the paint. The ephemeral reality (the clouds, atmosphere, etc.) primarily forms the point of departure for the artist’s paintings. Such is the case with Rolling Clouds (1968) from the Mu.ZEE collection. The composition and the colourfulness of the painting radiate a whirling dynamic. Wyckaert discards the classical perspective here, by which the depth is nearly completely negated. Rolling Clouds consists of contrasting, bright planes of colour; the blue clouds dominating the image’s surface.


Asger Jorn
(1914 – 1973)

Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International. He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark, and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen.




"Equilibre Précaire",
1968
Collage on paper on wrapping paper on wood
84 × 56 cm

So we’ve come to the last day of our two months covering the first 63 years of the history of abstract art.
And for our last day I thought to present you with a (very personal) selection of the next 50 years.
Starting tomorrow this thread is open for everyone:
So if you, browsing the Web, come across an abstract artwork you like, feel free to post it here or signal it to me so I can post it.
I will do the same, so maybe we can keep this thread alive till next summer?

And for tomorrow: The Pic Of The Day September? I promise: no abstract paintings anymore ;-)

First a reprise from 1940:

Lee Krasner
(1908 – 1984)

Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American abstract expressionist painter, with a strong speciality in collage, who was married to Jackson Pollock. This somewhat overshadowed her contribution at the time, though there was much cross-pollination between their two styles. Krasner’s training, influenced by George Bridgman and Hans Hofmann, was the more formalized, especially in the depiction of human anatomy, and this enriched Pollock’s more intuitive and unstructured output.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kra...



Hieroglyphs No. 12
1969
gouache on paper
61 x 48,2

Patsy Krebs
American b. 1940
Lives and works in Inverness, California

In 1996 and 2010, Krebs was awarded a Pollack- Krasner Foundation Artist’s Grant. She was the subject of a 2018 solo exhibition at the Bolinas Museum, CA, and her works are included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, CA; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Denver Art Museum, CO; and the Brooklyn Museum, NY. Patsy Krebs: Painting, a monographic survey of her work, was published in 2017.



Untitled
1973
acrylic on canvas
177 x 152 cm


Bridget Riley
(Born 1931)

IRiley was born at Norwood, London, the daughter of a businessman. Her childhood was spent in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She studied at Goldsmiths' College from 1949 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. She began painting figure subjects in a semi-impressionist manner, then changed to pointillism around 1958, mainly producing landscapes. In 1960 she evolved a style in which she explored the dynamic potentialities of optical phenomena. These so-called 'Op-art' pieces, such as Fall, 1963 (Tate Gallery T00616), produce a disorienting physical effect on the eye.


Nataraja
1993
Oil paint on canvas
165 x 227 cm
Tate

In the 1980s, following a visit to Egypt, Bridget Riley's work changed significantly. Adopting what she called an 'Egyptian Palette', her work attained a new chromatic intensity. In order to focus on issues of colour, she greatly simplified the formal organisation of her paintings. Between 1980 and 1985 she reduced her compositions to severe arrangements of vertical stripes, a device which she had used previously between 1967 and 1973. In 1986, Riley's work achieved even greater visual resonance as the result of her adoption of a diagonal compositional format. The composition is first of all worked out on paper in gouache by the artist, and then transferred onto canvas with the help of assistants.
Nataraja is an exemplary diagonal stripe painting. The surface is divided vertically and diagonally, creating a multiplicity of discrete areas of colour. The complexity of the colour relationships is formidable. Many of the colours exist in as many as twenty different shades. The position of each of these elements has been carefully judged in terms of correspondence, contrast and proportion.


Monique Orsini
• Born: 1937; Quercitello, Corsica, France 
•
Monique Orsini is a contemporary painter. She was born to parents who were teachers. Her father dedicated his spare time to painting, usually reproducing the works of famous artists. Since early childhood, Monique Orsini was naturally attracted by the visual arts, encouraged by a fatherly complicity at every instance. As a student, she participated in numerous artistic training courses, and came into contact with art in general, galleries and museums in particular. Self-taught, Monique Orsini will later teach the artistic disciplines and will start up many children’s studios. The artist will gain a lot of experience from these teacher-student experiences, integrating them into the syntax of her own creative vocabulary. Through the circumstances of her artistic life, she meets and becomes friends with artists, such as Karel Appel, Olivier Debré, Bram Van Velde, Hartung and Pierre Soulages. Bengt Lindstrom becomes particularly close, as the Swedish artist supports her and pushes her to show her work.
•


Flower Flavor
2004


Etel Adnan
(born1925 in Beirut, Lebanon)
Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
Besides her literary output, Adnan continues to produce visual works in a variety of media, such as oil paintings, films and tapestries, which have been exhibited at galleries across the world.
She lives in Paris and Sausalito, California.


Untitled
2010

Judy Millar
(born 1957

Penelope Judith Millar ) is a New Zealand artist, who lives in Auckland, New Zealand and Berlin, Germany.
Millar is known for her abstract acrylic and oil paintings. While her works may recall Abstract Expressionist paintings, Millar does not consider her paintings as being 'gestural'. In an interview with Ocula in 2016, she said that,
The word that always sets my teeth on edge is ‘gesture.’ Gesture seems like something that comes gushing out from deep inside you. That is not really what I am interested in. My work is much more about drawing; it is about looking and seeing, less about ‘expressing’. I’m using gesture only in the sense that a gesture can communicate something.


No Title
2018

Patsy Krebs. I hadn’t thought of her in years. We were briefly in grad school together.

Cool!
But isn't she a bit older than you?
I hadn't heard of her before doing the research for this thread ;-)

She's younger, Dirk. I'm 84.