Masters of New York: The Generation of Rothko, Pollock, and Krasner — From the collection of the Jewish Museum, New York
Masters of New York—a selection of postwar art, 1945 through the present—traces the groundbreaking development of modern abstraction. Beginning in the 1940s, art in New York thrust American culture onto an international stage, making Manhattan the successor to prewar Paris as the mecca for the avant-garde. Tragic recognition of the horrors of war inspired a search for the New—a context of experimentalism that privileged the artist’s autonomy. Departure into abstraction connoted freedom from convention and social restraint. The extreme form of this aesthetic liberty assumed an entirely new and materialist spontaneity, the dripped painting method developed by Jackson Pollock—exemplified by the exceptional loan for this exhibition of the spectacular Horizontal Composition (1949, Israel Museum).
Sections of the exhibition treat: the postwar background of abstraction; works of the New York School; developments from the 1960s, through to the present. [1] Thirty-five works by major practitioners—Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Morris Louis, Aaron Siskind, Frank Stella, and others—evoke the languages of abstraction and their continuity. Through paintings, works on paper, photography, and sculpture these major steps in ambitious art remain suggestive of key themes of modernity–including the ideal of freedom of artistic expression.
Paintings by Pollock and Lee Krasner mark a turning point, exploring the painterly possibilities between extremes of order and chance. Aaron Siskind’s use of fragmentary views echoes through his photographs the formal ambiguities of the painters, including his friends Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. For Newman, the monstrosity of war and the Holocaust deepened the artist’s questioning of modern painting and his sense of an urgent need for new beginnings. Postwar existential concerns suffuse works as varied as sculptor Richard Serra’s black square, the layered poetic ironies of a print by Jasper Johns, or the traces of performative action in the work of Rebecca Horn.
FEP’s exhibition is drawn from the collections of the Jewish Museum, located in the former Warburg House in New York City. Masters of New York celebrates the art of a decisive era in global visual culture. Intense with gesture, color, and incident, these enthralling works open onto a broadening field of inquiry into abstraction and its meanings.
Notes:
[1] Introduction (Beyond the Dream); Abstract Expressionism(s); Color Field and Post Painterly; Minimalism and Beyond.
