ART-TRIBUTE:Epic Abstraction, Pollock to Herrera, Part II
While Jackson Pollock was celebrated and canonized for his drip paintings for a significant portion of his short life, Carmen Herrera, an immigrant woman from Cuba, only began receiving recognition very recently. She had been practicing and refining the idea of abstraction since the fifties in New York, alongside her more publicized peers such as Leon Polk Smith and Barnett Newman (Part I).
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archive
A new vanguard emerged in the early 1940s, primarily in New York, where a small group of loosely affiliated artists created a stylistically diverse body of work that introduced radical new directions in art—and shifted the art world’s focus. Never a formal association, the artists known as “Abstract Expressionists” or “The New York School” did, however, share some common assumptions. The exhibition “Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera” begins in the 1940s and extends into the 21st Century to explore large-scale abstract painting, sculpture, and assemblage through more than 50 works from The Met collection, a selection of loans, and promised gifts and new acquisitions. In the wake of unprecedented destruction and loss of life during World War II, many painters and sculptors working in the 1940s grew to believe that traditional painting and figurative sculpture no longer adequately conveyed the human condition. In this context, numerous artists, including Barnett Newman, Pollock, and others associated with the New York School, were convinced that abstract styles, often on a large scale, most meaningfully evoked contemporary states of being. Many of the artists represented in the exhibition worked in large formats not only to explore aesthetic elements of line, color, shape, and texture but also to activate scale’s metaphoric potential to evoke expansive ideas and subjects, including time, history, nature, the body, and existential concerns of the self. Highlights of the exhibition include a group of paintings by Pollock and a selection of his experimental sketchbook drawings from the late 1930s and early 1940s that demonstrate the artist’s exploration of automatic techniques and his interest in Jungian psychoanalysis. Major works by Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Clyfford Still expand the representation of mid-century American painting, while a space devoted to Mark Rothko’s meditative compositions offer a powerful immersion in color, feeling, and sensation. These heralded Abstract Expressionists are joined by Hedda Sterne and Philippines native Alfonso Ossorio, who were also associated with the movement. A significant ink painting from 1966 by Japanese artist Inoue Yūichi illuminates the international practice of large-scale calligraphic abstraction. Monumental painterly canvases by Joan Mitchell and Mark Bradford evoke Abstract Expressionism’s long and profound legacy.The exhibition also features a gallery of works by the next generation of artists, including Carmen Herrera, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Alejandro Puente, and Anne Truitt, who tamed the highly pitched emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism by working in the hard edge and minimalist styles that came to define modern art in the 1960s and 1970s. An adjacent gallery with key works by Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis explore the reductive technique of staining canvas in painting. Also the exhibition includes a range of major works composed of found objects and repurposed materials, including the installation’s centerpiece, Louise Nevelson’s “Mrs. N’s Palace”, Chakaia Booker’s “Raw Attraction“ (2001), and Thornton Dial’s “Shadows of the Field” (2008), which evokes the history of American slavery.
Info: Curator: Randall Griffey, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 5th Ave, New York, Duration: 18/12/18- , Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:00-17:30, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org
