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Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg () (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock. Early life Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. Greenberg attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, then Syracuse University, graduating with an A.B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. After college, already as fluent in Yiddish and English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. Dur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Art in Paris, Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates (critic), Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine ''Der Sturm'', regarding German Expressionism. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky. Style Technically, an important predecessor is surrealism, with its emphasis on spontaneous, Surrealist automatism, automatic, or subconscious creation. Jackson Pollock's dripping paint onto a canvas laid on the floor is a technique that has its roots in the work of André Masson, Max Ernst, and David Alfaro Siqu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kitsch
Kitsch ( ; loanword from German) is a term applied to art and design that is perceived as naïve imitation, overly-eccentric, gratuitous, or of banal taste. The avant-garde opposed kitsch as melodramatic and superficial affiliation with the human condition and its natural standards of beauty. In the first half of the 20th century, kitsch referred to products of pop culture that lacked the depth of fine art. However, since the emergence of Pop Art in the 1950s, kitsch is sometimes re-appreciated in knowingly ironic, humorous or earnest fashion. To brand visual art as "kitsch" is often still pejorative, though not exclusively. Art deemed kitsch may be enjoyed in an entirely positive and sincere manner. For example, it carries the ability to be quaint or "quirky" without being offensive on the surface, as in the ''Dogs Playing Poker'' paintings. Kitsch can refer to music, literature, or any work, and relates to camp, as they both incorporate irony and extravagance. Hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medium Specificity
Medium specificity is a consideration in aesthetics and art criticism. It is most closely associated with modernism, but it predates it. Overview According to Clement Greenberg, who helped popularize the term, medium specificity holds that "the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique to the nature" of a particular medium. For example, in painting, literal flatness and abstraction are emphasised rather than illusionism and figuration. Medium specific can be seen to mean that ''"the artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material."'' This would probably include the techniques used to manipulate the materials. ''"Medium-specificity is based on the distinct materiality of artistic media."'' As early as 1776 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing ''"contends that an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flatness (art)
In art criticism of the 1960s and 1970s, flatness described the smoothness and absence of curvature or surface detail of a two-dimensional work of art. Views Critic Clement Greenberg believed that flatness, or two-dimensional, was an essential and desirable quality in painting, a criterion which implies rejection of painterliness and impasto. The valorization of flatness led to a number of art movements, including minimalism and post-painterly abstractionism. Modernism of the arts happened during the second half of the 19th century and extended into most of the 20th. This period of art is identified by art forms consisting of an image on a flat two-dimensional surface. This art evolution began in the 1860s and culminated 50 years later. By this time almost all three-dimensional works had been eliminated. This new approach to painting was to create a visual appearance of realism. Looking at a surface with only two-dimensions our perception of depth is an illusion. The reduction o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying 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. Biography Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada. In 1925 he visited New York, briefly studying at the Art Students League. He attended Spokane University from 1926 to 1927 and returned in 1931 with a fellowship, graduating in 1933. That fall, he became a teaching fellow, then faculty member at Washington State College (now Washi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate simplistic forms to emphasize this feeling. Early life Barnett Newman was born in New York City, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He studied philosophy at the City College of New York and worked in his father's business manufacturing clothing. He later made a living as a teacher, writer, and critic. From the 1930s on he made paintings, said to be in an expressionist style, but eventually destroyed all these works. Newman met Annalee Greenhouse in 1934 while both were working as substitute teachers at Grover Cleveland High School; they were married on June 30, 1936.Roberta Smith (May 13, 2000)Annalee Newman, 91, Muse And Support for the Artist''The New York Times''. Career ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism.de la Croix, Horst and Richard G. Tansey. ''Gardner's Art Through the Ages'', 7th Ed., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 857-8. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932.Chipp, Herschel B. ''Theories of Modern Art'', Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968, p. 511–2. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means.Seitz, William C. ''Hans Hofmann'', New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Willem De Kooning
Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) 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. In the years after World War II, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to as abstract expressionism or "action painting", and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Nell Blaine, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart. De Kooning's retrospective held at MoMA in 2011–2012 made him one of the best-known artists of the 20th century. Biography Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on April 24, 1904. His parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
All-over Painting
All-over painting refers to the non-differential treatment of the surface of a work of two-dimensional art, for instance a painting. This concept is most popularly thought of as emerging in relation to the so-called "drip" paintings of Jackson Pollock and the "automatic writing" or "abstract calligraphy" of Mark Tobey in the 1950s, though the applicability of the term all-over painting would be wider than that. "All-over painting" is not a formal style of painting and the term does not represent an "art movement." Some painting under the heading color field painting displays the "all-over" painting style. Such a painting would fail to treat the top, for instance, differently from the bottom; the left than the right. Uniform treatment of all sections of the surface are the hallmark of all-over painting. All-over paintings would lack a dominant point of interest, or any indication of which way is "up." Some paintings by Cy Twombly have had this term applied to them. Clement Greenberg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pron ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frances Stonor Saunders
Frances Hélène Jeanne Stonor Saunders FRSL (born 14 April 1966) is a British journalist and historian. Early life Frances Stonor Saunders is the daughter of Julia Camoys Stonor and Donald Robin Slomnicki Saunders. Her father, who died in 1997, was a Jewish refuge from Bucharest, Romania, born to a British national with Polish and Russian ancestry. Jews named Slomnicki died in the Belzec extermination camp; the fate of two great-aunts Saunders was unable to determine. Her parents divorced when Saunders was eight. Career A few years after graduating (in 1987)"Frances Stonor Saunders" (biography). ''Shadow Company.'' with a first-class honours degree in English from |
American Committee For Cultural Freedom
The American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) was the U.S. affiliate of the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Overview The ACCF and CCF were organizations that, during the Cold War, sought to encourage intellectuals to be critical of the Soviet Union and Communism, and to combat, according to a writer for ''The New York Times'', "the continuing strength of the Soviet myth among the Western cultural elite. Despite all that had happened - the Moscow show trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Nazi-Soviet pact, the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the Russian attack on Finland, the takeovers in Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe, the mounting evidence of the gulag - Joseph Stalin still retained the loyalty of many writers, artists and scientists who viewed the Soviet Union as a Progressivism, progressive alternative to the 'reactionary,' 'war-mongering' United States of America, United States." The CCF was funded by the CIA, as well as the ACCF (via the CIA officer James Burnham ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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