ABOUT THE ARTISTS

JACKSON POLLOCK (ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM)

Although he was born in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, Jackson Pollock grew up in Arizona and California. He was expelled from two different high schools before moving to New York City in 1930. He studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League and worked for the WPA’s Federal Art Project from 1938–1942. Pollock signed a gallery contract with Peggy Guggenheim in 1943, the same year Clement Greenberg first saw his work and proclaimed him to be “the greatest painter this country has produced.”

In 1945, Pollock married fellow painter Lee Krasner, and the two of them moved to a studio on the south shore of Long Island. It was during this period that Pollock developed and practiced his famous “drip method” in which he would drip, fling, and pour paint directly on an unstretched canvas on the floor. Pollock abruptly stopped this technique in 1951 and died five years later. 

HELEN FRANKENTHALER (COLOR FIELD)

Born in Manhattan in 1928, Helen Frankenthaler received her first modernist tutelage at the Dalton School, where she studied with the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. She later attended Bennington College in Vermont and worked with Paul Feeley, the artist responsible for making that area a hotbed of activity around Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting.

In 1950, a year after Frankenthaler graduated, she organized an exhibition of art by Bennington alumnae in New York City, where she first met the critic Clement Greenberg, with whom she would have a five-year relationship. With Greenberg, Frankenthaler made formative visits to Jackson Pollock’s studio during the period he was executing his Black Paintings. Intensifying and reconfiguring his technique, Frankenthaler began to work directly on the floor using a brush and sponge to assist the seeping of the thinned oil paint into unprimed canvas. Her breakthrough painting Mountains and Sea (1952) presented overlapping areas of near-translucent blues and pinks as resonant as they are reticent. Morris Louis, recalling his own crucial visit to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953 with Greenberg and Kenneth Noland, called the painting a “bridge between Pollock and what was possible.”

MORRIS LOUIS (COLOR FIELD)

Morris Louis Bernstein, who would later drop Bernstein from his legal name, was born in Baltimore in 1912 and studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1933. Employed from 1936 to 1940 by the Easel Division of the Federal Art Project, Louis lived in New York, coming into contact with artists such as Arshile Gorky, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jack Tworkov. In 1952, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he, along with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Anne Truitt, and others, would become part of the Washington Color School. The period prior to his untimely death in 1962 was a feverishly productive one, witnessing the artist’s completion of some 150 paintings—including Beta Kappa, from his Unfurled series.     

Working with a thinned acrylic paint made to his specifications, Louis would pour diluted color and manipulate its flow to stain the unprimed canvas. Although we know from his own account that this method was generally inspired by a 1953 visit to Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio, mystery—and myth—veils his specific handling of paint and canvas. He would not allow anyone to observe him working, and it has been left to conjecture just how his mural-scaled pieces could have been realized in a modest studio space that could not accommodate a finished, unfurled (i.e., stretched) painting of this size.

YAYOI KUSAMA (PATTERN)

Born in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1929, Yayoi Kusama moved to the United States in 1957 after corresponding with the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe. She first settled in Seattle, where she lived for a year before making New York her home. Kusama remained there until 1973, when, suffering from psychological disturbance, she decided to return to Japan.

Kusama has suggested that her Infinity Net paintings—which started in the 1950s and continue into the present—are manifestations of recurring hallucinations that obscure her vision with an overlay of dots and nets. However, this autobiographical explanation should be taken with a grain of salt, given the evident sensitivity and care with which the nets are rendered. Comparison is appropriate to Jackson Pollock’s webs of paint, which, like Kusama’s, are at once densely physical and potentially psychosexual. And yet Kusama’s webs are clearly more ordered, more structured, more patiently obsessive.

ALMA THOMAS (PATTERN)

Though Alma Thomas was the first graduate of Howard University’s fine arts program in 1924, her life as a junior high school teacher superseded her career as an artist. It was only with her retirement in 1960, at age sixty-nine, that she could dedicate herself to painting. At that time, Thomas enrolled in courses at American University. There, she studied with artists associated with the Jefferson Place Gallery, which was a leading venue for the Washington Color School.

Unlike her peers and contemporaries working in the Washington milieu, Thomas never abandoned the paintbrush or adopted raw canvas. While a generation of artists was renegotiating the relationships among medium, support, and the hand of the artist via activities such as staining and pouring, Thomas remained a preeminent dauber in the best Cézannian tradition, she of the consciously cautious and hesitant hand.

PHILIP GUSTON (TEXTURE)

Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913 to Jewish parents escaping persecution in Ukraine. He attended the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, from which he was subsequently expelled after distributing—with his friend and classmate Jackson Pollock—a broadside lambasting the conservatism of the faculty. With the exception of a year at the Otis Art Institute, Guston was an autodidact who spent much of the 1930s and early 1940s making murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) artist program, some of them politically accented. Though Guston is now most associated with his notorious switch from abstraction to cartoonish figuration in the late 1960s, when he adopted (or in some cases retrieved from his earliest work) the Klan figure, the boot, the cigarette, the lightbulb, the clock, the pile of food—all common motifs in his personal, allegorical, and political turn—this only came after struggling with the precepts of Abstract Expressionism throughout the 1950s.

ROBERT RYMAN (TEXTURE)

Robert Ryman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1930. In 1953, after a two-year stint in the United States Army Reserve Corps during the Korean War, in which he was assigned to a military band, Ryman moved to New York City to pursue music and a career as a jazz saxophonist. From the time he arrived in New York until 1960, he worked as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, where he would meet fellow employees Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Lucy Lippard. Anecdote has Ryman, taken with the newly acquired Abstract Expressionist paintings he kept watch on during the workday, purchasing materials and beginning to experiment with painting sometime in 1955. A term like “experiment” can connote both the tinkering of the amateur and the formal trial-and-error of the scientist; the dual valences of the verb fit an artistic practice that is as improvisational as it is analytical.

With some exceptions, particularly in his 1960s work, Ryman adheres to a palette of whites (or slight variations on white), a square format that resists being claimed by figure or landscape suggestions (or, indeed, by any hierarchy), and an application of paint that evinces the procedure of touch rather than some emotional correlate to gesture. Given these choices and acts of reduction and distillation, his work has frequently been understood as summations of painterly process (revealing the base material relationship among paintbrush, paint, and support) and laborious negations of the promise once held by painting as site of spontaneity and subjectivity.

JASPER JOHNS (SHAPE)

After finishing his compulsory military service in 1953, Jasper Johns settled in New York City, where his orbit of friends included the artist Robert Rauschenberg, the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, and the composer John Cage. By the time Johns created Target, he had already embarked on a series of works that used familiar symbols—such as the American flag and numbers—as the ostensible subject matter of his paintings.

Scholarship on Johns frequently casts him in an antagonistic relationship to Abstract Expressionism, the dominant painterly idiom of mid-century New York. With the notable exception of Willem de Kooning and his c. 1950 paintings of fierce-looking women, the most celebrated work of the immediate postwar period could be said to espouse an ideology of subjectless abstraction in which bravura gestural acts manifested the unleashed id, or true self.  Contrast this with Johns’s description of his chosen motifs as “things the mind already knows.” He selected overdetermined images precisely because they were, in his words, “preformed, conventional, depersonalized, factual, exterior” —which implies that Johns’s work is not about the self but rather the thing itself.

AL LOVING (SHAPE)

Born in Detroit in 1935, Al Loving attended the University of Illinois and received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan in 1965. In 1968, Loving moved to New York City, where he spent much of his life and professional career. He came to prominence only one year later, in 1969, when he had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art—a noteworthy achievement for any artist, but particularly given Loving’s youth (he was thirty-four at the time) and the fact that he was the first African American to receive such a distinction at that museum.

The work he was making during this period was indebted to Hard Edge and Color Field painting, a studied marriage of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. Like Sam Gilliam, Loving pointedly refused the pressures on black artists to paint so-called black subject matter. Instead, he had a calling card. In the words of April Kingsley, “Loving … developed the image with which he became identified, an illusionary cube made out of prismatic color planes in dark, middle, and light values, edged with narrow, zinging, separating, black, or white lines. The original inspiration was Josef Albers’s square, but Loving turned it into more of a crystalline structure.” However, Loving soon became dissatisfied with the limits of what he saw as a circumscribed practice. He said, “I felt stuck inside that box; I mean, this was 1968—the Democratic Convention, this was the war—and I’m doing these pictures.” He also said that he wanted to determine “whether there is black art and what it looks like.” Loving’s efforts to break out of the “box” attest to the fact that this rejection of “pictures” was a refusal of tired form, but not of the protean language of abstraction itself.