pushing the envelope: part three - art history from abstract expressionism to neoexpressionism

"What you see is what you see."

- Frank Stella, American artist

This is the third part of a series on the art movements that shaped the arts that we know today. I only focused on painting as it is the form I'm most familiar with, and the discussions are just overviews (very brief overviews, I must add). Nonetheless, I hope you stil find this informative and worth your while. And don't forget to enjoy the pictures!

In the mid 20th century, New York City became the mecca for most postmodernist painters. Also called the New York School, the Abstract Expressionist movement centered on the individual's spontaneous assertion through his painting as opposed to adhering to particular styles or limits of the conventional form - in other words, it homed in on the concept rather than a specific look. Painters in the movement were heavility influenced by Surrealists and the avant-garde painters from Europe.

The movement fluorished from the 1940s to the 1960s with the likes of American Jackson Pollock, who was best known for his "action" (paint texture as major element) paintings and Mark Rothko, who on the other hand introduced the other tendency which was the "color field" (unified color and shape as major elements). Other notable painters in this movement are Willem de Kooning and Robert Burns Motherwell.

Using subjects taken from mass culture, artists in the United States and Britain revolutionized Pop Art (or popular art) from the 1950s onwards as a reaction against what they perceived as Abstract Expressionism's overly intellectual and subjective nature that is far from reality. Aiming to diminish the divide between life art, Pop Artists celebrated the environment of everyday life using and/or incorporating as subjects bottles, cans, celebrities and similar objects in their paintings and collages.

The initial thrust that propelled the movement to the public's awareness was provided by Jasper Johns and David Hockney who was one of the first painters to portray a brand-name commercial product in a painting. Although it was Andy Warhol who carried the movement to the limit with his mass-production technique of silk-screening with subjects ranging from Campbell's Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe.

The 1960s ushered the coming of this movement in the United States. Making use of visual effects and optical illusions through bright colors (or juxtaposed black and white planes or lines) and patterns that suggest hidden images or movement, the Op Art also came to be known as perceptual abstraction and borrowed heavily from the practices of the Bauhaus. The major elements in this movement was the figure-ground relarionship which provides the viewer with vibrating texture surfaces emanating from two planes put side by side. The movement's popularity crossed over to fashion and commercial design.

The major proponents of the movement were British artist Bridget Riley and Hungarian-born artist Victor Vasarely. The consolidation of the movement was completed after the holding of "The Responsive Eye" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1965.

Minimal Art also largely developed in the United States in the early 1960s. The movement was also in answer to the dominant Abstrract Expressionist movement. Minimal artists were predominanly interested in the logical systems and the principles of universal physics and worked mostly with geometic shapes and other simpler forms arranged in a series of modules. Moreover, they preferred straight lines as used in industrial design over unrestrained brushstrokes.

Major proponents of the movement were Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly

The popularity of Pop Art - particularly its life-like representation, paved the way for the birth of New Realism in the 1970s and 1980s. Though Realism did not actually become extinct, New Realist painters added a new dimension to the Realist form and style - the aesthetic elements of abstract art.

Richard Estes and his photorealist paintings relied mostly on photography to come out with a comprehensively detailed but impersonal take on realist painting with his cityscapes. Other proponents included Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz.

The return to the human form was advocated by Neoexpressionism, a movement that started in the 1970s and gained impetus in the early 1980s after a long period of domination by abstract art. As with Expressionism, the revival movement highlighted a narrative quality which are characteristically effected with grand gestures that convey emotional intensity as opposed to the impersonal formalist purity of abstract art. The movement was born in Germany and Italy and made its way to American shores where it made its greatest impact.

The European Neoexpressionist contingent was led by Anselm Kiefer and George Baselitz while their American counterparts included Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat who incorporated his poetry and Afro-Caribbean heritage into his works.