New York Art New York\'s Post WWII

New York Art

New York's Post WWII Art Scene

After World War II, so many parts of Europe were in ruin. Economies were shattered, new governments worked to gain mandates for their authority and the people of Europe's countless and once rich cultural centers struggled to establish new identities. And following more than a decade of fascism, genocide and territorial war, many of the intellectually and culturally elite talents had departed the content for a context more hospitable to freedom and creativity. Relative to what they found in the spread of fascism, the United States would prove itself not just as the newly dominant military and commercial power in the world but also art center of the world. With devastation persistent throughout the great cities of Europe, New York emerged as the capital of the modern art world and so many of the innovations that would extend there from in the ensuing decades.

In many ways, what began to occur in New York in the years immediately and eventually following the war represented a continuity from the evolution taking place in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That is, a focus on the abstract processes of the psyche, of the mind, of emotion and of the human condition would enter into this mode of visual expression. From Picasso's cubism to Duchamp's dadism to Dali's surrealism, the focus of European art before and during the war had largely been to find ways of visually expressing internal processes. This exact notion found flight in the works of those artists who made New York their home following the war, but in a mode that was inherently more American in its material abstractions. And on this point, artists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock began to move abstract expressionism into a place of dominance. The Dayton Art Institute characterizes the work of Rothko, Pollock and their colleagues as Abstract Expressionism and the output of this group of painters would define the next phase in visual art.

This would include such figures as Norman Lewis, whose Twilight Sounds (1947), used highly complex, tightly intertwined and irregular geometric shapes to create fields of abstract imagery (http://arthistory.about.com/od/from_exhibitions/ig/action_abstraction/jm-aa_08_04.htm); Willem de Kooning, whose Fire Island (1946) recklessly defied conventions of visual appeal to express human tumult (http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/willem-de-kooning/fire-island) and Arshile Gorky, whose The Liver is the Cock's Comb (1943) offers an arrangement of colored shapes tangled in a circus of compelling visual forms (http://calitreview.com/5339). A contrast to the colors used by Gorky, Franz Kline's Chief (1950) offers stark black figures of menacing ambiguity (MoMA); Barnett Newman whose Onement 1(1948) experimented with shading textures in individual shades, brown in this case (http://paulcorio.blogspot.com/2008/07/paintings-i-like-pt-21.html) and Clyfford Still, whose Untitled 1957 work (http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/310) employs simple shade variants on a small set of correlated colors to bring out aggressive emotional responses.

In these examples, abstract expressionism was finding myriad different incarnations, though most shared a similar point of ideological origin. According to the Dayton Art Institute, this group of artists "recognized that while abstract art might lack a recognizable subject, it did not have to give up content. And like the age in which they lived, that content was complex: they drew upon diverse philosophies, myths, Freudian and Jungian psychology and even the symbolism of native peoples. The resulting works were rich with meaning. As Rothko stated, these artists 'favor[ed] the simple expression of the complex thought.'" (DAI, p. 1)

Certainly, evidence of this claim can be observed in some of Rothko's most prominent works. Among them, we consider "Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea," a work that Rothko completed in 1944. Consistent with Rothko's assertion, the piece is decidedly understated. Muted creams, beiges and grays offer an atmospheric but spare backdrop for two figures that imply gender in their posture and attire. We can observe a female figure on the left hand side, with the hem of a dress, a hat and an articulately designed print on her blouse. The male figure on the right hand side appears to be engaged in interaction with her. Though some interpretations have placed the figures in a place between the sky and the sea, the 'slow swirl' described in the title of the piece may perhaps be most explicitly represented in the abdomen of the presumably male figure. (MoMA)

With respect to the innovation reflected here, what is so remarkable is that for the simplicity described here above, the work actually presents figures which appear to be frenetic with physical movement, initiating with this swirl and extending to the male form which appears almost to be gesturing either in courtship or plaintiveness to the female form. The 'swirl,' in a far less literal sense, is the enveloping passion between the figures. Whether this passion is formed in love, spurning or mere familiarity is left to our interpretation. And in this complex intercourse between a simplicity of expression and yet a clear display of more complex human experiences, there is an opportunity for interpretation driven by the psychological and emotional experience of the beholder. In this regard, we can begin to see not just the visual but also the philosophical continuity from the European art scene to that burgeoning in New York.