It wasn’t SPC professor Jennifer Guest’s drawing that inspired this article — it was the story behind it.
Most abstract expressionist works look like a bunch of random shapes and lines without some backstory. That’s actually what I like about it — that its stories aren’t written on the canvas. They don’t immediately reveal themselves.
“There’s an academic language to it,” Guest says, “it’s for insiders only.” But if you take the time, take a look and read the stories, you can finally begin to appreciate this revolutionary art form. That’s why, in advance of the Tampa Museum of Art’s spring Abstract Expressionism: A Social Revolution exhibit, we’re telling the stories of abstract expressionism.
Guest, for the most part, draws it like she sees it. People in the art world call this “representational.” Everything on the paper or canvas represents something in real life. Paintings and drawings like these are easy to relate to.
We see the terror in “The Scream” and we are transported into our worst nightmares. We see Jesus sitting next to his disciples in “The Last Supper” and we dread the upcoming betrayal. We look at Picasso’s “Guernica” and, even through its abstractions, we can see and feel the terrors of war. Each of these paintings tells a story — we call this narrative art.
But what if all we see is a red square, a purple circle, and a broad green brush stroke? What if we’re looking at a bunch of paint splattered on a canvas? What does it mean? What stories do paintings like these tell?
These are the types of images we see in abstract expressionism, an American art movement popular in the 1950s.
“It’s all about shape and gesture and color, and making marks too,” says Guest, “but I think there’s still a narrative to it.”
Abstract expressionist paintings, Guest says, tell the story of their creation. When you look at a Jackson Pollock painting, through paint splattered on a canvas, you can almost picture him, standing over a large canvas, can of paint in one hand and brush in the other, paint dripping onto the canvas below.
Pollock wasn’t the only person painting in wild, physical gestures in 1940s New York City. Hans Hoffman used a drip technique in “Wind” around 1942-1944, three years before Pollock painted “Full Fathom Five.”
Willem de Kooning, instead of dripping paint, was practicing his own layered process of adding paint and then scraping it away.
Franz Kline was drawing chairs in the pages of a phone book when de Kooning showed him the projector that would change Kline’s art forever. Kline projected a section of the phone book onto a wall. The drawings, letters, and numbers were enlarged to the point of being abstract. According to the Museum of Modern Art, these black letters and numbers inspired the bold black lines in Kline’s monochromatic paintings.
There was a new style of painting in America, and New York City was its mecca. Prominent NYC art critic Harold Rosenberg called this novel type of art “action painting.” “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined,” he writes, “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
From New York City, the movement spread across the United States. Sarasota’s Syd Solomon, whose work is currently on display in the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, missed the grand buildup to abstract expressionism in NYC. It was during WWII, and Solomon was busy designing aerial camouflage for the U.S. Army.
Solomon continued working from above after the war, dropping fine mists of aerosol paint onto canvas. Standing in front of Solomon’s “Westcoastalscape,” MFA curator Katherine Pill points to about 6-inch-wide swaths of black paint along the bottom of the canvas. Solomon often applied paint with rollers, she tells me.
On the west coast, Richard Diebenkorn was defining California’s school of abstract expressionism. Like Solomon, Diebenkorn’s wartime experience forced him to look at things from above — Diebenkorn was a Marine cartographer.
From above, every landscape looks like an irregular grid. These grids appeared in Diebenkorn’s paintings as irregular zones of color. Life magazine called them “abstract landscapes.” The paintings had no obvious subject matter to them, but were grounded enough in real landscapes to form an interesting contrast to Pollock’s drip paintings.
Flash-forward to 2014, and Jennifer Guest is living her own abstract expressionist story. Guest first experimented with abstract expressionism while working on her MFA at Texas Christian University. Her professors and mentors there suggested it was the “duty” of an academic artist to “place themselves in an art historical context.” For someone who works in colored pencil, this was a challenge.
At first, Guest took the advice literally, drawing her self-portrait with an abstract expressionist painting hanging on the wall behind her. The painting in the background was Texas artist Richard Smith’s representation of Richard Diebenkorn’s “Berkeley No. 46.”
Then Guest took things a step further, doing her own representational drawing of the painting in colored pencil. As with most abstract expressionist works, this required hardly any planning. But instead of painting for the sake of painting, as many abstract expressionists did, Guest was drawing for the sake of drawing.
Like I said, it was her story that inspired this series.
Continue to Part 2 in the series.
This article appears in Dec 27, 2018 – Jan 3, 2019.
