ABSTRACT

EXPRESIONNISIM

Submitted by:

Perez, Jess

Pimentel, Godwin Harold

Reyes, Lee Marwyn

Salva, Mathew Anthony

Semira, Jayson Joshua

Tarcelo, Alen

Valencia, Rose Belle

Bunyi, Cherie Mhel

Abstract Expressionism, broad movement in American painting that began in

the late 1940s and became a dominant trend in Western painting during the 1950s.

The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock,

Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Others included Clyfford Still,

Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert

Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt,

Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. Most of these artists

worked, lived, or exhibited in New York City. Although it is the accepted designation,

Abstract Expressionism is not an accurate description of the body of work created by

these artists. Indeed, the movement comprised many different painterly styles varying

in both technique and quality of expression. Despite this variety, Abstract

Expressionist paintings share several broad characteristics. They are basically

abstract—i.e., they depict forms not drawn from the visible world. They emphasize

free, spontaneous, and personal emotional expression, and they exercise

considerable freedom of technique and execution to attain this goal, with a particular

emphasis laid on the exploitation of the variable physical character of paint to evoke

expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism).

They show similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of that paint in

a form of psychic improvisation akin to the automatism of the Surrealists, with a

similar intent of expressing the force of the creative unconscious in art. They display

the abandonment of conventionally structured composition built up out of discrete and

segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, undifferentiated field,
network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. And finally, the paintings fill

large canvases to give these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and

engrossing power.

Roy Lichtenstein Drowning Girl

Roy Lichtenstein was one of the most influential and innovative artists of the

second half of the twentieth century. He is preeminently identified with Pop Art, a

movement he helped originate, and his first fully achieved paintings were based on

imagery from comic strips and advertisements and rendered in a style mimicking the

crude printing processes of newspaper reproduction. These paintings reinvigorated

the American art scene and altered the history of modern art. Lichtenstein’s success

was matched by his focus and energy, and after his initial triumph in the early 1960s,

he went on to create an oeuvre of more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings,

sculptures, murals and other objects celebrated for their wit and invention.
 Roy Fox Lichtenstein was born on October 27, 1923, in New York City, the first of

two children born to Milton and Beatrice Werner Lichtenstein. Milton Lichtenstein

(1893–1946) was a successful real estate broker, and Beatrice Lichtenstein (1896–

1991), a homemaker, had trained as a pianist, and she exposed Roy and his sister

Rénee to museums, concerts and other aspects of New York culture. Roy showed

artistic and musical ability early on: he drew, painted and sculpted as a teenager, and

spent many hours in the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of

Modern Art. He played piano and clarinet, and developed an enduring love of jazz,

frequenting the nightspots in Midtown to hear it.

Drowning Girl (1963)

Artwork description & Analysis: In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein gained renown as

a leading Pop artist for paintings sourced from comic books, specifically DC Comics.

Although artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had previously

integrated popular imagery into their works, no one hitherto had focused on cartoon

imagery as exclusively as Lichtenstein. His work, along with that of Andy Warhol,

heralded the beginning of the Pop art movement, and, essentially, the end of Abstract

Expressionism as the dominant style. Lichtenstein did not simply copy comic pages

directly, he employed a complex technique that involved cropping images to create

entirely new, dramatic compositions, as in Drowning Girl, whose source image

included the woman's boyfriend standing on a boat above her. Lichtenstein also

condensed the text of the comic book panels, locating language as another, crucial

visual element; re-appropriating this emblematic aspect of commercial art for his

paintings further challenged existing views about definitions of "high" art.

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an American

painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. Paul Jackson

Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, the youngest of five sons. His parents,

Stella May (née McClure) and LeRoy Pollock, were born and grew up in Tingley, Iowa,

and were educated at Tingley High School. His father had been born with the

surname McCoy, but took the surname of his adoptive parents, neighbors who
adopted him after his own parents had died within a year of each other. Stella and

LeRoy Pollock were Presbyterian; they were of Irish and Scots-Irish descent,

respectively. LeRoy Pollock was a farmer and later a land surveyor for the

government, moving for different jobs. Stella, proud of her family's heritage as

weavers, made and sold dresses as a teenager. He was widely noticed for his

technique of pouring or splashing liquid household paint on to a horizontal surface

(‘drip technique’), enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was

also called ‘action painting’, since he used the force of his whole body to paint, often in

a frenetic dancing style.

This painting was among the first drip paintings Pollock completed. Its surface

is clotted with an assortment of detritus, from cigarette butts to coins and a key. While

the top-most layers were created by pouring lines of black and shiny silver house

paint, a large part of the paint's crust was applied by brush and palette knife, creating

an angular counterpoint to the weaving lines. "Like a seismograph," noted writer

Werner Haftmann "the painting recorded the energies and states of the man who

drew it." Since their first exhibition, critics have come to recognize that drip paintings

such as this might also be read as major developments in the history of modern

painting. With them, Pollock found a new abstract language for the unconscious, one

which moved beyond the Freudian symbolism of the Surrealists. He broke up the rigid,

shallow space of Cubist pictures, replacing it instead with a dense web of space, like

an unfathomable galaxy of stars. He even updated Impressionism, creating pictures

that seem to glitter with the effects of light, and yet which also suggest the pitch dark

and anxious interior of the human mind.

Full Fathom Five is one of Pollock’s earliest “drip” paintings. While its lacelike

top layers consist of poured skeins of house paint, Pollock built up the underlayer

using a brush and palette knife. A close look reveals an assortment of objects
embedded in the surface, including cigarette butts, nails, thumbtacks, buttons, coins,

and a key. Though many of these items are obscured by paint, they contribute to the

work’s dense and encrusted appearance. The title, suggested by a neighbor, comes

from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, in which the character Ariel describes a death

by shipwreck: “Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones are coral made / Those

are pearls that were his eyes.”

The artwork embodied different thing used by the artist, which has deeper

meaning of it that may affects one emotion. This work will value worth for the other

artist if they will do understand well what the artist means. It is good for the artist to be

well knowned byt this artwork.

Arshile Gorky The Leaf of the Artichoke Is an Owl (1944)

Arshile Gorky was recognized as the Father of Abstract Expressionism, while

he is deemed to be an exceptional painter due to his distinctive artwork and powerful

sentiment behind every painting, there are many untold mysteries regarding Gorky

due to his uncanny nature.

Arshile Gorky. He was born in Armenian around 1902-1905. He had three sisters, and

parents who guide and raised him. The misfortune hits their family in 1910. Turkey,

Gorky’s homeland is in feud with another nation which soon erupted in wars. Not

wanting to be in service for Turkish army, Gorky’s father abandons them, and

migrated in United States to start anew life. In 1915, Gorky and his family fled to

Armenia to avoid Turkish oppression and enslavement. However, his mother did not

last long and died from starvation on Yerevan in 1919.Gorky later proclaimed his

desire to be a great painter. He did not receive any formal training and was primarily

self taught by observing works from museums, galleries and books on art. In the latter

part, he learned more by being an apprentice to some famous artist Paul Cezzane,

Joanne Miro, and Pablo Picasso.

The Leaf of the Artichoke Is an Owl (1944)

André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist group, assigned this work its title based

on a meal he shared with Gorky, during which Breton associated an artichoke leaf

with an owl. Both artists were members of the European artistic avant-garde living in

exile in New York during World War II. Gorky's interest in unpremeditated or

automatic gestures was aided by his use of thin, liquid paint, which he poured onto the

canvas, allowing it to seep freely into the support. The shapes in this painting, while

vaguely recognizable, never fully describe any one thing and therefore encourage

free association— a mainstay of Surrealist intellectual activities.