Jackson Pollock, circling like a dancer around a canvas spread out on the floor, dripping and pouring paint – this film image of an “action painter” not only confirmed Pollock’s standing as the leading protagonist of one of the most influential avant-gardes of the twentieth century. It also became an unforgettable icon of modern art in general. Our exhibition, Action Painting, is devoted to the phenomenon of abstract gestural painting, which emerged in Europe and the United States in the wake of the Second World War. Despite all the differences between European L’Art informel and American Abstract Expressionism, in hindsight the similarities appear to predominate. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic dared a revolutionary new beginning by transcending the borders of traditional art. By radically concentrating on the spontaneous painting gesture, the artist’s personality and state of mind were to be directly manifested on the canvas.
On our journey through a modern myth we encounter, in addition to Pollock, other famous painters like Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Sam Francis, Roberto Matta, and Pierre Soulages, as well as some who, once celebrated, were soon forgotten and have recently been rediscovered. Paintings by Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Arshile Gorky, Wols, Morris Louis, and Kazuo Shiraga, reflect the multifarious visual potentials of color and gesture. Representing the following generation are Eva Hesse and Cy Twombly, who expanded the concept of Action Painting. The exhibition comprises about one hundred works by twenty-seven artists from Europe, South and North America, and Asia.
Basically we focus on two forms of expression in abstract painting that depend on “action”: first, the painting gesture as a “protocol” on canvas; and second, paint traces left up to the workings of controlled chance. Combinations of these two working principles are common, as is especially obvious in Pollock’s case. A large group of important Pollocks, done between 1946 and 1953 and showing the full range of his expressive devices, forms the center of the exhibition. The group includes such legendary works as Out of the Web, 1949, from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Number 7, 1950, from the MoMA in New York; and Search, 1955, the last picture the artist completed (courtesy Galerie Hauser & Wirth). Pollock’s works are manifestations of his physical movements; yet the most fascinating thing about his drippings and pourings is the fact that the paint, between leaving his hand and hitting the canvas, was no longer subject to the artist’s will.
This technique was adopted and ramified by various other artists. One is Helen Frankenthaler, who instead of applying paint in the usual manner used like a dye, letting it seep into the canvas. Morris Louis took this method further. His large-format “stained paintings,” radically reduced visual configurations, are among the absolute sensations in the exhibition – a significant series the likes of which has not been seen in Europe for many years. Gerhard Hoehme and Eva Hesse, inspired by gestural painting, are represented here by large compositions that show their concern with the three-dimensionality of paint, as if extending the weave of Pollock’s entangled paint filaments. Lynda Benglis with her cast paint sculptures, and Arman with his Accumulations of squeezed paint tubes, developed Action Painting in a compelling and ironic direction as they visualized the results of a creative process, indeed a performance.
The possible variations in the use of color and line to express movement are virtually infinite. This becomes clear in the exhibition, in which groups of works by the artists are arranged for the most part chronologically. Each can be seen to have his or her unique touch, as personal as handwriting. In small-format paintings and drawings, frequently influenced by the Surrealist idea of écriture automatique, artists such as Jean Fautrier, Wols, and Hans Hartung produced gestural imagery in which – especially in Fautrier’s case – there is no distinct line between figuration and abstraction. An entire exhibition room is devoted to Wols, who in Jean-Paul Sartre’s eyes embodied the existentialist artist par excellence. The notion of a painterly calligraphy immediately brings Cy Twombly to mind, a series of whose works is likewise on view at the Fondation Beyeler. In sharp contrast to Twombly’s delicate inscriptions stand the “paint orgies” of Kazuo Shiraga, the leading representative of the Japanese artists group “Gutai.” Inspired above all by Pollock and executed with his feet, Shiraga’s works were preceded by phases of intensive meditation.
The opposition between figuration and abstraction, once a topic of heated critical debate, was apparently less crucial to the artists themselves. This is confirmed by a juxtaposition of selected works by the “Cobra” artists Karel Appel and Asger Jorn with significant paintings by the star Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning. All of these artists, like Pollock himself, took the figure as point of departure for their compositions.
Especially interesting are the close ties that existed between Europe and America. Arshile Gorky, a survivor of the Armenian genocide who emigrated to the U.S., is a case in point. After adapting the approaches of his European ideals, Cézanne and Picasso, Gorky both built on them and liberated himself from them by developing a unique gestural style. Like Gorky, the German-born Hans Hofmann is still too little known in Europe. After beginning under the influence of Henri Matisse and moving to America, Hofmann not only became a pioneer of gestural painting, experimenting with dripping techniques even before Pollock, but the teacher of an entire generation of artists of the New York School. These included Lee Krasner, who is unjustifiably viewed primarily as Pollock’s wife – her paintings show her to have been an outstanding abstract artist. Artists like Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, who lived in Europe for long periods, likewise freely developed impulses from Claude Monet and others, and combined these with experiences gained from the New York School. Francis’s outstanding painting Round the World, from the Beyeler Collection, forms the hub of a compelling group of the artist’s works from the late 1950s.
In the U.S. as in Europe, the development of abstract gestural art went hand in hand with a liberation from the small format. A pioneer in this respect was Roberto Matta. Although perhaps not an action painter in the narrower sense, Matta’s large-format and smaller yet equally expansive “visual galaxies” set an example for artists like Pollock, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still. Compelling works by Kline, and examples of Still’s wonderful, sublimely fissured paintings, are on view. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, who stood in the tradition of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and now tends to be underestimated, was one of the first European artists to employ very large formats for his compositions in color. The well-nigh forgotten monumental Freiburg Painting (1956), a commissioned work for the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, is on loan to our exhibition – a veritable sensation. The most recent work on view is by Pierre Soulages, the doyen of French L’Art informel. His breakthrough came in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at about the same time as Pollock’s. Soulages, the last living member of the first generation of action painters, is represented by five examples from every phase of his career.
As our review suggests, gestural painting is predicated to a great extent on an actively receptive audience. These pictures make considerable demands on us as viewers, challenging us, as it were, to finish them in our own minds. Art that concentrates on the artist’s personality, gestures, and paint substance prompts us to participate, to virtually enter the picture. Action painting invites “action viewing”.
Beyeler Foundation, press release
On our journey through a modern myth we encounter, in addition to Pollock, other famous painters like Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Sam Francis, Roberto Matta, and Pierre Soulages, as well as some who, once celebrated, were soon forgotten and have recently been rediscovered. Paintings by Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Arshile Gorky, Wols, Morris Louis, and Kazuo Shiraga, reflect the multifarious visual potentials of color and gesture. Representing the following generation are Eva Hesse and Cy Twombly, who expanded the concept of Action Painting. The exhibition comprises about one hundred works by twenty-seven artists from Europe, South and North America, and Asia.
Basically we focus on two forms of expression in abstract painting that depend on “action”: first, the painting gesture as a “protocol” on canvas; and second, paint traces left up to the workings of controlled chance. Combinations of these two working principles are common, as is especially obvious in Pollock’s case. A large group of important Pollocks, done between 1946 and 1953 and showing the full range of his expressive devices, forms the center of the exhibition. The group includes such legendary works as Out of the Web, 1949, from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Number 7, 1950, from the MoMA in New York; and Search, 1955, the last picture the artist completed (courtesy Galerie Hauser & Wirth). Pollock’s works are manifestations of his physical movements; yet the most fascinating thing about his drippings and pourings is the fact that the paint, between leaving his hand and hitting the canvas, was no longer subject to the artist’s will.
This technique was adopted and ramified by various other artists. One is Helen Frankenthaler, who instead of applying paint in the usual manner used like a dye, letting it seep into the canvas. Morris Louis took this method further. His large-format “stained paintings,” radically reduced visual configurations, are among the absolute sensations in the exhibition – a significant series the likes of which has not been seen in Europe for many years. Gerhard Hoehme and Eva Hesse, inspired by gestural painting, are represented here by large compositions that show their concern with the three-dimensionality of paint, as if extending the weave of Pollock’s entangled paint filaments. Lynda Benglis with her cast paint sculptures, and Arman with his Accumulations of squeezed paint tubes, developed Action Painting in a compelling and ironic direction as they visualized the results of a creative process, indeed a performance.
The possible variations in the use of color and line to express movement are virtually infinite. This becomes clear in the exhibition, in which groups of works by the artists are arranged for the most part chronologically. Each can be seen to have his or her unique touch, as personal as handwriting. In small-format paintings and drawings, frequently influenced by the Surrealist idea of écriture automatique, artists such as Jean Fautrier, Wols, and Hans Hartung produced gestural imagery in which – especially in Fautrier’s case – there is no distinct line between figuration and abstraction. An entire exhibition room is devoted to Wols, who in Jean-Paul Sartre’s eyes embodied the existentialist artist par excellence. The notion of a painterly calligraphy immediately brings Cy Twombly to mind, a series of whose works is likewise on view at the Fondation Beyeler. In sharp contrast to Twombly’s delicate inscriptions stand the “paint orgies” of Kazuo Shiraga, the leading representative of the Japanese artists group “Gutai.” Inspired above all by Pollock and executed with his feet, Shiraga’s works were preceded by phases of intensive meditation.
The opposition between figuration and abstraction, once a topic of heated critical debate, was apparently less crucial to the artists themselves. This is confirmed by a juxtaposition of selected works by the “Cobra” artists Karel Appel and Asger Jorn with significant paintings by the star Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning. All of these artists, like Pollock himself, took the figure as point of departure for their compositions.
Especially interesting are the close ties that existed between Europe and America. Arshile Gorky, a survivor of the Armenian genocide who emigrated to the U.S., is a case in point. After adapting the approaches of his European ideals, Cézanne and Picasso, Gorky both built on them and liberated himself from them by developing a unique gestural style. Like Gorky, the German-born Hans Hofmann is still too little known in Europe. After beginning under the influence of Henri Matisse and moving to America, Hofmann not only became a pioneer of gestural painting, experimenting with dripping techniques even before Pollock, but the teacher of an entire generation of artists of the New York School. These included Lee Krasner, who is unjustifiably viewed primarily as Pollock’s wife – her paintings show her to have been an outstanding abstract artist. Artists like Joan Mitchell and Sam Francis, who lived in Europe for long periods, likewise freely developed impulses from Claude Monet and others, and combined these with experiences gained from the New York School. Francis’s outstanding painting Round the World, from the Beyeler Collection, forms the hub of a compelling group of the artist’s works from the late 1950s.
In the U.S. as in Europe, the development of abstract gestural art went hand in hand with a liberation from the small format. A pioneer in this respect was Roberto Matta. Although perhaps not an action painter in the narrower sense, Matta’s large-format and smaller yet equally expansive “visual galaxies” set an example for artists like Pollock, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still. Compelling works by Kline, and examples of Still’s wonderful, sublimely fissured paintings, are on view. Ernst Wilhelm Nay, who stood in the tradition of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and now tends to be underestimated, was one of the first European artists to employ very large formats for his compositions in color. The well-nigh forgotten monumental Freiburg Painting (1956), a commissioned work for the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, is on loan to our exhibition – a veritable sensation. The most recent work on view is by Pierre Soulages, the doyen of French L’Art informel. His breakthrough came in the late 1940s and early 1950s, at about the same time as Pollock’s. Soulages, the last living member of the first generation of action painters, is represented by five examples from every phase of his career.
As our review suggests, gestural painting is predicated to a great extent on an actively receptive audience. These pictures make considerable demands on us as viewers, challenging us, as it were, to finish them in our own minds. Art that concentrates on the artist’s personality, gestures, and paint substance prompts us to participate, to virtually enter the picture. Action painting invites “action viewing”.
Beyeler Foundation, press release