Formal Elements and Principles of Art of Jackson Pollock
The Of import Artists and Works of Formalism in Mod Art
Progression of Fine art
1875
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
This piece of work depicts an evening firework display at London's Cremorne Gardens, as a rocket explodes, its sparks of colour lighting upwards the darkness before falling into the river. The few figures on the shore in the foreground, and the shore itself, are most ghostly, transparent. A product of Whistler'south unique method of working with very liquid paint, this translucence of item reflects his commitment to an art of evocative abstraction, departing from figurative accuracy. This painting was the last in a serial of Whistler's nocturnes, landscapes that were important to both the Aesthetic movement and in launching Tonalism. Whistler described the works, exploring dark blue and green tonalities, as expressing "a dreamy, pensive mood." At the same time, the Nocturnes also reflect his view that emphasizing a painting'due south formal elements was more important than accurate representation.
Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket became the bailiwick of a famous libel action later on the critic John Ruskin accused Whistler of "throwing a pot of pigment in the public's face" in 1877. Whistler's defense of the artwork became a de facto defense of modern fine art. As art critic James Jones writes, "Whistler performed brilliantly. In a Victorian court of law, he nonchalantly explained his idea of abstract art: 'Asked about the meaning of the word "Nocturne," reported the Times, "Mr. Whistler said that a picture was to him throughout a problem, which he attempted to solve ... "An Arrangement" was an arrangement of light, form and color'."
Clive Bong noted the importance of Whistler'south opinion and counted him amid those "who made grade a ways to aesthetic emotion and not a means of stating facts and carrying ideas." As Whistler noted, "Nature contains the elements, in colour and grade, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the creative person is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be cute."
Oil on panel - The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan
1904
Mont Sainte-Victoire
This mural depicts Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence, a field of study that Cézanne returned to once again and again, as he created some thirty paintings and watercolors depicting the towering mountain. The valley that stretches out below is vibrant with irregular shapes of absurd colors - rich green and blue - contrasting with sun-drenched yellows and other warm tones. The landscape is suggested rather than depicted, conventional representation replaced past an emphasis on formal elements.
Art historian René Huyghe wrote that "[i]due north works such as these, [Cézanne] chose to rediscover a more substantial reality of elementary forms behind the glimmering veil of appearances...At the same time, such pictures present shimmering harmonies of color that tin exist seen equally totally flat designs, without depth." Equally the creative person himself put it: "I exercise not want to reproduce nature. I desire to re-create it." For him that meant depicting "nature by ways of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."
Cezanne's piece of work had an enormous influence on the development of Formalism, partly thanks to the reception of his work amidst early-20th-century artists and critics. When curating Manet and the Postal service-Impressionists, a London exhibition in 1910, art critic Roger Fry wrote that Cézanne "showed how it was possible to laissez passer from the complexity of the advent of things to the geometrical simplicity which pattern demands." Clive Bong saw Cézanne's artworks as exemplifying the search for "meaning course," and Cezanne became the chief influence upon Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in their evolution of Cubism. As Braque said, "In Cezanne'due south work we should see not just a new pictorial construction merely besides - too often forgotten - a new moral proposition of space."
Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
1916
The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows
This piece of work depicts a vaudeville tightrope dancer, her small grey and white effigy picked out at the elevation of the painting, while the abstruse blueprint of large colour planes below indicates the shadows of her movements. Resembling a collage, the painting was informed both by a series of preliminary experiments and past Ray's accidental discovery of the patterns his cutouts fabricated when he discarded them on the floor. Abstract representations of the dancer's movements come to dominate the pictorial plane; formal effects become the object of master focus.
In 1916 Man Ray exhibited x works in The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters at the Anderson Galleries in New York. His statement included in the exhibition catalogue emphasized a Formalistic approach. He described painting as the process by which an creative person realizes "his listen motives and physical sensations in a permanent and universal language of color, texture and form system." That year he as well published his Primer of the New Art of Two Dimension, described past art historian Francis M. Naumann as "a remarkably prescient Formalist theory."
Equally a native of the U.s.a., Man Ray was significant in representing the interaction between European and Due north-American artists, past which the baton of Formalism was passed to US-based painters such as Jackson Pollock and critics such equally Clement Greenberg during the mid-twentieth century. For Man Ray, "[t]he creative forcefulness and the expressiveness of painting reside materially in the colour and texture of pigment, in the possibilities of form invention and organization, and in the apartment plane on which these elements are brought to play."
Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
1921
Composition with Big Crimson Plane, Yellowish, Black, Gray, and Bluish
Varying blocks of principal colors offset against blacks and whites create the rhythm of this abstract artwork. Past the 1920s, Mondrian had begun to create his signature work, in an instantly recognizable style ofttimes emulated by subsequent designers, architects, and artists. As creative person John Goodrich put it, a Mondrian painting created "an arena of minutely adjusted intervals. It shows, as directly equally possible, the style colors - retiring, interruptive, elusive, arresting - multiply every impulse of drawing, deflecting or accelerating their rhythms.... Colors condition the relationships of lines, and vice versa, in a climactic rhythm of tensions."
This work exemplifies Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism, an advanced movement closely associated with Formalism, that used basic formal elements such equally colour and line to convey the spiritual harmony underlying reality. The juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical lines and the use of main colors along with blacks, whites, and greys were meant to advise the opposing metaphysical forces structuring reality. As Mondrian said, "[a]t the moment, at that place is no need for fine art to create a reality of imagination based on appearances, events, or traditions. Fine art should not follow the intuitions relating to our life in fourth dimension, only only those intuitions relating to truthful reality."
Greenberg acknowledged Mondrian's work every bit a cardinal case of Formalism, and saw it as standing apart from the artist's philosophical pontifications: "Mondrian's painting, however, takes its place beside the greatest fine art through virtues not involved in his metaphysics. His pictures, with their white grounds, direct blackness lines, and opposed rectangles of pure color, are no longer windows in the wall but islands radiating clarity, harmony, and grandeur - passion mastered and cooled, a difficult struggle resolved, unity imposed on diverseness. Space outside them is transformed past their presence." The strict geometry of Mondrian'southward work influenced subsequent generations of Formalist-aligned artists such every bit Bridget Riley and Ellsworth Kelly, and architects including Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Oil on canvas - Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague
1950
Autumn Rhythm: Number 30
Number 30 is amidst the most famous of Jackson Pollock's baste paintings, which he began creating in 1947. He made such works by placing the canvas on his studio floor, pouring household paints onto the canvas, and so using brushes and other implements to fling and drip the paint. Equally a result, his creative process attracted every bit much public and critical interest as his finished artworks; the lensman Hans Namuth spent several months documenting Pollock's method, including the cosmos of this particular piece.
Originally the work was titled Number 30, equally Pollock felt the apply of numbers prevented any kind of implied significant. However, in 1955, information technology was renamed Autumn Rhythm: some art historians believe the new championship was Clement Greenberg's suggestion.
Pollock's pictures have invited numerous interpretations, each critic stressing very different aspects of the artwork and/or its creation. Harold Rosenberg, for example, focused on process and technique: Pollock's dynamic encounter with the canvass, which he called action painting. Merely for Clement Greenberg, the painter'south strongest abet, the significance of his technique lay in its formal achievements. Pollock managed to disassemble line from its traditional function of defining shape and volume, inaugurating a new kind of painting, which he described every bit "'decentralized,' 'polyphonic,' all-over...with a surface knit together of a multiplicity of identical or like elements, repeat[ing] itself without strong variation from one cease of the canvas to the other."
Given Clement Greenberg's central function in defining Formalism within modern fine art, Pollock'southward drip paintings are perhaps the quintessential example of fine art created and interpreted on Formalist term. For Greenberg, Pollock's variant of Formalism corresponded to "something deep-seated in contemporary sensibility. It corresponds peradventure to the feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been wearied, that no area or order of experience is either intrinsically or relatively superior to whatsoever other."
Enamel on sail - The Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, New York
1954-55
Flag
This piece of work depicts the American flag, equanimous of combined panels and a collage of newspaper scraps, and painted with pigment and melted wax. Jasper Johns is often credited with paving the way for Pop Art by re-introducing recognizable subject matter into mod fine art at the top of the Abstract Expressionist era. But the importance of early pieces such as Flag lies every bit in the way he created a careful balance between grade and subject-matter. The delineation of a flag - a ii-dimensional grade, at least when laid on the ground - mischievously emphasizes the flatness of the pictorial plane while at the same time introducing a recognizable subject matter with many contextual and narrative associations, playfully subverting Formalism's emphasis on not-figuration.
Works such as Flag created a dilemma for Formalist critics such equally Clement Greenberg, since, while they maintained that the core of an artwork's value lay in its manipulation of grade, Johns fabricated it impossible to deny the presence of subject-thing in a piece of work created on Formalist terms. Ironically as critic John Yau noted, Greenberg inadvertently paved the fashion for the subversion of Formalist principles past Johns and other artists through his insistence that art should limited what he called "the real and material plane." Although this was intended to signify a plane of unfettered Formalist composition, without the intrusion of external context, "this insistence led directly to the literalism of Minimalism and to the literalist readings of Pop Art, particularly the 'flag' paintings of Jasper Johns."
Yau notes that, "[a]lthough Greenberg rejected Johns'south paintings, his followers did not, in part considering they saw in Johns a manner to distinguish their viewpoint from Greenberg's while adhering to his model of historical progress." Along with his collaborator Robert Rauschenberg, Johns too played a pioneering office in the development of Neo-Dada, a movement that, challenging medium-specificity and abstraction, heralded the refuse of Formalism's authority.
Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, 3 panels - The Museum of Modern Art, New York
1969
Soft Spoken
Here four squares in teal blueish, light and dark green, and dark regal, are arranged in diminishing sizes, asymmetrically placed low in the pictorial frame. Albers began his Homage to the Square series in 1949; this belatedly work in the sequence indicates his ongoing commitment to the formal exploration of color through the addition of a fourth square, and his farthermost restriction of colour palette, using iv variations on blueish.
Committed to abstraction, Albers experimented with color juxtapositions nigh scientifically as a way of creating differently inflected forms of pictorial space. In the 1920s, every bit a leading teacher and artist of the Bauhaus, Albers played an important part in the development of Constructivism and its subsequent development in Concrete Art, both of which were centrally concerned with abstruse formal furnishings. He was to play an equally important role in shaping Northward American art after he fled Nazi Deutschland in 1933. Arriving at the Black Mount School in North Carolina, he famously expressed his creative intentions by proverb in his limited English, "I want to open up eyes." His book Interaction of Color (1963) was widely influential, and his sober Formalism, exploring chromatic interactions and geometric abstraction, influenced developments in Colour Field Painting and Minimalism. Teaching and painting until his decease in 1976, Albers influenced new generations of artists, including Donald Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse, and Cy Twombly.
1 of the almost striking aspects of Albers'southward variant of Formalism was his sense that formal experiment could accept an ethical and culturally progressive value. Equally contemporary art historian Eva Díaz notes, "Albers [found] in form an ideals of perception which he developed in theories of progressive pedagogy concerning experimentation and social alter.... He maintained that learning to observe and design form made an essential contribution toward cultural transformation and growth."
Oil on Masonite - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
2012
Two Sides of the Aforementioned Coin
Spray-painted with innumerable pocket-size dots of paint, this painting exemplifies the tendency of contemporary Ceremonial that was subsequently dubbed "Zombie Ceremonial." resembling rain or mist from a distance, the small dots of paint are revealed to be spatters when viewed up close, each one a tiny explosion trailing speckled threads. Contemporary Formalism often emphasized the painting procedure, with artists using unique methods to set their abstractions apart. This painting was part of Smith's series Rain Paintings (2011), which he fabricated by using fire extinguishers to spray paint. As he described: "Growing up in New York City, I was very aware that graffiti artists were using these outdated burn extinguishers - not the ones that spray pulverization but the ones that spray h2o. You lot fill them with paint so I but started experimenting with that tool. In that location's a lot of different variables that come into play when making those paintings: the altitude y'all are away from the canvas, the viscosity, the 3-to-i ratio of paint, what kind of paint you utilise, how soluble the paint is. Once I'd figured out that process it was actually just waving a wand."
Smith fabricated his series while studying art at Cooper Wedlock School of Fine art. After graduation, the auction of his work became the leading case of a new kind of fine art investment. As art critic Luka Terihaj puts it, Smith "had the art globe transfixed on his every move after a 'meteoric ascent' in 2013. His process-based artwork earned him 'disquisitional darling' status among the industry's elite with the likes of The New York Times and Faddy dubbing him 'the fine art world wunderkind'."
However, this phenomenon was curt-lived; as fine art critic Henri Neuendorf noted: "Smith saw two more years of rampant speculation before his auction prices roughshod, just as quickly as they rose. In 2019, the boilerplate sale toll for Smith's work at auction was but $22,992, according to the Artnet Price Database." In 2015 Smith decided to go contained, leaving his studios and New York City and working with a non-profit, Serving the People, focused on creative inquiry. More recently he has launched an artistic comeback. In 2020 he held his offset solo exhibition at Parrish Museum in Long Island, stating that "[westward]hat I would beloved to achieve from this is to give artists a picayune more power. A lot of artists remember they need to put their careers in the hands of curators and dealers and gallerists to be taken seriously. But I don't necessarily recall that is the case all of the time."
Acrylic on primed sail - Individual Drove
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added past Greg Thomas
"Formalism in Modernistic Art Definition Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Greg Thomas
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First published on 01 Sep 2012. Updated and modified regularly
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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/formalism/artworks/
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