Contemporary Western art: 1945–2000

After 1945

The postwar work of Braque developed a few basic themes. The space and content of the Studio series of five paintings were formulated in vertical phases of varying sombreness; a mysterious bird that featured in this series was a symbol expressive of aspiration. Nicolas de Staël, a friend of Braque who was born in St. Petersburg, reached in 1950 a style in which lozenges of solid paint were built into structures of echo and correspondence. Colour in itself provided the substance, and de Staël’s influence was considerable. The painterly and basically traditional vein of abstraction pursued in Paris by such painters as Alfred Manessier remained, at root, decorative.

The Expressionist tradition was revived in a new spirit by the COBRA group of painters from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam who came together in Paris in 1948. In the work of Asger Jorn and Karel Appel, the image springs as if by chance from the free extempore play of brushstrokes. Surrealism proved remarkably durable. Among its admirers, the American Joseph Cornell had been evolving from the techniques of collage and assemblage a personal and evocative form of image; the Pole Hans Bellmer and the German Richard Lindner, working in Paris and New York City, respectively, explored private and obsessive themes; they were recognized as among the most-individual talents of their generation. In general, the most idiosyncratic and anarchic qualities of art were being developed as a new tradition, while geometric abstraction was seen to be the natural basis for the arts that are public and communal in purpose. Victor Pasmore in Britain, for instance, abandoned his earlier Post-Impressionist standpoint to start afresh with constructional and graphic symbols deriving from Klee and Mondrian.

The presence of a number of the pioneer Surrealists in the United States during World War II affected later developments there. Surrealism’s element of psychic automatism, particularly the spontaneous calligraphy of André Masson, was particularly influential. The possibilities had, in fact, been implicit in modern painting for at least two decades; in Paris in the 1920s Jean Fautrier was already basing pictures on spontaneous and informal gestures with paint. In the United States in the 1940s, however, fresh impetus came from the impulsive play of colour in the work of influential teacher Hans Hofmann. The movement that became known as Abstract Expressionism represented a decisive departure from its European sources, not only because the homogeneous consistency of a painted surface in itself took on a new meaning in the expansive American conditions but at least equally because of the exceptional personality of Jackson Pollock. The style Pollock adopted in 1947 reflected an original involvement in the act of painting that transcended deliberation or control. The influential critic Harold Rosenberg wrote in The Tradition of the New (1959):

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

In contrast to Pollock’s work, that executed at the time by Willem de Kooning, though equally sweeping and ungovernable, showed a recurrent figurative reference; his series of alarming variations on the theme “Woman” began in 1950. Another Abstract Expressionist, Franz Kline, claimed, in executing his shapes like huge black-and-white ideograms, to be in some sense depicting figurative images. Rosenberg dubbed the group “action painters.” In the course of the 1950s their influence was felt in almost every country. The climate of artistic opinion that spread outward from New York City made possible flamboyant gesture paintings such as those of the French-born Georges Mathieu.

The idea of painting as a homogeneous allover fabric led at the same time to other, quite separate developments. Prompted by the primitive and psychotic imagery that he called l’art brut (“raw art”), Jean Dubuffet embarked on an extraordinarily resourceful series of experiments in translating the raw material of the world into pictures. The energy that fills the works of American painter Mark Tobey is by comparison gentle and lyrical and was much influenced by East Asian art. Dubuffet’s example inspired the abstract “matter” painting that developed in several countries about 1950. At its best, as in the work of Catalan Antoni Tàpies, this style conveys a strong sense of natural substance.