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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

[Review Of The Book Pollock's Modernism, By M. Schreyach], Eileen Costello Apr 2018

[Review Of The Book Pollock's Modernism, By M. Schreyach], Eileen Costello

Art and Art History Faculty Research

In 1950, on one of the few occasions that Jackson Pollock publicly discussed his approach to painting, he remarked that 'technique is just a means of arriving at a statement'. Given Pollock's revolutionary method and unprecedented formal achievements, this declaration has generated an enormous amount of critical attention over the past sixty-five years. The book under review is the most recent contribution, yet it stands apart from earlier studies.


Moving Vision: Anne Truitt, Paintings 1972-1991, Michael Schreyach Jan 2018

Moving Vision: Anne Truitt, Paintings 1972-1991, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Spacing Expression, Michael Schreyach Jan 2018

Spacing Expression, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Meeting Spaces, Michael Schreyach Jan 2018

Meeting Spaces, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Although in size and shape they more closely resemble traditional easel pictures than do some of his previous works—specifically those on uniquely fashioned supports, which patently display their constructed aspect, or his large-scale public commissions on concrete—Mark Schlesinger’s recent paintings nonetheless convey the impression, like those prior works, of having been built. Not only do the wooden frames upon which he mounts his canvases project his surfaces away from the wall at a noticeably greater distance than do conventional stretchers, but Schlesinger has made an effort to render his auxiliary supports conspicuous.


The Crisis Of Jackson Pollock’S Mural As A Painting, Michael Schreyach Jan 2017

The Crisis Of Jackson Pollock’S Mural As A Painting, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Critics frequently describe Pollock’s allover painted fields, especially those he began producing after 1947, as absorbing or engulfing the viewer, occasioning a sensation of being immersed within an all-encompassing visual environment. His paintings are said to establish so powerful a continuity between viewer and painting that the distinction between them collapses, generating a feeling of what the psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig notoriously described as “undifferentiated oceanic envelopment.”1 Pollock’s works, he continued, “enveloped the spectator inside the picture plane,” producing a “manic experience of mystic oneness.”2 In them, “pictorial space advances and engulfs [the viewer] in a multi-dimensional unity where …


Re-Created Flatness: Hans Hofmann’S Concept Of The Picture Plane As A Medium Of Expression, Michael Schreyach Apr 2015

Re-Created Flatness: Hans Hofmann’S Concept Of The Picture Plane As A Medium Of Expression, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

For Hans Hofmann and Clement Greenberg, flatness--more specifically, “re-created flatness,” a term Greenberg adopted after hearing it used in the painter’s important 1938– 39 lectures--became a key term in their accounts of pictorial meaning. In this paper, I articulate what is significant about that idea and draw out its implications for understanding what Hofmann meant by artistic expression. Ultimately, I suggest that the concept of re-created flatness, and its pictorial realization, implies or entails a certain view of expression: namely, that what is expressed by an artwork is the artist’s meaning (in contradistinction to the arbitrary meanings that may be …


Representing “Actuality”, Michael Schreyach Jan 2014

Representing “Actuality”, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

In an effort to challenge some prevailing assumptions surrounding the art of the painter Wols—whose work various critics in the late 1940s associated with the expression of existential unease—Alex Potts proposes that what Wols truly wished to convey was “a real sense of the substance of the world,” its “bare non-art materiality” (119–20). An anecdote supplied by the critic René Guilly on the occasion of Wols’s 1947 Paris exhibition provides some evidence for that contention, even as it reveals the artist’s feelings of inadequacy in the face of his task. Walking by a decomposing wall glimpsed through a pane of …


John Dewey And Art, Michael Schreyach Jan 2014

John Dewey And Art, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Barnett Newman, Michael Schreyach Jan 2014

Barnett Newman, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró In The 1920s, Michael Schreyach Jan 2013

Fixed Ecstasy: Joan Miró In The 1920s, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Pre-Objective Depth In Merleau-Ponty And Jackson Pollock, Michael Schreyach Jan 2013

Pre-Objective Depth In Merleau-Ponty And Jackson Pollock, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Pollock’s drip technique generated certain unconventional representational possibilities, including the possibility of expressing the pre-reflective involvement of an embodied, intentional subject in a perceptual world. Consequently, Pollock’s art can be understood to explore or investigate the pre-objective conditions of reflective and intellectual consciousness. His painting—here I consider Number 1, 1949—motivates viewers to consider the relationship between intention and meaning as it appears in both primordial and reflective dimensions of experience. The account proceeds in three stages. First, I review key features of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the pre-objective and attempt to clarify the reflexive nature of investigating it by considering his …


Barnett Newman's “Sense Of Space”: A Noncontextualist Account Of Its Perception And Meaning, Michael Schreyach Jan 2013

Barnett Newman's “Sense Of Space”: A Noncontextualist Account Of Its Perception And Meaning, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Barnett Newman professed that a beholder's encounter with his paintings was like meeting another person for the first time. He believed the experience produced the conditions for apprehending an ethical relationship that would entail both the individual's achievement of his or her own understanding of “self” and his or her acknowledgment of another individual. But it would be their mutual recognition of separateness as the condition of possibility for communication — for sharing worlds — that would ground the ethical relationship between them. Not just interested in matters of theory, the artist was also specific about the modes of spatial …


Intention And Interpretation In Hans Namuth's Film, Jackson Pollock, Michael Schreyach Sep 2012

Intention And Interpretation In Hans Namuth's Film, Jackson Pollock, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Because many of Jackson Pollock's most familiar statements are multiply authored, they seem to challenge basic assumptions regarding the transparency of intention to meaning that they are often presumed to enunciate. The fact that Pollock's public declarations about his work are collages, juxtaposing different voices and points of view with his own, complicates our assessment of their validity as univocal expressions of his intentions. In his film Jackson Pollock, Namuth utilizes those statements, many of which concern aspects of Pollock's technical procedure, as part of his strategy to ground the meaning of Pollock's paintings in the processby which …


Unity And Continuity In Jon Lee’S Abstract Woodblock Prints, Michael Schreyach Sep 2009

Unity And Continuity In Jon Lee’S Abstract Woodblock Prints, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

No abstract provided.


Rogier Van Der Weyden And Early Netherlandish Wall Memorials, Douglas Brine Jan 2008

Rogier Van Der Weyden And Early Netherlandish Wall Memorials, Douglas Brine

Art and Art History Faculty Research

The article considers two sculpted wall memorials from the Burgundian Netherlands that can be closely linked to the painter Rogier van der Weyden. The first was commissioned by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, for the Franciscan convent church in Brussels in commemoration of two long-deceased Brabantine duchesses to whom he was distantly related. It was destroyed by the Calvinists but a series of payments of 1440 records the various craftsmen responsible for its creation, including Rogier van der Weyden, who polychromed the sculpture and painted the duke’s coats of arms on its wings. It is argued that the memorial …


‘I Am Nature’: Science And Jackson Pollock, Michael Schreyach Jul 2007

‘I Am Nature’: Science And Jackson Pollock, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

An attempt has been made to determine the authenticity of some newly discovered paintings that may be by Jackson Pollock on the basis of a belief that his art incorporates fractal patterns seen in the natural world. This is only the latest in a long line of interpretations of his works in terms of references to nature, as Michael Schreyach discusses.


David Smith's Equivalence, Michael Schreyach Jan 2007

David Smith's Equivalence, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Artists of David Smith's generation often sought to produce artworks that challenged the conventions of artistic "expression" and the expectations—technical, formal, psychological, interpretative—that accompanied them. Smith (like his contemporaries Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky) was one of a group of artists whose formal innovations were guided both by a desire to align themselves with avant-garde art and by a pressing need to distance themselves from European affiliation. In Barnett Newman's words, these artists wanted to liberate themselves from "the impediments . . . of Western European painting" in order to "create images whose reality is self-evident and …


Seeing Noland’S Feeling, Michael Schreyach Jan 2007

Seeing Noland’S Feeling, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Kenneth Noland's paintings—whether his target-like compositions and their elliptical variations of the late 1950s and early 1960s; his midcareer chevrons, diamonds, and elongated horizontal bands; or his irregular polygon-shaped canvases of the 1970s—exhibit the artist's formal solutions to some notoriously difficult pictorial problems, specifically those generated by the complex interrelationships between shape and color.


Helen Frankenthaler’S Gravity, Michael Schreyach Jan 2007

Helen Frankenthaler’S Gravity, Michael Schreyach

Art and Art History Faculty Research

Helen Frankenthaler, like other painters of her generation, was compelled to come to terms with the technical and philosophical modes of Abstract Expressionism's gestural practice. Responding to Pollock's black-and-white paintings of 1951, she evolved a technique of staining raw, unsized canvas with thinned acrylic pigments that became her hallmark and a formative influence on many other painters, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. The method yielded paintings whose images appeared indivisible from their canvas grounds because colors were soaked directly into the surface. Moreover, since the technique de-emphasized the touch of the artist, it potentially renounced Abstract Expressionism's painterly gesture.