Kline & Motherwell

How is it that I knew and loved Franz Kline, but MoMA's Abstract Expressionist New York was the first time I really appreciated Robert Motherwell?

New York, Franz Kline

No. 7, Franz Kline

Zinc Doors, Franz Kline

 I still have a lot of art historical catching up to do. This whole time it's as if Robert Motherwell was waiting in the wings for me, so to speak.

Elegy 57, Robert Motherwell

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, Robert Motherwell

Beside the Sea, Robert Motherwell

Beside the Sea, above, is a new favorite of mine. Clearly, I love the stark palette with the bold, expressive brushstrokes. Both artist's work vary much more than what I'm showing here. Yet the similarity is still distinct, and belies some of the difference that the exhibition stresses.

h

The Big Picture: Abstract Expressionist NY at MoMA

One: Number 31, 1950, Jackson Pollock

Abstract Expressionist New York at MoMA is a large show, and I only had time to see 'The Big Picture,' a painting and sculpture-centric takeover of MoMA's 4th Floor. Of course, the typically large Abstract Expressionist canvases, bursting with color, are difficult to hang next to each other even when from the same artist. Rather than playing off each other, they often seem strangled. Jackson Pollock's One: Number 31 was an exception; this enormous canvas could hold its own in a brawl with just about any work of the era.

Personage with Yellow Ochre and White, Robert Motherwell

MoMA has a treasure trove of Abstract Expressionist pieces, so its great to see them all out. The exhibition wasn't the art history lesson I had hoped to get from it, showing rooms of individual artists instead of making comparisons. Maybe that's for the better; it's rather a lot to take in as it is. Yet it felt lackluster and unfocused compared to some of the excellent shows MoMA has put on recently (Marina Abramovic, William Kentridge). On the other hand, this focus on artists made cherry-picking favorites easy enough: Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman. Swoon

No.5 / No. 22, Mark Rothko

Chief, Franz Kline

Two Edges, Barnett Newman

I guess the conclusion is: there's some fantastic art up on the walls of MoMA right now, but you can't see it very well.

k

The Writing on the Wall: Tangled Alphabets and Words

Leon Ferrari, left, and Mira Schendel, right

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture containing words has worth to the nth power. The special exhibition up at MoMA now, Tangled Alphabets, examines the works of two artists who explore words extensively in their works, and it got me thinking about how words have been used in art. Writing on an artwork exists traditionally as a signature or a date, or perhaps an inscription such as 'Marcus me fecit.'

Tangled Alphabets focuses on the work of South American painters León Ferrari and Mira Schendel. The show says that the artists "produced their works in the neighboring countries of Argentina and Brazil throughout the 1960s and 1980s, when the question of language was particularly central to Western culture due to the central role taken by post-structuralism, semiotics, and the philosophy of language."

Franz Kline, left, and Cy Twombly, right.

Since the 1950s however, writing has come into prominence in the visual arts. Surrealism, and the automatic writing it inspired (where the author writes from his or her unconscious) combined with an interest in the East, led to the prominence of the written word in Abstract Expressionist works. And, at least according to the critic Harold Rosenberg, the action painting popular at the time allowed the psyche assert or express itself, similar to the process of automatic writing.

From Wikipedia we have it that "automatic writing was an important vehicle for action painters Franz Kline in his black and white paintings, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly who used gesture, surface, and line to create calligraphic, linear symbols and skeins that resemble language, and resonate as powerful manifestations from the collective unconscious." In the hands of artists like Kline or Twombly, writing becomes a lush visual element. (Kline denied that it was in fact calligraphy; Twombly's graffiti-like scrawls are legible.)

Andy Warhol, left, and Roy Lichtenstein, right.

Of course, pop art took words in another direction, as they exploited comic books (Roy Lichtenstein) or packaging (Warhol) In these works, the words are an intrinsic part of the image being reappropriated. In the reuse of printed materials, like some of Robert Raucheneberg's collages, words become part of the material itself.

For a contemporary approach to automatic writing, look no further than MoMA's recent acquisition. This untitled work, above, by British artist Jack Strange features a lead ball pressing down the g key indefinitely. (I was born the same year as the artist, 1984, and feel like I desperately need to catch up with someone who already has 2 works at MoMA!)

Words are conceptual and tied to a specific meaning, while the visual arts are just that, visual, visceral and more fluid in meaning. The combination of words and images makes your mind work overtime. Having to read something uses a different part of the brain that looking at something, and sometimes words seem too explicit. On the other hand, they certainly pack a punch.