Reading: Clement Greenberg- Post Painterly Abstraction

malerisch:

-german word used by Heinrich Wölfflin

-translated as "painterly" to talk about the "formal qualities of Baroque art"

-painterly: "blurred, broken, loose definition of color and contour"

-linear: the opposite of painterly (clear, sharp)

• these terms help us "notice all sorts of continuities  and significant differences, in the art of the present as well as of the past"
• many artists combine elements of both

Abstract art:

-born amid the painterliness of Analytical Cubism, Leger, Delaunay, and Kandinsky thirty years earlier, but there are all kinds of painterliness"

-1920s & 1930s: abstract art identified by "flat silhouettes and firm contours" (Synthetic Cubism, Mondrian, Bauhaus, Miro)

-"neatly drawn and smoothly painted...clean outlines and flat, clear colors"

• abstract art --> abstract expressionism seemed "form, all order, all discipline, had been cast off"

Abstract Expressionism:

-abstract & painterly

-"flurry strokes, blotches, trickles of paint"

-a.k.a. "informel" and "action painting"

-derived from Cubism

"Tenth Street Touch" (spread in 1950s)
-"stroke left by a loaded brush or knife frays out, when the stroke is long enough, into streaks, ripples, and specks of paint"

-creates "variations of light and dark by means of which juxtaposed strokes can be graded into one another without abrupt contrasts"

-"automatic solution for one of the crucial technical problems of abstract painting: that of asserting the continuity of the picture plane when working more or less 'in the flat'"

-not necessarily bad but it was negative in its "its standardization, its reduction to a set of mannerisms"

Artists in Exhibition:
-John Ferren: retains "Tenth Street touch," but boxes it "within a large framing area" --> new expressiveness from it
-Sam Francis: "liquefying touch"; "closed and solidly filled paintings of the early 1950's that touch somehow conveys light and air"
-Helen Frankenthaler: "soakings and blottings of paint...open...the picture, and would do so even without the openness of her layout"
-Arthur McKay: "heavily inlaid surfaces relate to Painterly Abstraction in France, but the linear clarity, and plainness, of his design fend off what might be oppressive associations"

-lucidity of color, "stress contrasts of pure hue rather than contrasts of light and dark"

• "clarity and openness...are relative qualities of art...belong to the physical aspects of painting"
• reaction against Abstract expressionism: pop art