Abstract Imagists - Style

Style

It had been recognized that the paintings of Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell were all very different yet the symbolic content was achieved "through dramatic statement of isolated and highly simplified elements." In many cases the dramatic simplification was achieved by the use of:

  • geometric means: Josef Albers; Franz Kline; Hans Hofmann
  • compression: Grace Hartigan; George McNeil
  • intricate elaboration of canvas surfaces: Richard Pousette-Dart; Robert Richenburg; John Ferren; Jimmy Ernst;
  • isolated shapes or signs: Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell
  • detailed over-all patterning of the canvas: William Baziotes
  • simplified structure through the dominance of the large, unified color shapes: James Brooks, Esteban Vicente, Adja Yunkers, Cameron Booth; Giorgio Cavallon

In some cases there was a "loss of the feeling and immediacy" in the work.

Read more about this topic:  Abstract Imagists

Famous quotes containing the word style:

    The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

    Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)