Displaying items by tag: abstract expressionism

On Sunday, December 21, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) in Berkeley, California, will say goodbye to its Brutalist home of forty-four years. Founded in 1963 following a major donation from the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, the BAM/PFA announced an architectural competition to design the new museum building in 1964. The jury named the San Francisco-based architect Mario Ciampi and his associates Richard L. Jorasch and Ronald E. Wagner the winners of the competition, saying, “The richness of this building will arise from the sculptural beauty of its rugged major forms and will not require costly materials or elaborate details. We believe this design...can become one of the outstanding contributions to museum design in our time.”

One of the largest university art museums in the United States, the BAM/PFA opened the doors of its distinctive Modernist building on the UC Berkeley campus in 1970. Executed in the Brutalist style, an architectural movement that flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, the BAM/PFA’s building is a behemoth cast concrete structure.

The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known for daring installations that can stretch as long as a football field, will announce Monday a group of long-term projects with some of the country’s most prominent living artists, including Laurie Anderson, James Turrell and Jenny Holzer, as well as a partnership with the foundation of the late post-abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg.

When the roughly $55 million project is completed in 2017, Mass MoCA will be the largest contemporary art museum in the country, with more than 250,000 square feet of gallery space. It will also be one of the most eclectic, with a campus that features everything from rock and bluegrass festivals to dance premieres and a 27,000-square-foot building devoted to the drawings of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt.

Barbara Babcock Millhouse has given a painting by one of American art’s most distinguished abstract expressionist artists to Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Allison Perkins, museum executive director, revealed “Birth,” a large-scale oil painting by Lee Krasner to an audience of more than 300 at the museum’s annual black-tie fundraising gala on Friday night.

The painting is on view in the museum’s exhibition “Love and Loss." The show examines the power of art to transform individual loss into expressions of shared experience.

Last month, Colby College Museum of Art put on a view a 1968 painting by Joan Mitchell that museum director Sharon Corwin believes is the best example of abstract expressionism in Maine. Next month, the Portland Museum of Art will unveil an 8-foot-tall steel “Seven” sculpture by Robert Indiana, once rejected by the Prince of Monaco, in the pedestrian plaza out front.

The two works share few similarities, but they represent the latest high-profile acquisitions by two leading museums in Maine and highlight the challenges facing curators and museum directors as they shape collections across the state.

In both instances, the museums acquired the art because benefactors took personal interest in bringing it to Maine.

  Willem de Kooning, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, is best known for his moody, gestural paintings that flutter between figuration and abstraction. It wasn’t until he was 65 and already a celebrated artist that he began experimenting with sculpture, the least-known aspect of his oeuvre. While in Rome in 1969, de Kooning began making small clay sculptures, soon moving on to produce large-scale bronze works. Made by building-up layers of wet clay on wood and metal armatures, these sculptures echoed the dynamic energy that pervaded de Kooning’s painted figures.

Between 1969 and 1974, de Kooning created twenty-five sculptures, including “Clamdigger,” which will be offered at Christie’s next month.

Jackson Pollock’s former Greenwich Village apartment is up for sale for $1.25 million. The 800-square-foot penthouse located at 46 Carmine Street—very convenient to the historic Cedar Tavern, where Pollock and the Ab Ex crew hung out—has 14-foot Tudor-style ceilings, a working fireplace, and “Pirelli floors,” which we assume means they’re great for laying large canvases on to make drip paintings.

What makes it interesting to Luis Ortiz, the Douglas Elliman broker who has the listing. is the address.

Critics think they have the last word, but sometimes art keeps talking. In 2008, while organizing the Jewish Museum’s boisterous survey of Abstract Expressionism, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art, 1940-1976,” the curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, noticed that two paintings — Lee Krasner’s “Untitled” (1948) and Norman Lewis’s “Twilight Sounds” (1947) — seemed to be speaking to each other. He had the good sense to listen and, later, to orchestrate a deeper conversation. The result is “From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, 1945-1952,” a nuanced, sensitive and profound exhibition.

The show isn’t really a dialogue, in the conventional sense. But it bravely elides differences of gender, race and religion, finding that Krasner and Lewis — a Jewish woman and an African-American man — shared a visual language that was a subtler, more intimate dialect of Abstract Expressionism.

On September 21, Stanford University will reveal the Anderson Collection, one of the most valuable gifts in its history. Assembled over the course of fifty years by Bay area collectors Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson along with their daughter Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, the collection features 121 works by 86 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly. While Abstract Expressionist works form the collection’s core, the Andersons’ gift also includes a number of works from California art movements such as the Bay Area Figurative School, which started in San Francisco in the 1950s, and the Light and Space movement, which originated in Southern California in the 1960s.

The Andersons began collecting art after their first visit to the Louvre in 1964. Before focusing on works by Abstract Expressionists, Color Field painters, and Pop artists, they acquired a number of works by French Impressionists and American modernists.

The Bellevue Arts Museum in Bellevue, Washington, is currently hosting the exhibition “Under Pressure: Contemporary Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation.” The show, which features works by artists such as Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt, and Andy Warhol, traces printmaking’s rise to prominence in post-war American art. Drawn from real estate mogul Jordan D. Schnitzer’s vast collection, “Under Pressure” includes examples from major movements within contemporary art such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Photorealism, and Minimalism.

During the late 1950s, the art world experienced a groundswell of interest in printmaking. Ignoring the stigma associated with the process, pioneering artists such as Rauschenberg and Johns began experimenting with a variety of techniques, including offset lithography, screen printing, wood-cutting, lino-cutting, and laser-cutting.

 In November 2015, The Dallas Museum of Art will be the only American venue to host the exhibition “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots.” The show is the first in over three decades to explore Jackson Pollock’s Black Pourings, a series of black enamel and oil paintings created by the Abstract Expressionist artist between 1951 and 1953. Although the Black Pourings are a pivotal part of Pollock’s oeuvre, they have largely gone underexplored.

“Blind Spots” is the first major exhibition to be curated by Gavin Delahunty, who joined the Dallas Museum of Art as the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of American Art in May.