Elizabeth Murray: Blurring Distinctions

Elizabeth Murray - Painter’s Progress, Spring 1981 - 1981 - Oil on canvas, nineteen panels - 9’ 8" x 7' 9” - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (Click Photo for Large Image)Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007) was an American artist whose work “blurs the distinction between abstraction and representation, and her shaped canvases and multipart supports challenge traditional conventions of painting.”

“Painter's Progress, Spring 1981” is a painting of an artist's palette and brush, made up of 19 individual canvases of various shapes, arranged in a fashion that allows the viewer to see the discrete pieces but also the painted image. Murray's paintings are fun, cartoonish, and also deadly serious in their commitment to the medium and its boundless possibilities. Murray is famous for expanding painting's dimensions by working across multiple canvasses, and fragmenting the picture plane. 

Murray described this piece as "so psychologically satisfying because I finally realized the meaning of shattering and of putting an image inside the shattered parts that would make them whole again." 

Morris Louis: Method and Medium

Morris Louis - Blue Veil - 1958 - Acrylic on canvas - Fogg Museum (Harvard Art Museums), Cambridge, MA (click photo for larger image)Morris Louis (1912-1962) became one of the leading figures of Color Field painting, along with his contemporaries Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler. In his short yet prolific career, most of which he spent in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Louis continually experimented with method and medium, manipulating large canvases in creative ways to control the flow and stain of his acrylic paints. His mature style, characterized by layered veils and rivulets of poured acrylic paint on untreated canvases, makes his paintings some of the most iconic works of Color Field Painting. Morris Louis was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1962 and soon after died at his home in Washington, D.C. on September 7, 1962. The cause of his illness was attributed to prolonged exposure to paint vapors.

The work featured here is part of what is known as the Veil series, named for its thin overlapping "veils" of acrylic Magna paint. This canvas is one of Louis's earliest experimentations with applying thin, quick-drying washes of color to unprimed canvas. The title may evoke the sense of shifting color and light that we are encouraged to perceive in this painting.

Giacometti: An Existentialist

Alberto Giacometti - Three Men Walking - 1949 - Bronze - 30 1/8 x 13 x 12 3/4 in. (76.5 x 33 x 32.4 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkSwiss artist Alberto Giacometti  (1901-1966) had a remarkable career that traced the shifting enthusiasms of European art before and after the Second World War. As a Surrealist in the 1930s, he devised innovative sculptural forms, sometimes reminiscent of toys and games. As an Existentialist after the war, he led the way in creating a style that summed up the philosophy's interests in perception, alienation and anxiety.

In the late 1930s, Giacometti abandoned both abstraction and Surrealism, becoming more interested in how to represent the human figure in a convincing illusion of real space. He wanted to depict figures in such a way as to communicate a perceptual sense of spatial distance, so that viewers, might share in the artist's own sense of distance from his subject. The solution he arrived at involved whittling the figures down to the slenderest proportions.

Giacometti’s Surrealist works influenced such sculptors as Henry Moore (discussed elsewhere on What About Art?). His figurative work was instrumental in re-establishing the figure as a viable motif in the post-war period, at a time when abstract art dominated. 

“The rough, eroded, heavily worked surfaces of "Three Men Walking (II)" [featured here] typify his technique. Reduced, as they are, to their very core, these figures evoke lone trees in winter that have lost their foliage. Within this style, Giacometti would rarely deviate from the three themes that preoccupied him—the walking man; the standing, nude woman; and the bust—or all three, combined in various groupings.” (metmuseum.org)

Henry Moore: “Truth to Materials”

Henry Moore - Reclining Figure - 1935-36 - Elmwood - h. 19; l. 35; d. 15 in. - Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (click photo for larger image)Henry Moore (1898-1986) is widely regarded as the most important British sculptor of the 20th century, and the most popular and internationally celebrated sculptor of the post-war period. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures, which are located around the world as public works of art. Moore also produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.

Non-Western art was crucial in shaping his early work. He often used abstract form to draw analogies between the human body and the landscape. 

The foundation of Moore's approach was direct carving, something he derived not only from European modernism, but also from non-Western art. At one point in his career, he abandoned the process of modeling (often in clay or plaster) and casting (often in bronze) that had been the basis of his art education, and instead worked on materials directly. He believed in the ethic of “truth to materials”—the idea that the sculptor should respect the intrinsic properties of media, letting them show through in the finished piece.

His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace, Yorkshire.

Gino Severini: Futurism, Cubism and Pure Abstraction

Gino Severini - Dancer = Propeller = Sea - 1915 - Oil on canvas - 29 5/8 x 30 3/4 in. (75.2 x 78.1 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of New York, New York (click photo for larger image)Italian artist Gino Severini (1883-1966) is often labeled as a Cubist/Futurist painter because he found a unique way of synthesizing the styles of Cubism and Futurism. His teacher was future fellow futurist Giacomo Balla. The Futurists wanted to revitalize Italian art (and, as a consequence, all of Italian culture) by depicting the speed and dynamism of modern life. Severini shared this artistic interest, but his work did not contain the political overtones typical of Futurism. The group, as a whole, hoped to revitalize all of Italian culture through its art by glorifying war and mechanized power. This was not Severini’s objective.

“Like other artists associated with Italian Futurism, Severini was fascinated by the interactions of movement and matter and the dynamic speeds of the modern world. In his manifesto ‘Plastic Analogies of Dynamism’ (1913–14), written just before [the work featured here] was painted, he describes the sensory and visual ‘analogies’ that resonate across seemingly unrelated objects, from a dancing girl to a rushing express train to abstract forms.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

In around 1916, Severini embraced a more rigorous and formal approach to composition; instead of deconstructing forms, he wanted to bring geometric order to his paintings. His works from this period were usually still-lifes executed in a Synthetic Cubist manner

To learn more about Severini, Futurism, and Cubism, take What About Art? founder Dr. Jill Kiefer’s class on Modern Movements, beginning Saturday May 1st at the Bethany Arts Community. You can learn more and register HERE.