“State of the Art” - Online

Hans Hofmann - Veluti in Speculum - 1962 - Oil on canvas - 85 1/4 x 73 1/2 in. (216.5 x 186.7 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYThe first session of the “Ninth Street Women” Series Online, offered by Bethany Arts Community is entitled, “State of the Art”. You do need to enroll in the seven-week session in order to attend. Learn more about the program and Register HERE. You’ll also get some tips on how to participate in online programs.

In the introductory session, we’ll take a look at art as an ongoing continuum. Then we’ll explore the trends in art and culture that led to a collective desire to change the direction of visual art.

What the Surrealists began, with their exploration of blending the unconscious with the conscious mind, later artists took to wholly new expressions of the self. Post-war trauma and anxiety shaped both their processes and their products. 

Join us to have a look at the world and the traditions that gave birth to the Ninth Street women.

Adja Yunkers: Abstraction

Adja Yunkers - The Gathering of the Clans - 1953 - Woodcut - Composition: 19 × 13 11/16" (48.2 × 34.7 cm); sheet: 22 1/2 × 15 13/16" (57.2 × 40.1 cm) - MoMA, New York (click photo for larger image)Adja Yunkers (1900-1983) was an American abstract painter and printmaker. He was born in Riga, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire in 1900. He studied art in Leningrad, Berlin, Paris, and London. He lived in Paris for 14 years, and then moved to Stockholm in 1939. In 1947 he moved to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. He held a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York while summers were spent teaching at the University of New Mexico. In 1949, Yunkers received a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the 1950s he primarily worked in color woodcuts, introducing brushwork into the genre. In 1960, he began producing lithographs. Two important series of lithographs can be seen at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles―Salt (five lithographs) and Skies of Venice (ten lithographs). Yunkers died in New York City in 1983.

Jill’s Spring 2020 Art & Art History Classes

(click photo for larger image)How about treating yourself to some Art and Art History class this Spring? 

 “Dare to Try” your hand at oil painting in one of my classes at the lovely Cedar Lane Arts Center, 235 Cedar Lane, Ossining, NY 10562. These classes run for six weeks and there are two additional (and optional) open workshop sessions. You can register HERE for either the Beginners or Intermediate class. Both sessions begin the week of April 20th.

 “Dr. Jill” will also be presenting a five-week “Ninth Street Women” series at the beautiful Bethany Arts Community, beginning Saturday, April 25th at 10 AM. You can register HERE for what will be a lively and informative class.

Both locations are perfect learning environments, and both have plenty of free parking!

More details are here in the flyer.

Barnett Newman: “Zips”

Barnett Newman - Concord - 1949 - Oil and masking tape on canvas - 89 3/4 x 53 5/8 in. (228 x 136.2 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)Barnett Newman (1905-1970) shared the Abstract Expressionists' interests in myth and the primitive unconscious, but the huge fields of color and trademark "zips" in his pictures set him apart from the gestural abstraction of many of his peers. 

The response to his mature work, even from friends, was muted when he first exhibited it. It was not until later in his career that he began to receive acclaim, and he would subsequently become a touchstone for both Minimalists and a second generation of Color Field painters.

“Claiming that he sought ‘to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before,’ he saw his compositions as forms of thought, as expressions of the universal experience of being alive and individual.”

“Concord was painted during Newman's most prolific year. He exhibited the painting in his first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, which was installed with the help of his friend, Mark Rothko. Concord's green layer of paint is uncharacteristically brushy, and it was perhaps with its atmospheric wash in mind that Newman titled the picture after the town famous for Henry David Thoreau's Walden, where he and his wife, Annalee, had honeymooned fourteen years earlier.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Jules Olitski: Material, Surface and Color

Jules Olitski - Pink Alert - 1966 - Acrylic on canvas - 113 x 80 in. - National Gallery of Art Washington, DC

Jules Olitski (1922-2007) was a Russian-born American painter who was instrumental in the development of the Color Field school. Like his contemporaries, Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Olitski stained the surface of his canvases in a technique that rejected the gestural brushwork of the then-popular Abstract Expressionist artists.

With their emphasis on material, surface, and color's emotional strength, his signature works eliminated the illusion of depth and any evidence of the artist's touch. Although Olitski did not remain as well known as some of his fellow Color Field painters, his abstract "spray paintings" of the 1960s are still considered landmark works of this movement.