Janet Fish: Life Itself—Captured in Casual Glances

Janet Fish - Raspberries and Goldfish - 1981 - Oil on linen with acrylic gesso ground - 72 x 64 in. (182.9 x 162.6 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)American artist Janet Fish (born 1938) is discussed elsewhere on What About Art? She is known for large still life compositions of common objects with bright colors--lime green, pink, yellow, etc. Fish works from a loft in the SoHo section of New York City and takes pride in the fact that she paints "forbidden subjects," which refers to her realistic paintings. Her work, expressive of her highly independent spirit, is a reaction against the pure abstraction that has been prevalent for so many years in the American art world, especially in New York.

As the work featured here demonstrates, “[h]er subjects really are color, light, visual movement and space, and the content of her work is perhaps life itself, seen in isolated moments of unusual juxtapositions and casual glances. It is the work of a true painter, who sees potential paintings many times throughout the average day.

Esteban Vicente: A Trailblazer

Esteban Vicente, No. 3, 1959, oil on canvas, 177.8 x 200 cm - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia - Madrid, Spain (click photo for larger image)Although Abstract Expressionism is a very broad term referring to numerous styles and approaches, all of its practitioners were committed to art as expressions of the self, born out of profound emotion and universal themes. They were most heavily influenced by Surrealism, which adapted to the anxiety and trauma of the post-war era. In their success, these New York painters robbed Paris of its mantle as leader of modern art, and set the stage for America's dominance of the international art world.

Most of the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism matured in the 1930s. They were influenced by the era's far leftist politics, and came to value an art grounded in personal experience. Few would maintain their earlier radical political views, but many continued to adopt the posture of outspoken avant-garde artists and supporters.

Spanish-born Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) was a first-generation member of the avant-garde New York school of painting, which flourished from the 1940s to the ’80s.

In 1929, after training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, Vicente moved to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso. Vicente divided his time between Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona until 1936, when he relocated to New York City. During the 1940s Vicente began to create abstract paintings. He contributed to the highly publicized “Talent 1950” exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, which showcased paintings by New York school artists. He shared a studio with fellow Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning for a time. (See more about de Kooning and Abstract Expressionism here on What About Art?) 

From 1964 until the mid-1980s, Vicente taught art at a number of universities, including Black Mountain (N.C.) College, NYU, and Yale. In 1998 the Spanish government opened the Esteban Vicente Contemporary Art Museum in Segovia.

Gertrude Greene: Purity of Form

Gertrude Greene - Construction 1946 - 1946 - Oil on wood and fiberboard - 40 1/8 x 30 1/8 x 5/8 in. (101.9 x 76.5 x 1.6 cm.) - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.American Abstract Expressionist Gertrude Glass Greene (1904-1956) was an abstract sculptor and painter from New York. Although she and her husband, artist Balcomb Greene (1904-1990), were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art, Gertrude did not overtly express societal concerns in her art. However, she and Balcomb were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization.

Gertrude was one of the earliest American artists to produce non-objective relief sculptures in the early 1930s. She synthesized Cubist and Russian Constructivists themes into her work, and was heavily influenced by what she saw as the “purity” of those two movements. By the 1940s, her work also revealed an interest in Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism. She produced her last sculpture in 1946. For the rest of her life she concentrated on abstract painting.

Alma Thomas: A Force in the Washington Color School

Alma Thomas, Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers, 1968, Acrylic on canvas - 58 7/8 x 50 in. - The Phillips Collection - Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)Alma Thomas (ca. 1891-1978) was an African-American Expressionist painter and art educator. She lived and worked primarily in Washington, D.C. Thomas began to paint seriously in 1960, when she retired from her thirty-eight year career as an art teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C. In the years that followed she would come to be regarded as a major painter of the Washington Color Field School.

Thomas was in her eighth decade of life when she produced her most important works. Earliest to win acclaim was her series of Earth paintings—pure color abstractions of concentric circles that often suggest target paintings and stripes. Done in the late 1960s, these works bear references to rows and borders of flowers inspired by Washington's famed azaleas and cherry blossoms. The titles of her paintings often reflect this influence. In these canvases, brilliant shades of green, pale and deep blue, violet, deep red, light red, orange, and yellow are offset by white areas of untouched raw canvas, suggesting jewel-like Byzantine mosaics.

The works featured here is composed of a vertical grid of closely spaced stripes filled with bars of contrasting colors on a painted white ground. The acrylic paints are thinned almost to the point of transparency, retaining the luminous quality often associated with watercolor. The modulated white background functions in the same way the white of watercolor paper can glow from beneath the painted surface. Thomas sometimes produced as many as twenty watercolor studies before beginning a painting on canvas.

Anselm Kiefer: Monumental and Confrontational

Anselm Kiefer - Everyone Stands Under His Own Dome of Heaven - 1970 - Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on joined paper - 15 3/4 x 18 7/8in. (40 x 47.9cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image) Anselm Kiefer's powerful canvases were groundbreaking at a time when painting was considered all but dead as a medium. Kiefer (born 1945) is most known for his subject matter dealing with German history and myth, particularly as it relates to the Holocaust. These works forced his contemporaries to deal with Germany's past in an era when acknowledgment of Nazism was taboo. Kiefer incorporates heavy impasto and uncommon materials into his pieces, such as lead, glass shards, dried flowers, and strands of hay, many of which reference various aspects of history and myth, German and otherwise. He diverged from Minimalism and abstraction to develop new representational and symbolic languages.

The work featured here “re-imagines the now-miniscule figure of the artist in a green military coat in the midst of a vast, snow-dusted field.” It is part of a series of watercolors related to the photographs Kiefer staged in 1969, reenacting the Nazi salute.  Kiefer has said, "Each man has his own dome, his own perceptions, his own theories. There is no one God for all."