Lecture 04 Abstract Expressionism The New York School

okay and welcome back so after that speed run through the 19th and first half of the 20th century to give you sense of how we got to the middle of the 20th century we're not going to slow down we're going to do some of the side quests and what mean by that is we're going to explain what art was like at the middle of the 20th century and think this is very important because you can't understand contemporary art you can't understand pop art which pops up out of nowhere jeez i'm sorry don't try this the dad jokes they just come naturally have three kids give me break it just pops up out of nowhere in the middle of the 1950s and explodes onto the scene in the 1960s but it doesn't come out of nowhere there's lot percolating under the surface and it has to do with the incredible success of abstract expressionism and particularly the new york school that is that all of the ideas that people had been experimenting with over the last 50 years finally become mainstream and mean totally and completely mainstream that they are part and parcel of this vast post-world war ii consumer culture that is created in the 1940s and 50s so let's get into it why does it happen here why does it happen in new york city and the answer is that new york city is city of exiles remember nazis come to power in 1933 by 1933 1934 they have shut down the bauhaus in dasao germany it doesn't last much longer in berlin people like max beckmann get booted out of their position in frankfurt germany ken colwitz gets booted lot of these people had found teaching positions as and as art instructors and universities and most of them lose their positions in the purge many of them are jewish and have no desire to hang around for what they can see coming and they leave and they leave in series of waves of exiles they start leaving first from germany then wind up leaving you know paris and and denmark and elsewhere because those places are also conquered and then they move to england and then finally england comes under the blitz 40 41 so it seems like the only safe place to go is the united states and some of them are some of the biggest names that we know from this time period so piet mondrian who was this dutch painter who pioneers this extreme abstraction of the steel he comes to new york ferdinand legere who was one of the first cubists who was exhibited in that in the autumn salon in 1911. he's there max ernst max ernst was also daughterist and also very instrumental in surrealism andre proton who was the founder of surrealism and wrote the surrealist manifesto all kinds of people including bill de kooning bill de kooning's dutch artist who comes to america and everybody comes but some of them stay some of them decide to make their new life in new york city some of them return after the war and it's not just artists it's whole host of intellectuals you know richard krauthaimer very famous architectural historian comes over irwin panovsky comes over and he eventually winds up at princeton erin panovsky's an art historian this is true across the board some of the great most prominent scholars of what we call the frankfurt school marcusa and adorno german scholars they end up coming and end up working in places like ucla berkeley et and but new york is where most of them come because that's the major major hub so remember that as we were working in the period between the wars the goal of modern artists between the wars was this re-capturing of meaning dadaism pretty much encapsulated the feelings of people at the end of world war one that meaning was dead how could you possibly say that art could have any meaning or that life could have any meaning and so they had completely deconstructed meaning so it was new search for meaning and there's two ways to go about this one is to go in the direction of pure abstraction to go in the direction of kasmir malevich montreal to steal and other movements that abstract in itself was form of expression that you were going to totally remove yourself from the past create something that was non-objective complete reduction of form often geometric and so abstraction comes to the fore and the reason abstraction is so popular is because abstraction is pure it's seen as this kind of pure aesthetic you don't have to explain it you know non-objective art by vasily kandinsky what is it it is what it is that black square by malovich what is it my students really don't know it's black square there's nothing more to it than that it is what it is it's this attempt to get down to reality and truth the other direction that people go is surrealism and surrealism is this idea that okay we're going to create something objective but going back to the iconography of the past of christianity and what the symbolists were doing that just wasn't going to cut it anymore so we needed new iconography new visual vocabulary so we went to things like the interpretation of dreams the the theories of sigmund freud we started delving into the subconscious allowing ourselves to explore the self which was something that was relatively new you know this this idea that you could explore the cell for meaning was would have been considered ridiculously self absorbed in the 19th century they preferred stoic resolve and you find meaning outside yourself and one of the methods that evolves out of this is psychic automatism this drive to find the composition as you are creating it it's very process oriented that is you jump into it and you just create you do not have something in mind so just like word association or an ink blot you don't come to it with an image the image comes out of you spontaneously in kind of intuitive process and it creates these organic forms that you later kind of resolve we call this biomorphism because the things are biomorph biomorphic that biomorphic means they they look like life forms like single-celled organisms and other things these two ideas this this method of psychic automatism of expression of finding spontaneity and abstraction total removal of any kind of objective representation and pure reduction of form come together as you can see in this phenomenal diagram to create what we call abstract expressionism where it takes the psychic automatism the spontaneity the improvisational technique and process of the biomorphic psychic automatism and it fuses it with this pure abstraction and unlike the psychic automatism and biomorphism which still has kind of representation they get rid of it and it could only happen in place like new york because it's the only place that all of these people were at where they were all coming together and experimenting and looking at these things and so this is what creates abstract expressionism so abstract expressionism is really term defined by the critic harold rosenberg called rosenberg called this stuff action painting that you find it in the process and the reason he called it action painting is that instead of painting you know scenes of action you were active in the creation of it you really attacked the canvas and you can see that and this aligned with lot of improvisational forms that were happening at the same time we were having experiments in poetry it's not an accident that the beatnik poetry comes out of the same period the late 1940s early 1950s or you would stand up there i'm sure you all know the beatnik poetry it's my gosh it's terrible stereotype and cliche now it's the place where you go to beat bar people wear berets and black turtlenecks and smokes cigarettes and drink coffee and instead of applauding they yeah it's deep man they they snap it's it's it's hollywood cliche at this point but at the time that was really innovative this you know this improvisational poetry without form that existed and it's very similar to jazz jazz is also an improvisational art form i'll never forget the time went to jazz club in philadelphia my friend invited me i'm not big jazz connoisseur but really wanted to experience it and it was amazing remember being there and thinking wow i've been listening to this for 20 minutes haven't heard recognizable theme since the first five minutes the saxophone has gone into his second solo time has no meaning this is just intense it was just wave of wave and it was impressive to hear them do that to just create this and they knew how to make it this form well you could think of the painting of the of the abstract expressionists to be the same process you have few simple rules that you set down and then if you follow those rules everything else branches out from that and if it's one thing that's interesting about this is the technique actually removes the artist from the process you have few set simple rules but infinite variation within those rules so this is the first movement really that isn't stylistically unified in the way that even you know post and post impressionists weren't terribly stylistically unified either but but even more so that is you can group things together by style but many of the abstract expressionists look completely different from each other they're all abstract they're all expressionist they all have different method of removing themselves from the process and that creates an ideological movement it is not the style that unifies them it is the concept behind the style and that's critical that's really critical because it shows that at some point the concept has become more important than the output and that will become very important as we get into contemporary art later on when you have an art form that emphasizes your process and emphasizes the ideology behind that process you're really making conceptual art now the abstract expressionists at the end of the day still have these massive monumental 20-foot wide paintings that you know they could sell for millions and they were still object but you have to have that kind of break between your process and the ultimate painting it ceases to be image making that's fascinating thing is that with the exception of maybe de kooning they're not making images anymore even before this people were making images when malovich is reducing it to square he's still making an image he's making square but at this point they're no longer making images anymore they're making experiences remember what we said about contemporary art contemporary is bad experiences so in way contemporary art can said to be just the next step it liberates the abstract expressionists from the need for an object so it's not as much repudiation as you might think so the person who was behind all of this other than errol rosenberg was probably clement green clement greenberg had already established himself as writer and thinker with his very famous art and kitchen in 1939 and he was hanging out in new york city at this time and in fact all of these people kind of come together we have whole collection of artists that are active and you can look through the some of the important ones that you can see robert motherwell is here jackson pollock it's really kind of incredible dead center you got barnet newman and roth go off to the side so you have whole collection of individuals that were all actively involved in these ideas and they were all in lower manhattan and it's not just artists you have artists from europe artists from america but you also have art critics clement greenberg was right there in the mix so this is another thing that's unusual about this time period in addition to in addition to the artists all kind of being there at the same time you have the art critics and art historians like meyer shapiro who are hanging out with these same artists so and for you know it's very rare usually what happens is an artist makes something then the critic looks at it and says like it and don't here's why and then the artists have to respond to the critics but you have artists and critics mingling socially together in the same places at this time and it allows them to feed off their ideas so clement greenberg was really committed to this idea of high art freeing the artist and getting closer to truth at this progressive ideal and he was hanging around in the same places that these artists were hanging around and they were exchanging ideas so think he had the opportunity to really shape this movement and so what were they all doing in lower manhattan lower manhattan was dirt cheap that's the truth that's why they were there know if you go to soho and greenwich village today they are not dirt cheap they are pretty darn bougie they've been completely gentrified love that line out of age of ultron where captain america comes back and they say hey are you going to move back into brooklyn he says don't think can afford brooklyn it's true all of manhattan has gone boogie you know even the naked city has gone bougie it's it's crazy but these were lower class working-class crime-filled neighborhoods once upon time that were full of warehouses and stores and shops and factories and things like that so they were in those places because you could get cheap loft space that's the answer to it you could find space that was you know studio that you could actually paint at and that's why they were there and so they were in this cheap place and we have this collection of people that come together and we call them the new york school now it's not formal school it's not anything like formal school it's just group of like-minded individuals that gathered together and amazingly they gathered together in one place and that is the cedar tavern and the cedar tavern was dive bar it was an absolute it was the kind of bar that longshoremen and teamsters would hang out in and when asked why they you know hung out in that bar jackson pollock was just very honest about it he said because the booze was cheap and he said that's why we hung out there you know it was had nothing to do with anything else you know they weren't intentionally slumming it in those early days in the 1940s they were desperately poor that's why they were there you could get cheap loft space so you could actually have places to paint and you could get cheap booze and they form something they call the art club and they called it the art club but it was purely informal club and they describe it that you know everybody would put in dollar and that would be enough to buy bottle of jack or bottle of something and they would they would get tiny little dixie cup and everybody would get some but it usually wasn't enough to go around and then they would invite somebody to come speak and they would either hang out in the cedar tavern sometimes they would go to place at the art student league in in new york city and they would just shoot the ball and they would sometimes get somebody in to talk to them john cage the very famous musician and founder of black mountain college which is radical arts college in north carolina at the time they got him to speak he was into zen buddhism and so he talked about zen buddhism and about how you have this spontaneous generation and zen art and they thought that was really interesting and then there were bunch of other of these you know exiles refugees wanderers you know hanging around and it was this lively environment and what's interesting is slowly over the course of the late 1940s into the 1950s it ceased to be place that you know attracted longshoremen and teamsters and now attracted these bohemian crazy artists and some of the most famous people are there and they all interacted so up there in the top you have that's bill de kooning's white shock of hair he's always recognizable and then think that's his wife elaine de kooning who was every bit as much as part or center of the group as anybody else and so all these artists would hang out there it became kind of bohemian place and the stories they tell about the cedar tavern are really quite extraordinary by the 1950s when it had become you know kind of hip hipster place and they've driven off all the teamsters and working class people there were famous artists and critics who were coming there routinely and there was one who said you know still haven't met bill de kooning and somebody said well that's him over there and he realized he never recognized him before he thought he was just some drunk he had actually seen him passed out on the street in front and never never realized that he was this famous artist jackson pollock got booted from the tavern because he kicked in door on bathroom stall another famous artist got booted because he was drunk and urinated in the sink in the bathroom one of my favorite stories is that clement greenberg was there and and bill de kooning he had he had written clement greenberg had written very scathing critique of de kooning de kooning was was probably the most popular in the late 1940s early 1950s but by the late 1950s he was considered passe and clement greenberg had written very scathing report of him critique of him and bill de kooning came in and and said you know and it got to be this big shoving match and and he said let's go outside take this outside i'm going to punch you and come gerber says no i'm not going to i'm going to punch you and then so and then so kakuni said he was going to punch him right there so clement greenberg got punched out by bill de kooning in the middle of the cedar tavern lots of stories lots of things happened what can say they were bunch of womanizing drunks that's just the truth they swapped partners and lives and it's amazing any of them got out alive in fact most of them didn't and but it was this incredible dynamic place what's funny is that the cedar tavern it actually killed the cedar tavern because of course when you create space like this that's all hip and everybody wants to go to it then the teamsters and the working class people go away those are your regulars but then eventually the bohemians will get bored they'll move on to the next place and the teamsters and the working-class people won't come back so in way it was kind of blessing and curse for the cedar tavern it immortalized it as this locus where people would change you know exchange ideas about art but it ultimately kind of destroyed the the business so they were all exchanging these ideas they were talking directly to critics they were talking to people from all over europe and many of them were from europe or elsewhere themselves and they all came together in this moment to create this art so let's talk about some of it one of the kind of founding members is arshal gerke arshogi himself was refugee twice over he escaped the armenian genocide as kid and went to russia dropped his armenian name and adopted gorky he was actually born was danica doyen and he changed his name to archel gorky gorky was the name of famous russian writer and arshila's achilles so you know this they all had these kind of invented identities about themselves so he'd spend lot of time in in russia but also paris and eventually came to new york and settled in new york and people commented on it when he was he had been in new york long enough that you know he still had slight accent but his accent got more pronounced whenever he was in the company of critics or people in the cedar tavern it's really kind of remarkable and he is really credited as the first to break through with this you know idea of abstract expressionism he is the one that takes the biomorphism and the psychic automatism and crosses over he was like lot of these artists employed by the work projects administration or projects administration was one of the new deal programs it was part of the nra the nra was the national recovery act not the national rifle association just there's lots of different acronyms in the world sooner or later they're going to line up and so he was painting stuff like this this was mural that he did in 1937 he's clearly working you can see on the biomorphism of the surrealists but his challenge here was to create something that was recognizable form that fit the context which was mural for new airport that went up in newark new jersey and it's while he's in the work projects administration that he meets people like jackson pollock and others because they all worked for the work project's administration during the depression there wasn't lot of work for artists and so the government employed artists making murals for things like airports post offices things like that and he is the first to kind of he could see him working towards us direction late 30s world war ii comes along and lot of these artists find different work to support the war effort and in this case here you can see how he starts moving away from biomorphism into kind of pure expression of forms and his technique is very interesting he will take line and just create free-form line and the line will overlap itself and intersect creating forms and then he will accentuate those forms by painting color back into them or sometimes it's the reverse sometimes he will paint kind of loss in shape with color and then he will outline it and so you can see that this spontaneous generation of form is creating shapes and impressions and pure expressions you can see it when you compare it to something like mirose the escape ladder but miro would always resolve these into faces you can see him putting eyes and and limbs on things mirror would always try to give these things an identity they were still shapes and forms the process by which he got them was random but eventually he would solidify them in his imagination into something bit more recognizable but that was not the case with gorky gorky would actually just leave them forms and decided not to push them and force them to be conformed to his imagination he would just create them and so you can see how he'll put down an area of one color and then outline it very quickly with another you have that same kind of energetic brush stroke that you see in the expressionists for example but this time completely freed from any desire to do any kind of representation it has the same kind of energy as kandinsky but kandinsky stuff is more deliberate kandinsky is sitting there looking at the composition okay need something here something here whereas this isn't this is something that is created spontaneously you can see how he creates these spaces just you know outlining them creating forms and then putting the color inside of them or sometimes creating the color and then outlining them afterwards but they never ever turn into things they are always just forms that exist arshal gorky then is usually given credit as the person who crosses over into abstract expressionism now what's interesting is that he has all of these guys have very well the exception of bill de cunning we'll talk about him in minute but the exception of all of them is that they all of them had very kind of brief lives arsenal gorky's wife think cheated on him and this caused him to go out and hang himself and so he's gone by 1948 so it's interesting is right as these people's art starts to hit their self-destructive behavior kind of catches up with them probably the most imminent of all of the abstract expressionists in the late 1940s would have been bill de kooning willem de kooning who was gone mostly by bill who became fully americanized heavy drinking heavily womanizing often got into fights very obstructurous personality obnoxious guy and his method was rather than kind of just going over the canvas and finding these forms his method is what he called desperation and that is that you had to be willing to lose painting in order to find it he said like to get all the colors in the world into one painting was never interested in how to make good painting but to see how far one could go and you can see that in his early works he's still creating form of all the abstract expressionists he's the one that never gave up on representation he usually had some kind of figure and of course women were the more popular of his figures this one you can see he kind of creates construction it starts off as kind of surrealist almost biomorphic shape but then especially in the face you see that what what we talk about desperation that that color being pushed further and further until it's just muddy mess there's some control in the lower half of the painting and it's that energy that brushwork you know it's very similar to the brushwork of kokoshka or you know sateen or others and just energetic painting that's what really attracted him and that's what he starts really moving into the painting and the over painting he usually had model or something he was looking at but he did that just because he wanted something there to hold his attention so that he didn't wander into creating something from his imagination it was just springboard for this action and he was noted for painting and over painting constantly mean if you look at painting many of his paintings have 30 40 layers of paint and he's just obliterated whole compositions just painting over it pushing himself to where he's at this moment of desperation again there's something of process here this the the thing that matters is this concept again elevating concept and process over the final outcome and using process and as way to achieve the outcome and you can see it in his paintings you can see how they get muddy layer and layer of color over the top of each other this one you can actually only barely see traces of the original yellow and pink and green where he's obliterated it with black and white moving furiously over it if you've ever seen de kooning painting in person you'll notice that there are dents and divots in the canvas and sometimes holes he is hitting this so hard with the brushes it sounds like he's attacking it he's stabbing it here you can see this is the first of his very famous woman series which kind of cemented his reputation and you can see in that upper corner that starburst how he's you know just painted it until it's just muddy mess and then driven white paint back into it same thing with the figure itself it all just kind of starts to lose it and it's only at that moment where he could feel like the sense of he was losing painting that he was happy with it now the thing about it is that this process how do you know when you're done and the truth is he didn't really know when he was done he was notorious for continuing on his paintings and never ever really finishing in paintings this first major exhibition he refused to let anybody hang the paintings and so he hung the paintings himself when the gallery owner came in he found him in the gallery still painting on the paintings of the show that was supposed to go up in hours so when the people came in the the paint was still wet on the canvas and wanted to have this this absolute energy and you can see that energy and this is the kind of mean this is just far more than anything ever achieved in the modern period in terms of energy and that's the key of abstract expressionist paintings you find them in the making of them you do not find them in you know by sitting back and looking at the canvas and thinking it's not an intellectual act it is an experiential act you find it in the process of making it creating these things but by the mid-1950s he was still doing iterations of these women and and that's when clement greenberg said well there's really much more interesting things going on that's when they had their their row and their fisticuffs and in the cedar tavern and then he never ever really adjusted after that it's interesting that all of these guys started out just insanely dirt poor you know they were you know they were living in the ymca they were living in hostels and sleeping on the floors of their friend places what we would call couchsurfing they had virtually no money but when they hit their fame in the late 40s early 50s it was massive and it was international and at that point they did become quite successful you know de kooning was regularly selling paintings for ten and twenty thousand dollars and this is at time period where you know the median income is eleven thousand so median income is around fifty thousand today medium income you know median income was around eleven thousand then eleven you know you could buy car for you know thousand you could buy house you know for you know 10 to 20. so selling painting for you know five to ten thousand was lot of money in 1950 and so they did become very very successful very quickly and it destroyed most of them they drank most of their money and after they drank it and frittered away there was nothing left when pop art came along bill de kooning was forgotten and he never ever could get enough going again and it's amazing he was probably the hardest living and hardest drinking out of any of these guys in the new york school but just by dumb chance he lived and so by the 1980s people were starting to retrospectives of the you know these great painters from the middle of the 20th century and they started you know doing retrospectives on decoding and people said hey wait minute he's still alive and so he's i'm happy to say he had second career and so in the 80s people said wait minute he's still alive and they said you know they started collecting and selling his works he actually got to see his stuff appreciated so he had this early great career collapsed when pop art and conceptual art came along you know was pretty much starving for most of the later half of the 60s and 70s and early 80s and then by the 80s they rediscovered him and he started painting again he really hadn't painted that much and he's painted and i'm going to tell you this now actually like his second career better actually do understand why people love the energy and intensity of these paintings from the 1950s but think his paintings from the 80s have the same kind of intensity but they have kind of well they're more 80s colors heck i'm an 80s kid you know they have the kind of neon bright colors the day glow colors and it showed that you know he still had that wonderful kind of quality and so he did he did have second career it's kind of interesting which brings us to one of my favorite members of the new york school robert motherwell i'm shirt and tie kind of guy may be an art historian have the personality of game show host but have the soul of an accountant and so like shirt and tie guys you know went into the arts where could literally go to work in shorts flip-flops and and mesh tank top and nobody would care but always want to go to work at work in shirt and tie always wanted to be professional guy think that's why like robert motherwell so robert motherwell is an interesting character because he actually was unlike lot of these guys who were you know working-class joes who came from poverty and and worked their way up or were absolute refugees literal refugees he actually was born into money he was the son of banker son of banker grew up outside seattle his family was well educated and well established and when he was young man he said want to go be an artist and his parents said well why don't you go into something respectable instead like art history so he did and that's why he writes the best about this stuff he became other than clement greenberg and harold rosenberg the most adamant defender of abstract expressionism and the the person who most you know kind of elucidated and explained its methods and its ideas so he goes and he becomes an art history student at columbia university and that's where he comes into contact with mayor shapiro mayor shapiro is an art historian who knew what was going down in you know lower manhattan at the time and meyer shapiro says look you don't really want to be an art historian you want to be an artist go be an artist and so i'm sure he disappointed his parents and went and became an artist and became this world famous artist seem to be the only person in the world who's went into the arts started in studio arts but seem to be the only art student in the world whose parents approved of him going into the arts said dad wish to be an artist my dad was like cool my mother was like awesome and went to be an artist and i'm like dang hate this this is boring i'm gonna be an art historian my parents were like cool and my mom was like awesome and so that's why was lousy artist didn't have any of this teenage angst from my parents telling me to go into chartered accountancy or something like that at any rate so he becomes the most literary defender of the abstract expressionists as an interesting character he says most painting in the european tradition was painting the mask modern art rejected all that our subject matter was the person behind the mask and love that quote because what he's saying is that at the end of the day if you're constructing geometric shapes or if you're painting an actual figure you're not getting to this experiential quality and he himself was very interested in love this photo here he is cigarette you know he'll never be this cool cigarette narrow tie with one of his paintings behind him and he himself was trying to get to that to get to that idea that expression and so early in the 1940s he's doing works relatively similar to arshal gorky in way creating shapes and forms filling them in with color but it's not until he gets to his kind of elegy series that he really starts to find himself he was reading poem by harold rosenberg and he starts to paint and he was doing something in sketch on pen and ink and started scribbling he was also very interested in zen calligraphy in japanese calligraphy which has these spontaneous forms that are created and so he just started creating these ovoid shapes and rectangles working them together and he takes this original poem by harold rosenberg as his inspiration year later he reinvents it to small poem called lament for ignacio sanchez mejas by garcia lorca and these are the first in his elegy series and the an elegy is poem it's typically poem to something that is lost you know you when you read these poets from the classical age they would have poems to their eligible mistress what they meant by that was this is woman that can never attain and you know unrequited love but also elegies are given in into expressions to things that are lost or could never be so like eulogy but an elegy is little bit different and so he created whole series of these painting furiously and love his paintings because you can see the energy in them there's reason that harold rosenberg called these action paintings you can see the spatter you can see the energy coming off the brush strokes you can see that these things are painted quickly at speed and he would paint white and then he would paint black over the top of it these ovoid forms and it was very fitting to this concept of an elegy to something that was gone he himself was kind of devoted marxist the spanish republic was one of the first marxist institutions and of course then it had the civil war and franco took control and held control until the 1970s so this is an elegy to what might have been and so he did whole series of these throughout his life again love how he takes these colors the gold the red the blue these were associated with you know coat of arms and spanish flag at the time and then he obliterates them with black and white these funerary colors these overwhelming funerary colors and massive scale and you can see the energy of this he is really trying to capture the emotion that he feels as he thinks about what's been lost he also did whole series called the new england elegy and these were in remembrance of jack kennedy so jack kennedy is assassinated november 23rd 1963 and again jack kennedy camelot he held the hope of nation and so by obliterating these you know these these forms in these big black horizontal forms again he's not trying to illustrate anything he's trying to express and did whole series of those again he would often create small little lithographs based on quick brush work and sketches in the japanese calligraphy tradition and zen calligraphy there are these things called kanjis and studying non-western art can tell you that legibility is not all that important in asian calligraphy what's more important is expression and he was and they often have spatters and and things like that so taking up from that you can see these quick drips or these works where you have this spontaneous spatters that are created you're trying to capture the energy of the moment another one who likewise was painting in that same gestural style who was working with de kooning but moved over into kind of monochromatic black and white palette was franz klein so franz klein would do much the same creating these strong black you know striking lines over white background again spattering the paint showing the energy showing the motion lot of dry brush as well franz klein was one of the first to actually use house paints because to get paint to move like this to spatter to flow to show the energy of your movement you need thinner paint and you need paint that will move but you know artist paint tend to be thick and heavy bodied because you're painting slow you're painting little at time so he was painting in house paints and when he finally sold some of his first paintings his gallery owner said okay enough of this we're we're selling art here and people who buy art expect high quality materials so he went and he cleared out franz klein studio stripped out all of the house paints that he had bought at the local hardware store and replaced him with rembrandts and other rembrandt brand paints and and high quality stuff and when franz klein got back he had fit took it all threw it away went to the hardware store and bought himself house paintbrush and and you know just an oil varnish you know house paint and went back to work and so again this is something that it's it's the process and the materials communicate with it and create this kind of vitality again franz klein died too soon think he died of heart attack which brings us to jackson pollock jackson pollock is probably the most famous member of the new york school and he is for couple of reasons one think he achieves the most international fame and second he's the hero of the movement clement greenberg singles him out you know michelangelo had vasari to settle him out and make him the hero of the renaissance clement greenberg picked jackson pollock as his michelangelo as the hero the person whose expression most closely captured what clement greenberg was looking for in this closeness this attempt to reach truth in this progression towards ultimate truth so jackson pollock grew up in cody wyoming and very much again poor from american west and they often played that up in his biography as kind of cowboy artist i'm not sure how much of cowboy artist he really was he trained under thomas bettenhart and who was one of these regional painters at the the new york art league and also worked extensively in the work projects administration creating things he was deemed for so he didn't get drafted for world war ii so he was hanging around new york city when all of these you know kind of refugees come piling in and in one of these sessions gordon onslow ford guy from england came by to talk at the new york art student league and when he was there he starts talking about automatism and methods of automatism of creating spontaneous form by either scribbling or drawing and one of the techniques that he mentions is dripping he says yeah you don't even have to touch the canvas you can drip and this really sparked off jackson pollock's attention he was at the lecture so immediately afterwards he and basiotias and komrowski two fellow artists of his that were kind of in this group of erasables kind of artists in the late 30s early 40s that were trying to change art do this painting and they collaborate on it and you can see the dripping you can see that the dripping is here and here in various places now what's interesting is it's not the star of the show it's kind of an accent lot of this is just kind of free-form brushwork but dripping will then be part of his toolkit from that time forward so here you have painting you did in and again this is very much like kind what the surrealists were doing creating symbols actions these things almost look like you know math you know clear diamonds recognizable shapes but in the background there's the strips you can see them his furious drips are are there but this stuff was very frustrating to him because even though you can see these drips in the background most of his action is still furiously painting brush on surface and he couldn't get the freedom that he was looking for here again you can see there are drips there are drips in the edges you can see drips here and there but most of this is furiously just kind of working on this material and not and and feeling constrained mean he was trying to get beyond forms and then you look at all of these you can see he's still creating forms he may not be creating them intentionally he may not be creating objective forms but he's still creating forms and the thing is not entirely free think he gets real break peggy guggenheim wealthy family massive sponsors of the arts there were some of these nouveau riche who were really trying to set themselves apart from others by showing where their tastes were and they were real enthusiasts for modern art in fact they were instrumental in the funding of the museum of modern art and of course the guggenheim museum is created and that's where that gets its name and she had home that was going up and she had massive stairwell and needed something over it and friend of hers said let me recommend this guy and so jackson pollock did it and think this is where we start to see this breakthrough moment here you can see it you know the scale of this thing now there are some drips here and there but not very many of them mostly this is an all-over decoration and series of rhythmic movements in the brush and so rather than him creating forms here he gets himself into kind of stan trance and this is very interesting we often talk about people being in an alpha state or being in in in the zone that is where they lose themselves and they fall into rhythm of doing something musicians describe this sports people you know basketball players all kinds of people you know talk about this that they're in the zone they actually aren't even doing anything consciously this stuff is happening intuitively and you can see the repeating forms over he is working kind of dance or movement over the canvas and this is critical because this allows him to cross over and we start to see it in this painting eyes in the heat lot of this is still again applied vigorously by brush but we start to see the drips come to the fore the drips are being allowed to become the central player of his compositions and finally 1947 1948 is when he crosses over where there's still some brushwork here but most of this is him rhythmically moving the paint over the surface full fathom five is probably the first one that you can actually start to see this there is again some brushwork here some of these heavy marks here are brushes but most of this is drips and then we get this layering effect layer upon layer of drips creating density all of it on the surface and this is why think clement greenberg really gravitated to this because there's no way to deny this the truth of this this is surface this is just what it is i've always said you can criticize clement greenberg for lot of things but the one thing you can't criticize him for is being snob he really did genuinely believe in the universality of this kind of expression abstraction in his opinion it's funny because most people look abstraction and they feel kind of lost and know that you know lay people and and people who aren't really into this don't understand it but even my wife says you know of all the abstract expressionists and she's not fan of contemporary or modern art at all it's it's it's rule people the people who put the cap back on to the toothpaste and the people who leave it off they always get married the people who hate contemporary art and the people who love contemporary art they always get married too you can't avoid it it's just you know it has to be so my wife is not fan of lot of stuff teach but anyway even she says you know can kind of get this understand what this is about this is kind of experience not her favorite not to her taste but she can get it think that's why clement greenberg elevated him so much and kind of swapped out de kooning and put in pollock as his kind of golden boy because it is just on the surface there is nothing to understand it is what it is it's kind of an experience and it communicates something of the experience of his creation of it it is document of its own creation you can see him working these paints and of course lot of times you know when you see jackson pollock represented in textbooks they always show him painting and as this started to get out in the late 1940s people started coming to studio people started filming him because they realized that there was this kind of dance like quality performance like quality to what he was doing he would stand over the the canvas now linked to it on canvas but i'll also link to it down below on the youtube but there's very famous film by hans nemeth on jackson pollock in 1951 where he paints painting and want you to go look at it and want you to watch it because it gives you sense of this he also talks about his artwork he talks about how he doesn't want to illustrate his feelings he wishes to express them he compares himself to the sand painters he buys into that kind of western mythos that our critics were talking about him and some of this was bs and hype but some of it was true and he compares himself to the sand painters of the navajos that they worked close to the earth and they were creating something well sand painting is ritual action and at the end of it the sand painting is is done it's not preserved it is today because now it's recognized in art form but usually it's ritual thing and so he's at ritual moment which breaks the question where is the art is the art on the wall or is the art in the moment of its creation he's very famous saying that don't paint nature am nature am creating this am this force and often think you really have to do this don't know if you've ever painted this way if you're one of my art students go get big canvas get the biggest canvas you can throw it on the ground and start throwing some damn paint around just get bucket get brush get them up don't care and just do this if you've never experienced this you've got to do this this goes true for anybody listening on youtube visit one of my students if you've never experienced this spontaneous creation of just picking up big roller and just covering something in color without any intent in mind or throwing the paint or splashing it if you've never done it you got to do it now what you may produce maybe garbage i'm going to be honest with you i've done it bunch it's always garbage but the experience of creating it is really incredible and so it is this experiential quality and amazingly he gets picked up and and he gets popularized because of this and he gets written up think it's kind of it was just so crazy mean even the painters who were working vigorously you know like franz klein or robert motherwell it still felt like painting this felt like novelty or something else and again because it's so abstract and it's nothing more than what it is it kind of is has an appeal it also has an all-over surface decoration mean when you look at jackson pollock looking at jackson pollock is kind of looking like snow on screen even though they don't have snow on screen anymore but except in horror movies but you know and it it overwhelms you you get deer in the headlight kind of feeling looking at it this kind of sensation is overwhelming and think that's why people gravitated to it and it's important to talk about this that the abstract expressionists they weren't just written up in magazines for art nerds like me for critics and and connoisseurs in magazines like new yorker or burlington or or what have you they were written up in life magazine life magazine was mass media mass distribution magazine they were written up in things like reader's digest they were written in all kinds of popular things and they were in fact well known and there were people creating knockoffs of this galore once jackson pollock started doing this people started painting this way it had both decorative quality that people could appreciate and an expressive quality and it really turned them into star and so he starts numbering his paintings he doesn't actually he doesn't actually give them names much or they sometimes have names but they're kind of nicknames he starts numbering them and then he renumbers them he often comments that you know sometimes he would lose painting that you know it didn't turn out the way he wanted so he'd roll it up throw it away which is huge problem for collectors because sometimes those paintings wound up in the hands of friends and there's think there's junkyard that wound up with one and and and they have now validated that yeah it is but he didn't sign any of them so it's very hard so there are few lost pollocks out there there's very famous documentary about lady who claims to have bought one at at yard sale or was it thrift store and now there's people trying to verify it but it's really interesting so when you see these things they do have kind of all over surface quality there is nothing to look at there is no foreground or or point or co or focal point composition now there is sense of composition he does respect the edges you can see the bare canvas here you can see how he works in rhythms first one color and then the other you can see the repeating rhythm of the features and how they layer up they really do become overwhelming when you look at these in detail it's really quite exceptional how much layering there is and just seeing the way people look at them it just it involves there's there's no level at which this isn't satisfying you can stand back you can get close it destroys all these distinctions of kind of space and it is what it is again explains why clement greenberg was you know such champion of it but he starts to change you know mean he fully explores the drips in the late 1940s and the year 1950 but almost all of these most famous paintings are done in less than two-year period between 49 and 51. by 52 he is not doing pure drips anymore he's starting to pour the paint he's starting to get bigger thicker areas and you can see that when he starts interjecting some kind of control over the composition again having liberated himself with this technique having created it with this dance-like rhythmic motion that you really should go look at and see in the video he starts to create solid form in way he's like malovich malovich had to get down to that black square before he could start introducing other colors and other forms and so he can see he's pouring the paint in straight lines some of his later works he starts creating forms and that's really fascinating faces persons you can see the faces hopefully you can clearly see this face over here he starts going back to working in with the brush and the drips go back to being bit player in supporting role his last paintings are very kind of think they're his best paintings people started calling them poor paintings took broad areas of color in many ways think he would have evolved into the color field and you can see this allowing things to go creating compositional high points mean instead of this all over surface decoration you have this opening kind of void in the center being framed by the white but think that helps you mean and then and then yeah with his mistress and friend of his mistress he gets drunk and wraps his car around tree and his mistress survives but he kills the his mistresses friend who was with him and kills himself and it all comes to an end it would have been very interesting to see how he would have evolved because think we concentrate on the drip we associate him so much with the drip and the technique that we don't see that he himself would have had some breath i'm big fan of mark tansy mark dance he is postmodernist penis painter who also was the child of two art historians and that will explain why you're so messed up and he paints these very funny paintings in these kind of monochromatic realist style almost like documentary photographs but he shows how jackson pollock was like the christ to the apostles in the boat you can see arshel gorky here clement greenberg is pointing at him showing him the way here he is in his typical dripped posture and what this and here's robert motherwell looking on in interest while other figures look and you know the water looks deep and this is the myth of depth of course this reference is clement greenberg's comment that you know how do we treat painting do we treat painting like window onto scene no you treat painting like surface because it is surface and jackson pollock was the one who truly treated it like surface mark tansy also you know does this wonderful thing called the triumph of the new york school where on this side we have the early modernists we can see matisse and picasso and notice that they are dressed in the clothing of world war one over here we have clement greenberg motherwell jackson pollock is here and they are instead of being on horses and in the close of world war one they are in the close of world war ii and so this is gag it's way of saying yeah the early modernists you know had their day but clearly by the 1940s by the 1950s modernism was purely established in the united states in new york and it's these american or ex-refugees living in new york who were going to take up the mantle do want to point out that major supporting feature of his life was lee krasner who herself was an accomplished painter and after jackson pollock got himself killed on drunk driving accident she went on to have career and think she carries on many of these kind of same ideas well do want to wrap this up so let's get into barnet newman barnett newman is there from the beginning it's kind of interesting you kind of have core of artists and that's going to be people like gorky the kooning pollock but there's kind of periphery of artists that are hanging on as well and one of those characters is going to be barnett newman barnett newman is an interesting kind of sad sack figure it he was failed art teacher he could never ever pass his examinations to become professional art teacher and so he ended up being substitute art teacher but was very very frustrated for that and he didn't have his first matrix exhibition until 1951 and he didn't sell his first painting till he was 50 years old i'm in my 50th year right now so have lot of sympathy for this approach so if you're has-been hold on you know if you're in your young 20s or one of my students in your early 20s you still got another 30 years of being husband before you can pull it out i'm just teasing and he is an interesting character because he very much was trying to find his way through this he was one of the only ones of these that wasn't kind of womanizing drunk he had very dedicated wife and he had gone through series of jobs and finally in the late 1940s when all the rest of this was breaking through his wife said you have to pursue this so she went back to work so that he could pursue it and dedicate it and this is when he ended up having his first major exhibition in 1951. he said it is our function as artist to make the spectator see the world our way not his way and he did that in such reduced minimalized way that it really is incredible what's fascinating to me is that barnett newman was not considered to be amongst the premier painters in the 1950s but by the 1960s he was recognized for his vision and his paintings today are selling more than de koonings they are fetching higher prices at auctions and think that's because abstract expressionism for all its energy was brief moment but his art presages the way to minimalism and to painters that came after him so as mentioned he was struggling to try and find style to try and find an identity and that's when he painted this painting in 1946 and he painted single kind of white line in the midst of field of more typically abstract expressionist kind of brushwork and he was so captivated by this he realized that this was the direction he was going to go for it he was so committed to it that he destroyed all his previous works we have very few paintings of his earlier style he called these straight vertical lines zips and they're made literally sometimes by just painting straight line sometimes by putting tape down painting over the tape or painting between two pieces of tape and then creating these layers of color underneath it as kind of you know expression this is very kind of bizarre minimalist approach and it was so bizarre that even his fellow artists at the time thought he was fraud thought you know come on you know this is gimmick you know you're not doing this but he was earnestly sincere about this another feature of his paintings is the scale the scale of the paintings are enormous and if all of your expression is limited to these single vertical lines then the spacing and the color of those lines become critical and he described it as symphony as you go through symphony you'd never see the whole symphony at once it's an experience note by note as you go through and so he wanted people to walk across his paintings to see line and then move on and when you see people looking at his paintings you could see that they focus in on it it becomes very experiential you have this wall of color this was painting that he painted in 1950 this was in his first exhibition in and it's just mammoth painting think it's more than 11 feet long and it has these vertical stripes some are incredibly subtle and barely come out from the background others as you can see are very vibrant and enormous and as people look at it you can see that's how they interact with it they interact with it through those zips all of these paintings then try to create sensation of focus and you can see this real intense deep blues he's painting in many many layers so you have this vibrating color surface and then this bright single line that exhibition was complete failure he didn't sell single painting and he was so distraught and depressed by that he didn't paint again think for another seven years and so for seven years he gave up and then something amazing happened as things started going into the 50s and the first wave of the pop artists were coming through clement greenberg was kind of looking around for something to hold on and clement greenberg initially kind of gave dismissive view of barnett newman but later looked at his work and said wait minute there's something here and think that's because by the late 1950s early 1960s clement greenberg was trying to deal with the the reality of pop art how did it happen and then he was trying to explain where modern art was going and this is he was working up to his post-gestural post-painterly post-gestural painting show that he was going to curate and put on and as you're doing that you look for the sources of that kind of style and he could see that barnett newman was the source for this style so barnett newman became incredibly successful but very late in his life alas died in the 1960s again of heart attack but not before he got to have this chance to influence the next generation of abstract painters he himself was jewish but he was not religious jew but he also was very concerned about religious imagery so he tackled probably one of his most famous pieces this would be the stations of the cross and again these are not illustrations the stations of cross is very famous kind of concept where you show various different stages of christ in the passion as he's going to be crucified there are various different stations you know there's one where the women of jerusalem weep form there's another was saint veronica presses the sweat cloth to his face and this miraculous image one where you know he's you know whipped at the column of flagellation and he takes all of these stations and he tries to create not an illustration but sensation of the feeling that created this is the third station of the cross and the third station across is associated with the the cry lama lama sabachthania it's like you know this cry that christ gives out god why has thou forsaken me and so they express almost pure black and white you almost don't need to know which station it is because you can get the pure feeling from it so this marks shift by the middle of the 1950s the abstract expressionist painters are either dead or they've been written off like de kooning or they've become successful but they're going in new direction direction that is more simple but there's still this thing that connects them together and it's this process that they each chose method that limited the output of the artist so that it could be pure expressive for jackson pollock it was his drips for de kooning it was his desperation as furious working into the canvas over and over working the canvas but for barnet newman it's going to be these zips and what's going to happen is the next group of artists that pick up on this is they're going to pick up on color and so the extension of abstract expressionism that has the longest shadow that has the longest influence is going to be the color field movement so the color field movement was these groups of artists who man can never spell hans hoffman's name right either put in two fs or one it should be one and two n's second time i've realized i've made that mistake so don't comment it onto the youtubes people i'm sorry all those defenders of hans hoffman i'm sorry spelled his name wrong gotta crank out several of these videos every day so but the color field again was very similar to this idea of barnett newman of getting expression in one area and one zone only and you can see it in the late 50s hans hoffman is starting to experience experiment with pure colors he himself was doing dripping and was dripping large areas of color but he starts to square it off creating just zones of pure color the person who's really going to pick up on this however is mark rothko so mark rothko is jewish russian-american painter he was russian immigrant named marcus rothkovich but he shortened it to rothko and he's active in new york and he is on the periphery of the core of this abstract expressionist movement mean he was always there he was there in the cedar tavern he was hanging out with these other individuals and like them he was experimenting but in the late 1940s he starts doing some very interesting things he starts brushing out the edges of his areas he never lets something hard leave hard so while everyone else is working to this hard expressive gesture he starts erasing the marks of the gesture and of course if you don't have those spatters and dry brushing and edges then what becomes the principal focus of the expression it becomes the color and he literally starts painting in layers so thin that you can't see the brushwork and then he'll take rag and soak it in turpentine and actually scrub back the edges of the paint so that you can't see the brush work and his color sections become cloud-like forms you can actually see how the white in this case over layers the black and the red he's working in many many thin layers and and almost gauze-like glazes over the top of each other and this creates all this subtle radiant vibrant energy eventually he realizes this is the thing that's the really exciting part of it not the shapes the forms and so he starts creating his sectional paintings and these are the paintings for which he will become you know world famous his sectional paintings have broad areas of color whereas barnett newman had his vertical zips almost all of his sectional paintings are going to be horizontal areas again he will scrub out the edges sometimes doing things leaving gestural edges but by the time he hits the mid-1950s he's going to be painting just intense fields of color cloud-like forms and no other kind of form painting like this doesn't have like foreground or background or any kind of shape it's just an expression of color he was also insistent that these things be hung low to the ground all of these painters work at scale the monumentality of abstract expressionism and color field is one of the universal characteristics of it because you want people to be subsumed in the painting and he took it step further he liked his paintings to be hung low to the ground so that it didn't feel like you were looking out window it felt like broad expanse it was filling your peripheral vision he wanted people to stand that close to it he also was was very clear about the lighting he generally liked the lighting low so that these things almost have buzzing quality about them when you see these things in the intensity of color that becomes the communication now this is something that i'm sorry you really can't enjoy unless you actually experience one in person slides just aren't going to cut it they don't cover the same color they don't cover the scale it's not until you see it in person learned when started teaching about contemporary art at the philadelphia museum that had to lecture about the rothkos in the hall outside of the gallery where rothkos were at because the second got people into the hall had lost them because they were too caught up in the experience this kind of throbbing experience of these intense colors and you really can't experience it until you actually see it as he goes on throughout the 50s and into the 60s his palettes start to get more complex they start to get darker and this was it seemed interesting that you know we remember jackson pollock and today we remember barnett newman but by far he was more successful than anybody that came out of the new york school towards the end of his life he was selling paintings for hundred thousand dollars that was 1970. so in 1970 100 000 insane amount of money it's like selling paintings for millions today and usually he didn't work for gal he didn't gallery he had developed such reputation that he stopped selling through gallery he was just selling right out of his own studio so and he had dozens of paintings in his studio eventually this this became sparked off controversy when he died but we'll talk about that in minute and he received an enormous commission towards the end of the 1950s commission to decorate the four seasons restaurant the four seasons restaurant was located at the top of this the seagram's building the seagram's building was designed by mies van der rohe mies van der rohe was the last director of bauhaus when it was in berlin and he was the founder of the international style school of architecture so by the 1950s modernism is utterly triumphant the buildings the ideas of modernism and bauhaus are being used to build skyscrapers this skyscraper is what it is it is steel and glass it is true to the form it is true to the materials and surface there's nothing beneath it it is what it is and what perfect place for painting and all of this comes together i'm sad that the four seasons restaurant is gone you know it was an institution for my life and now it's gone but the reason it was called the four seasons is it was this idea that you know the same ideas of modern painting something being true to what it is happened to food as well and in food they decided we're going to serve seasonal food instead of these complex french sauces and and fussy kind of recipes we're gonna have simple recipes that highlighted the food and the quality of food in season and it was really kind of pioneering idea and the aesthetic of the building and the aesthetic of the restaurant was hundred percent modern you know no moldings no crown moldings everything is glass or steel or wood or pure veneer and there actually was at this location there actually was at this location very famous work by picasso painted backdrop for play and that backdrop was part of this but that was felt like it didn't fit it wasn't this pure modernist aesthetic that they were looking for so they commissioned series of paintings by mark rothko for this location and think the commission was six figures was enormous for the day absolutely insane commission but it fell through there was disagreement between rothko and the four seasons and eventually he didn't want them to be displayed there and so they wound up in the tate gallery and eventually the tate modern and he put them in there with the agreement that they would in fact place them according to his desires that they'd be low to the ground that they have low lighting and so it's weird experience going there because you know it's this low lighting and it's strange you know they're not terribly well lit you kind of have to get close to them so in way kept the reason i'm telling you this and going to such detail is because it shows how the abstract expressionists were and the color field painters were moving into this experiential format and and in way the crossover to performance is not as crazy as we might think one of his last major commissions was to create series of paintings for the menil foundation houston was in the middle of an oil boom oil means money money means art if you you could see where all the great art museums and you can tell exactly when the economy was booming in each of those cities because that's when the contemporary art museum gets built so houston dallas they have all these contemporary art museums that are being built from the 60s and 70s and that's because that was the oil boom anyhow so this was supposed to be non-denominational meditational chapel the obelisk out front is by barnett newman they were the family manial family was great patrons of contemporary art and this was the last major commission that he was given it was not installed until after his death because chapel wasn't quite finished but he painted these 14 massive paintings and in these there it's really quite incredible at times they appear to be brown at times they appear to be blue they are so layered and again with this gauze-like kind of cloud-like numinous kind of quality that you really can't photograph them you have to experience them in person many people have written about mark rothko and how as he's gone in his life he's actually works towards darker palette more complex layering and this was probably an indication of his increasing depression anxiety and alcoholism he had very bad split with his wife he was alienated from his wife and his daughter and so in 1970 believe he went to his studio and he committed suicide now here's where have to debunk myth that was taught and that you know the story goes that he carefully put his clothes to his side and he slit his wrists and laid the blood out and that the blood looked like mark rothko painting that he kind of committed ritual suicide and used his own blood to make his last great work that's myth that's not true the truth is he was in underwear and that was part of his regular routine and he just committed suicide that myth kind of gets pushed out there by the people who inherited his foundation because they inherited his foundation and they basically used it to line their own pockets and screw the rothko family and his daughter out of anything of his legacy and it was very famous court case where rothko's daughter basically fights to preserve rothko's legacy so maybe you are seeing this man's you know many people have commented that you see his depression his angst his anxiety his you know fear of the end right there in this work of art and it it really is powerful know can't really explain it to people you have to go see it in person peter gabriel famous musician wasn't really particularly fan of this kind of art and he went and saw it in person and it was so moving it was so kind of an interesting experience that he actually wrote song about it 14 black paintings so if you're fan of peter gabriel that's where that intersects with mark rothko so just briefly we also ought to mention helen frankenthaler helen frankenthaler was there again with the new york school she married robert motherwell and she too was working in color field but in her case she would pour out thin wash of paint with lot of thinner and then charge it back with color and again this is another way of letting the painting and the process take control over what's happening so that you have these areas and fields of intensity of color and then these things would be evocative of certain forms whether it was bay or canyon and that's how she would give it this title but you can actually see the flow and the movement of the paint morris lewis for his point for his part would put stains of paint on canvas that was tilted and he would see the paint pour down you can see the drips and layer of layer over the top of it jules olitski was doing much of the same thing so by the time we reach the year 1950 modernism is utterly and completely triumphant and by the time we reach the year 1960 it's not just triumphant it's everywhere it is every phase of design the buildings our houses our clothing our consumer products our cars all of them had fully embraced this idea of modernist design and you have to understand that before we can go on to what happens in conceptual and pop art why it's such revolution and why they revolted against it it's because for so long modernism had defined itself as the avant-garde but when you are making six-figure commissions creating things for the excuse me if you're getting seasick creating things for the four seasons for these modernist buildings you can no longer say that you are the avant-garde you are the establishment and the other thing is that it was so successful that everybody was painting this way everybody was trying to mimic the success and sudden popularity of pollock de kooning orothco etc making it impossible to get any attention because if everybody is painting that way and the painting is so defined by abstraction how do you get any oxygen how do you get any attention as an artist and so we always have to remember artists are businessmen and they're they're artists and they have ideologies but they also got to eat and so how do you break through how do you gain attention when the whole world is like that and there were very few people at the top and no way to break in so the only way to break is to do something different so clement greenberg's vision that not only had art achieved truth but that it would stay this way forever really comes crashing down around his ears beginning in the mid 1950s but really escalating as we get into the 60s and we'll save that story for next time thanks so much know this was long one know there's lot of lectures this week but hang in there i'm going to kind of drill in little deeper next time know it's been real slog getting to the point where we can finally start to talk about how contemporary art gets sparked off but thanks for hanging in there ciao