Top Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Primer | WatchMojo.com Top Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Primer in: 20th century lists hosted by Rebecca Brayton The twentieth century saw the birth of modern art, and featured a number of notable styles and artists who indelibly influenced history. Among these artists was Pablo Picasso, who is considered by many to be the greatest artist of the century. His abstract art, as well as his cubist movement, were revolutionary. Following him was Salvador Dali, whose surrealist works utilized Freudian dream imagery. Jackson Pollock was a leader in the abstract expressionist movement, and his action painting techniques were hugely influential. Andy Warhol’s pop art sought to remove the importance of the artist and place the artwork firmly in the spotlight. In this video, WatchMojo.com learns more about a few of the top artists of the twentieth century, as well as their most notable oeuvres.

10 Artists Who Changed The Course Of 20th Century Art 10 Artists Who Changed The Course Of 20th Century Art Anahit Behrooz Updated: 2 December 2016 The 20th century was a time of rapid artistic change and development where preconceived, traditional concepts were challenged. The role of the artist, the relationship between representation and significance, and the growing relevance of mass-produced visual images were considered and redefined. Here, we list ten of the key figures who revolutionized the art of the 20th century. Louise Bourgeois Involved in a series of artistic circles throughout her life, Louise Bourgeois’ work only came to prominence in her later years, with powerful, highly evocative pieces such as Destruction of the Father (1974), an enclosed installation made of latex and plaster and reminiscent of a womb, or Maman (1999), a nine-meter-high bronze sculpture of a spider. Bourgeois’ works are deeply personal, drawing from childhood trauma and depicting themes of the subconscious, sexuality, and repressed emotion.

Bourgeois translated these themes into often macabre, formidable visual symbols; her spiders, which she is perhaps best known for, are both predatory and protective. Her manipulations of the body recall ideas of sexuality and feminine pain. Through her work, Bourgeois revolutionized both feminist and installation art. Maman Spinne Kunsthalle HH | © Windschatten/WikiCommons Marcel Duchamp Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre spanned many of the early 20th century’s key movements, including Dada and Futurism. Today, however, Duchamp is best remembered for his controversial work titled Fountain (1917) – a porcelain urinal upon which Duchamp added the false signature, ‘R.Mutt.’ Simultaneously outrageous and puzzling, Fountain is a seminal 20th century moment, removing art’s obligation to be aesthetically pleasing and calling instead for the intellectually provocative. Duchamp’s works were entirely expressive of his Dadaist attitude; alongside his literary, political, and artistic contemporaries, he revolted against the notion of artistic value and ‘fine’ taste, and advocated for art which appealed to the mind rather than the eyes.

Marcel Duchamp | © Marcel Duchamp/WikiCommons Frida Kahlo Born in 1907 in Mexico City, Frida Kahlo’s legendary life was marked by drama, trauma, and tragedy. At the age of 16 she was involved in a near-deadly streetcar accident which left her in chronic pain and poor health for the remainder of her life. She suffered severe levels of emotional distress during her tempestuous relationship with political painter Diego Riviera , and due to her childhood accident, was never able to carry her pregnancies to term. These hardships found deep expression in her vibrant, often disturbing works, which are characterized by a bold, unflinching exploration of her own personal experience, identity, and sexuality. Frida Kahlo is widely remembered as a Surrealist, but Kahlo herself rejected that term, disliking the misogyny found in the Surrealist circles and in their Freudian, male-centric depictions of women. Instead, through her work, Kahlo revealed the complexity of female experience and asserted the validity of her own unique vision.

[ K ] Frida Kahlo – Two Fridas (1939) (possible allusion to the ‘Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters’) | © cea +/Flickr Anish Kapoor Born in 1954 in Bombay, India, Anish Kapoor is one of the highest-grossing contemporary artists and most successful contemporary sculptors of the century. His work incorporates an astounding variety of aesthetics; his early work combines Eastern and Western influences, using natural materials such as sandstone and granite infused with brightly-colored pigments and shaped into simple forms. His later, large-scale sculptures experiment with form on a monumental scale, using reflective surfaces to distort conceptions of perspective and structure. His use of red wax in installations, meanwhile, is shocking and visceral, while its malleability and constant transformation question ideas of form and artistic creation. Most recently, Kapoor was in the news for winning exclusive rights to the blackest pigment in the world: Vantablack .

C-Curve – Anish Kapoor | © Dominic Alves/Flickr Jeff Koons One of the most highly divisive figures in contemporary art, Jeff Koons is self-described as the artist “who is trying to lead art into the 21st century.” Koons challenges all preconceived notions of what art is, seeking to revolutionize traditional distinctions between ‘high’ art and mass-produced, commercial art. Building on the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, Koons eschews the concept of the artist as an original creator; rather, Koons is well known for his highly technical recreations of advertisements and banal objects. His work also depicts objects that are widely considered ‘unattractive’, and provocatively places them in a context where the viewer is forced to consider them as ‘artistic.’ Criticized by many for the supposed demise of artistic talent and the rise of kitsch, Koons remains one of the century’s most influential, controversial, and highest-grossing artists.

Balloon Flower by Jeff Koons Cour du Chateau de Versailles – panoramio | © bigup21/WikiCommons Georgia O’Keeffe Georgia O’Keeffe is credited as one of the leading figures in American Modernism, a movement which gained popularity and attention during the interwar years. Modernist painting sought to represent a multiplicity of meanings, rather than stopping at pure representation. O’Keeffe’s works famously eschew the boundaries between representation and abstraction; her paintings largely depict nature and the southwestern American landscape, but in such a way as to create new layers of significance. Her famous paintings of flowers represent these classic subjects in a new way, by focusing on close-ups of the centre of flowers and their reproductive organs. By removing context, her paintings become abstract and almost surreal, evoking new perceptions of the object. Pablo Picasso One of the most famous and prolific artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso was instrumental in creating the Cubist movement, thereby entirely revolutionizing the concept of art.

His painting titled Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is a proto-Cubist work which rejects traditional ideas of proportion and perspective in favor of geometrical lines and forms which seek to represent emotion and impression, rather than reality. As his style developed, Picasso tested Cubism’s extreme limits, creating flat, almost two-dimensional paintings in which the subject matter was reduced to a series of shapes. Picasso continued painting until his death in 1973; spanning over 70 years, his oeuvre reflects some of the most important art historical and sociopolitical contexts of the century. [ P ] Pablo Picasso – Tête d’Homme (1969) | © cea +/Flickr Jackson Pollock One of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock’s paintings reject the traditional narrative and subject-based nature of art in favor of an exploration into the medium itself.

His paintings, created with his iconic drip technique where paint is dripped and thrown at the canvas without the use of brushes or tools, do not depict a particular object or story; rather, Pollock’s works explore the very act of painting, presenting a record of his relationship with the paint and his efforts to manipulate it at a particular moment in time. Pollock’s work went on to influence a generation of abstract artists, including Cy Twombly and Helen Frankenthal, starting a critical dialogue in the art world on the role of representation and meaning in art. New York. MoMA. Jackson Pollock | © Tomás Fano/Flickr Cindy Sherman Widely acknowledged as the pioneer of the late 20th century’s photographic aesthetic, Cindy Sherman’s photographs are an arresting exploration of selfhood and identity. Sherman chose to focus on photography, both in her education and artistic work, believing it best epitomized contemporary means of expression. Sherman was particularly interested in the media and its modes of representation; her key works depict herself in a variety of costumes and scenarios, mimicking typical images of women found in the media.

Her Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) series depicts her as famous screen icons, aligning identity with physical appearance, and thereby questioning the simplification and objectification of the female form in contemporary society. Andy Warhol Widely considered the leading figure of the Pop Art movement, Andy Warhol created some of the most iconic works of the 20th century. His works tap into the cultural zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s, using recognizable, in some cases banal, images of consumer products, advertisements, and celebrities in order to explore the relationship between art and commercial images. Warhol is particularly notable for introducing the silk-screen technique for artistic painting; the almost identical reproductions he could create echoed the mass produced nature of consumer products and the media. Rather than giving in to certain critics’ predictions that art would suffocate under the new consumerist culture, Warhol combined the two, exploring the nature of one through the other.

Andy Warhol – Marilyn 1967 | © Ian Burt/Flickr Jackson Pollock - Painter - Biography.com Jackson Pollock Famous 20th century artist Jackson Pollock revolutionized the world of modern art with his unique abstract painting techniques. IN THESE GROUPS » quotes “It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” “I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.” “Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.” Jackson Pollock Jackson Pollock - Mini Biography (TV-14; 3:26) A short biography of Jackson Pollock, an art icon of Abstract Expressionism best known for his drip paintings, as well as his battle with alcoholism.

Synopsis Born on January 28, 1912, in Cody, Wyoming, artist Jackson Pollock studied under Thomas Hart Benton before leaving traditional techniques to explore abstraction expressionism via his splatter and action pieces, which involved pouring paint and other media directly onto canvases. Pollock was both renowned and critiqued for his conventions. He died after driving drunk and crashing into a tree in New York in 1956, at age 44. Early Life Paul Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming. His father, LeRoy Pollock, was a farmer and a government land surveyor, and his mother, Stella May McClure, was a fierce woman with artistic ambitions. The youngest of five brothers, he was a needy child and was often in search of attention that he did not receive. During his youth, Pollock's family moved around the West, to Arizona and throughout California. When Pollock was 8, his father, who was an abusive alcoholic, left the family, and Pollock's older brother, Charles, became like a father to him. Charles was an artist, and was considered to be the best in the family.

He had a significant influence on his younger brother's future ambitions. While the family was living in Los Angeles, Pollock enrolled in the Manual Arts High School, where he discovered his passion for art. He was expelled twice before abandoning school for his creative pursuits. In 1930, at age 18, Pollock moved to New York City to live with his brother, Charles. He soon began studying with Charles's art teacher, representational regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, at the Art Students League. Pollock spent much of his time with Benton, often babysitting Benton's young son, and the Bentons eventually became like the family Pollock felt he never had. The Depression Era During the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt started a program called the Public Works of Art Project, one of many intended to jumpstart the economy. Pollock and his brother Sanford, known as Sande, both found work with PWA's mural division. The WPA program resulted in thousands of works of art by Pollock and contemporaries such as José Clemente Orozco, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. But despite being busy with work, Pollock could not stop drinking.

In 1937, he began receiving psychiatric treatment for alcoholism from a Jungian analyst who fueled his interest in symbolism and Native American art. In 1939, Pollock discovered Pablo Picasso's show at the Museum of Modern Art. Picasso's artistic experimentation encouraged Pollock to push the boundaries of his own work. Love and Work In 1941 (some sources say 1942), Pollock met Lee Krasner, a Jewish contemporary artist and an established painter in her own right, at a party. She later visited Pollock at his studio and was impressed with his art. They soon became romantically involved. Around this time, Peggy Guggenheim began expressing interest in Pollock's paintings. During a meeting she had with the painter Pete Norman, he saw some of Pollock’s paintings lying on the floor and commented that Pollock’s art was possibly the most original American art he had seen. Guggenheim immediately put Pollock on contract. Krasner and Pollock married in October 1945, and with the help of a loan from Guggenheim, bought a farmhouse in the Springs area of East Hampton, on Long Island.

Guggenheim gave Pollock a stipend to work, and Krasner dedicated her time to helping promote and manage his artwork. Pollock was happy to be in the country again, surrounded by nature, which had a major impact on his projects. He was energized by his new surroundings and by his supportive wife. In 1946, he converted the barn to a private studio, where he continued to develop his "drip" technique, the paint literally flowing off of his tools and onto the canvases that he typically placed on the floor. In 1947, Guggenheim turned Pollock over to Betty Parsons, who was not able to pay him a stipend but would give him money as his artwork sold. The "Drip Period" Pollock's most famous paintings were made during this "drip period" between 1947 and 1950. He became wildly popular after being featured in a four-page spread, on August 8, 1949, in Life magazine. The article asked of Pollock, "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The Life article changed Pollock's life overnight.

Many other artists resented his fame, and some of his friends suddenly became competitors. As his fame grew, some critics began calling Pollock a fraud, causing even him to question his own work. During this time he would often look to Krasner to determine which paintings were good, unable to make the differentiation himself. In 1949, Pollock's show at the Betty Parsons Gallery sold out, and he suddenly became the best-paid avant-garde painter in America. But fame was not good for Pollock, who, as a result of it, became dismissive of other artists, even his former teach and mentor, Thomas Hart Benton. Furthermore, acts of self-promotion made him feel like a phony, and he would sometimes give interviews in which his answers were scripted. When Hans Namuth, a documentary photographer, began producing a film of Pollock working, Pollock found it impossible to "perform" for the camera. Instead, he went back to drinking heavily. Pollock's 1950 show at the Parsons gallery did not sell, though many of the paintings included, such as his Number 4, 1950, are considered masterpieces today.

It was during this time that Pollock began to consider symbolic titles misleading, and instead began using numbers and dates for each work he completed. Pollock's art also became darker in color. He abandoned the "drip" method, and began painting in black and white, which proved unsuccessful. Depressed and haunted, Pollock would frequently meet his friends at the nearby Cedar Bar, drinking until it closed and getting into violent fights. Concerned for Pollock's well-being, Krasner called on Pollock's mother to help. Her presence helped to stabilize Pollock, and he began to paint again. He completed his masterpiece, The Deep, during this period. But as the demand from collectors for Pollock's art grew, so too did the pressure he felt, and with it his alcoholism. Downfall and Death Overwhelmed with Pollock's needs, Krasner was also unable to work. Their marriage became troubled, and Pollock's health was failing. He started dating other women. By 1956, he had quit painting, and his marriage was in shambles. Krasner reluctantly left for Paris to give Pollock space. Just after 10 p.m.

on August 11, 1956, Pollock, who had been drinking, crashed his car into a tree less than a mile from his home. Ruth Kligman, his girlfriend at the time, was thrown from the car and survived. Another passenger, Edith Metzger, was killed, and Pollock was thrown 50 feet into the air and into a birch tree. He died immediately. Krasner returned from France to bury Pollock, and subsequently went into a mourning that would last the rest of her life. Retaining her creativity and productivity, Krasner lived and painted for another 20 years. She also managed the sale of Pollock's paintings, carefully distributing them to museums. Before her death, Krasner set up the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which gives grants to young, promising artists. When Krasner died on June 19, 1984, the estate was worth $20 million. Legacy In December 1956, the year after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and then another in 1967.

His work has continued to be honored on a large scale, with frequent exhibitions at both the MoMA in New York and the Tate in London. He remains one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Videos Art History/20th Century - Wikibooks, open books for an open world Art History/20th Century Jump to: navigation , search The twentieth century has seen huge changes in the modes and meanings of artistic production that mirror the enormous social changes that have occurred during the same time period. Continuing with the break with the academic values such as the hierarchy of genres, many movements and many countries re-evaluated aesthetics, technique, color, media, meaning, and many other aspects of artistic enterprise. Technology has had not only an indirect impact on artists, but often is the subject matter, or even the media that artists have worked with. The Impressionists, at the end of the nineteenth century, who championed landscape painting and revolutionized technique and use of color helped to open the floodgates for many more movements (not all of which identified themselves as such).

The Secession movement, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Suprematism, Surrealism, The Bauhaus, De Stijl, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism, and the Postmodern are some of the major movements that have shaped the century and changed our very conceptions of what art is. Contents Secessionist movement[ edit ] The Secessionist movement was the Austrian branch of a larger movement known primarily as Art Nouveau ("new art"). Depending on the country, the style is also known as Jugendstil (Germany), Style Liberty (Italy), Modernisme (Spain), or Latvian Romanticism. Art Nouveau is an umbrella term but also refers to works of this style produced in France and Belgium. Art Nouveau has its roots in the English Arts and Crafts movement of the 19th century; in fact, certain artists, like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, work in both styles. The purpose of Art Nouveau was to create what is known as a complete work of art - a work that includes painting, drawing and printmaking as well as applied arts and architecture.

For this reason, some of the most beautiful and informative Art Nouveau works are complete rooms or houses where every object within is executed in Art Nouveau style. Art Nouveau is characterized by free-flowing floral, vegetal, and other typically feminine motifs. It also features a kind of romantic mysticism that can be traced back to the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist movements of the 19th century. Some well-known Art Nouveau artists and craftsmen include Alphonse Mucha (Czech), an accomplished printmaker and painter; Antoni Gaudi (Spanish), whose architectural works dot Barcelona; Hector Guimard (French), whose wrought-iron entrances for the Paris metro have become his legacy; Gustav Klimt (Austrian), who led the Austrian Secessionists with his opulent and complex paintings; and Louis Comfort Tiffany (American), who is well-known for his distinctive stained-glass work. Fauvism[ edit ] Fauvism, whose name derives from the French word for "wild beast," was a Primitivist movement centered in Paris in the first decade of the 20th century. The most well-known Fauvist artists are Henri Matisse and Andre Derain.

The large blocks of color and simplified forms Fauvist artists used undoubtedly influenced the Cubist movement, which overlapped Fauvism by a few years. Cubism[ edit ] The Father of Cubism is said to be Cezanne . Pablo Picasso , a Spanish artist, who had many phases in his long career, picked up the gauntlet of Cubism. His famous "Demoiselles d'Avignon" of 1907, housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, depicts five nude women, possibly prostitutes, in an interior. The painting is primitivistic - Picasso synthesized his well-documented interest in African masks into the faces of the figures. The fragmentation and flattening of the figures also anticipates the development of analytical Cubism a few years later. One of the Spaniard's most socio-political cubist paintings is "Guernica" of 1937, his grey, black and white portrait of the horrors of war. The basque town of Guernica was bombed by the German Luftwaffe on April 26, 1937.

[1] Another founding member of the Cubist movement was Georges Braque, a French artist whose analytical Cubist work from the 1910s is quite similar to Picasso's. Braque and Picasso worked together closely, and Braque's influence on Picasso (and vice versa) should not be downplayed. Other major artists of the analytical Cubist movement include Juan Gris, whose interest in mathematics made his art more regularized, and less fragmented, than Picasso's; Marcel Duchamp, whose early, pre-readymade works such as "Nude Descending a Staircase" are highly fragmented and undeniably Cubist; Jean Metzinger; and Albert Gleizes. Futurism[ edit ] Futurism was an Italian movement in the 1920s that was based on a fascination with movement, technology, and machinery. Postmodernism[ edit ] Postmodern artist Barbara Kruger is known for critical images inspired by commercial advertising. She is the author of several books. "Love for Sale" shows Kruger's blown up photographic black and white images with text in a red box superimposed creating a new meaning for the viewer.

Kruger taught at the Art Institute and Cal Arts during the 70s. Kruger's work often focuses on feminist issues. Kruger's Whitney Biennial 2'x3' work, enlarged as she tackled billboards in the US and other countries. She was the subject of a lecture given at the 3rd Annual Conference of the Society of the Word and Image at Carleton University in Ontario, Canada in 1993. Abstract Expressionism[ edit ] A school of painting that flourished after World War II until the early 1960s, characterized by the view that art is nonrepresentational and chiefly improvisational. Abstract art is defined as art that has no reference to any figurative reality. In its wider definition the term describes art that depicts real forms in a simplified or rather reduced way - keeping only an allusion of the original natural subject. The abstract paintings of Joan Miró are a good example of this wider definition. The term non-figurative is used as a synonym. In the twentieth century Wassily Kandinsky is considered as the inventor of non-figurative art. Over a period of several years his paintings moved gradually away from figurative subjects.

In 1910 he created the first completely abstract work of art - a watercolor - without any reference to reality. Wassily Kandinsky not only became the first abstract artist, he also promoted it as a theorist. In 1912 his book On the Spiritual in Art was published. A movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade; also called action painting and the New York school. Jackson Pollock 's turbulent yet elegant abstract paintings, which were created by spattering paint on huge canvases placed on the floor, brought abstract expressionism before a hostile public. Willem de Kooning 's first one-man show in 1948 established him as a highly influential artist. Other important artists involved with the movement included Hans Hofmann , Robert Motherwell , and Mark Rothko ; among other major abstract expressionists were such painters as Clyfford Still , Theodoros Stamos, Adolph Gottlieb, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, and Esteban Vicente.

Jackson Pollock Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works | The Art Story Like The Art Story on Facebook Follow The Art Story on Google+ "It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." Synopsis In its edition of August 8th, 1949, Life magazine ran a feature article about Jackson Pollock that bore this question in the headline: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Could a painter who flung paint at canvases with a stick, who poured and hurled it to create roiling vortexes of color and line, possibly be considered "great"? New York's critics certainly thought so, and Pollock's pre-eminence among the Abstract Expressionists has endured, cemented by the legend of his alcoholism and his early death. The famous 'drip paintings' that he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century. At times they could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world.

Key Ideas Pollock's tough and unsettled early life growing up in the American West shaped him into the bullish character he would become. Later, a series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space. In 1939, Pollock began visiting a Jungian analyst to treat his alcoholism, and his analyst encouraged him to create drawings. These would later feed his paintings, and they shaped Pollock's understanding of his pictures not only as outpourings of his own mind, but expressions that might stand for the terror of all modern humanity living in the shadow of nuclear war. Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.

Most Important Art Autumn Rhythm: Number 30 (1950) While only one painting from Pollock's 1950 solo exhibition was actually sold, the show gained much attention. It was described by Art News as one of the three best exhibitions of the year, and Cecil Beaton staged a famous fashion shoot in the exhibition space, which subsequently appeared in Vogue. Autumn Rhythm was one of the major works which appeared in that show. As with many of Pollock's paintings, he began it with a linear framework of diluted black paint which in many areas soaked through the unprimed canvas. Over this he applied more skeins of paint in various colors - lines thick and thin, light and dark, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical. As the title suggests, the coloring, horizontal orientation, and sense of ground and space in Autumn Rhythm are strongly evocative of nature. The balance between control and chance that Pollock maintained throughout his working process produced compositions that can have as much calm tranquillity as some works by Rothko.

Oil on canvas - Metropolitan Museum of Art Like The Art Story on Facebook Biography Childhood Paul Jackson Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, the fifth and youngest son of a family of Irish-Scottish extraction. Pollock was only ten months old when the family moved to San Diego. His father's work as a surveyor would force them to move repeatedly around the Southwest in subsequent years, until, when Pollock was aged nine, his father abandoned the family, only to return when Jackson himself had left home. The West of Pollock's childhood provided a tough upbringing, but he grew to love nature - animals and the expanse of the land - and while living in Phoenix in 1923 he discovered Native American art. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Early Training Pollock attended the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where he befriended Philip Guston, and where he was also introduced to theosophical ideas which prepared him for his later interests in Surrealism and psychoanalysis.

Two of Pollock's older brothers, Charles and Sanford, also pursued careers as artists, and it was their encouragement which lured him to New York in 1930, where he studied under Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. In New York Pollock was attracted to Old Masters and began to study mural painting. He posed for Benton's 1930-31 murals at the New School for Social Research, and he met the prominent Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. He later spent a summer observing Diego Rivera paint murals at the New Workers School, and in 1936 he joined the Experimental Workshop of another muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, where he learned to employ unorthodox painting techniques. Pollock's own canvas, Going West (1934-35), blends many of these influences and is typical of his style at this time. In 1937, he was assigned to the Easel Division of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project.

During much of the 1930s Pollock lived with his brothers in Greenwich Village, and was at times so poor that he had to work as a janitor and steal food to survive. In 1932, however, he was invited to participate in the 8th Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels and Drawings by American and French Artists at the Brooklyn Museum, his first exhibition. Mature Period In 1936, Pollock briefly met Lenore ("Lee") Krasner. In time, their relationship would bring some of the few spells of calm and happiness that Pollock ever knew. But the two did not meet again until 1941, after which they became romantically involved and married in 1945. Meanwhile, Pollock's alcoholism - which had been a problem since his adolescence - drove him into treatment as early as 1938, and by 1939 he was receiving Jungian psychoanalysis.

His analyst encouraged him to produce drawings to aid his recovery, and the methods and motifs in these drawings - albeit shaped by Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Jose Clemente Orozco and the theories of John Graham - soon found their way into works such as Guardians of the Secret(1943). Despite his personal problems, Pollock remained bullishly confident in his art. Krasner was impressed when she saw his work in the early 1940s and introduced him to her teacher, Hans Hofmann. Hofmann was similarly enthusiastic, and the meeting blossomed into an enduring friendship between the two men. Hofmann is said to have remarked that Pollock needed to work more from nature, to which Pollock famously replied, "I don't paint nature, I am nature." The WPA came to an end in 1943 and Pollock was forced to find work on his own. Along with various odd-jobs he became a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum), and it was there that he met Peggy Guggenheim, who invited him to submit work to her new gallery, Art of This Century.

Eventually, Guggenheim put Pollock on a contract, and in 1943 she gave him his first solo exhibition, which was well received. The critic Clement Greenberg noted with approval that Pollock had absorbed and transcended Mexican mural painting, Picasso and Miró. The pictures still carried much figuration, although the references remained concealed - as Pollock said, "I choose to veil the imagery." At the same time, Peggy Guggenheim also commissioned a painting for the entry hall of her New York apartment. The resulting work was Mural (1943), which would prove important in Pollock's transition from a style shaped by murals, Native American art and European modernism towards his mature drip technique. And it was Guggenheim who again helped Pollock when he needed a down-payment to secure an old farmhouse in the town of The Springs on Long Island. He and Krasner bought the farmhouse in the fall of 1945 and married in October. Krasner hoped that distance from the struggles and temptations of the city would offer a great opportunity for both of them to pursue their painting in seclusion and peace.

Exactly how Pollock came upon his drip technique has been a matter of long and inconclusive scholarly argument, but his work was already taking steps towards it in the mid-1940s. He began to lose the symbolic imagery of his earlier pictures and looked for more abstract means of expression. His experience of painting Mural for Guggenheim's apartment was also important in spurring him on, and in 1945 he painted There Were Seven in Eight, a picture in which recognizable imagery was thoroughly suppressed and the surface was knitted together by a vivid tangle of lines. In the following years his style became more boldly abstract still, and he produced works like Shimmering Substance (1946). The following year he finally hit on the idea of flinging and pouring paint, and thus found the means to create the light, airy and apparently endless webs of color that he was reaching towards. Masterpieces such as Full Fathom Five (1947) were the result. Pollock had carried out another stylistic somersault and arrived at a method that synthesized Impressionism, Surrealism and Cubism.

Shimmering Substance led on to works like Number 1A (1948), a larger canvas than Pollock was familiar with, and dense with a dazzling web of color. He found he was best able to approach works such as this by positioning the canvas flat on the floor, moving around it and applying the paint from all sides. By dipping a small stick, house brush or trowel into the paint and then rapidly moving his wrist, arm and body, he allowed it to drip and fall in weaving rhythms over the surface. The technique - the epitome of what critic Harold Rosenberg would call "action painting" - rarely permitted the brush to directly touch the canvas. "On the floor I am more at ease," he said. "I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting." Pollock's work thus became as much about process as they were about product. They became a record of the performance of painting - his play in and around the canvas, where he could enter them as a participant and hover above them as their creator. "There is no accident," Pollock once said, "just as there is no beginning or end..

Sometimes I lose a painting, but I have no fear of changes, of destroying the image, because a painting has a life of its own." Critics were quick to recognize the power of Pollock mature work. Greenberg, who would be his staunchest and most powerful supporter, wrote at the time, "[His] superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control." But when Pollock's pictures reached a wider public, through coverage in magazines such as Vogue and Life, the response was a mixture of shock and incredulity. Nor was he widely collected at first, having only a small circle of supporters. Commercial success would soon come, but even at its height - after Art of This Century Gallery had closed and gallery owner Betty Parsons had taken over Pollock's contract - the painter was still being treated for alcoholism. Pollock supposedly stayed dry from mid-1948 to late 1950, and during these years he lived primarily in Long Island, only occasionally coming into the city.

In 1950, he had a successful solo exhibition, and, along with Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, was selected by MoMA director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., for the Venice Biennale. But a year later he was drinking again. Late Period and Death Pollock's radical abstraction seemed to herald an incredible new freedom for painting, yet semblances of recognizable imagery continued to hover in the background of his pictures. The vast expanse of Blue Poles (1952) is knitted together with the aid of diagonal lines. And One: Number 31 (1950) retains a strong sense of rhythmically dancing figures, amidst its remarkable diversity of effects. Pollock might have abandoned the realism of his youth, but he still managed to make his paintings eloquently metaphorical. Like many of his canvases from this time, One evokes a mood of grandeur which ties it to the tradition of sublime landscape which stretches back into the eighteenth century. It also glistens as if it were dappled with light in the manner of Monet's canvases, and many critics have speculated on whether Pollock was influenced by the French Impressionist.

Pollock never really lost his interest in figurative imagery - as he once put it, "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge." As early as the late 1940s, figuration showed signs of resurfacing in his work. By 1950, whilst his drinking increased, he returned to drawing, resurrecting some of his old motifs, and producing a series of mainly black and white poured paintings. Some, like Yellow Islands (1952), incorporate touches of color and are highly abstract; some, like Echo (Number 25, 1951), are calligraphic in style and only residually figurative; others bear clear images of heads. They were badly received when Pollock first exhibited them, but he continued to work on them right through 1953, his last productive year of work. His personal troubles only increased in his later years. He left Betty Parsons Gallery, and, his reputation preceding him, he struggled to find another gallery. He painted little in 1954, claiming that he had nothing left to say.

In the summer of 1956, Krasner took a trip to Europe to get some distance from Pollock, and soon after the painter began a relationship with 25 year old artist Ruth Kligman, who he had met at the Cedar Bar. Then, on the night of August 11, 1956, while Pollock was drunk and out driving with Kligman and her friend, Edith Metzger, he lost control of the car, killing himself and Metzger, and seriously injuring Kligman. Legacy Pollock's immediate legacy was certainly felt most by other painters. His work brought together elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism, and transcended them all. Beside that achievement even greats such as de Kooning, who remained closer to Cubism, and hung on to figurative imagery, seemed to fall short. And the best among subsequent generations of painters would all have to take on his achievement, just as Pollock himself had wrestled with Picasso.

And as early as 1958, when pioneering performance artist Allan Kaprow explicitly addressed the question of his legacy in an article for Art News, some were beginning to wonder if Pollock might even have opened up possibilities outside of the realm of painting. To borrow critic Harold Rosenberg's words, Pollock had re-imagined the canvas not as "a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or 'express' an object.. [but as] an arena in which to act." And it was a short step from this realization to interpreting Pollock's balletic moves around the canvas as a species of performance art. Since then, Pollock's reputation has only increased. The subject of many biographies, a movie biopic, and major retrospectives, he has become not only one of the most famous symbols of the alienated modern artist, but also an embodiment for critics and historians of American modernism in its finest hour. Influences and Connections National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC School You Gotta Know These 20th-Century Paintings Below is a list of ten paintings which are frequent quiz bowl topics.

This list focuses on individual paintings rather than bodies of work; thus, an artist like Georgia O’Keeffe is not included because no specific one of her familiar cowskull -and- flower paintings is sufficiently prominent. The list is notably skewed toward the first half of the 20th century, as only one work was painted after 1950. Perhaps the earlier paintings have simply had more time to be influential and make their way into the artistic canon. Also, many prominent post-1950 painters, like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko , do not have a specific work with a catchy title that has gained particular attention above all others; like O’Keeffe, they are known for their style and collective body of work rather than for any one painting. Guernica , by Pablo Picasso . Guernica was a Basque town bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937. Picasso had already been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, and he completed his massive, black, white, and grey anti-war mural by early June 1937.

Picasso’s Cubist approach to portraying the figures adds to the sense of destruction and chaos. Guernica was in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until 1981, when it was returned to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , by Marcel Duchamp . First painted in 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase created a sensation when shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic referred to it as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” Painted in various shades of brown, Nude Descending a Staircase portrays a nude woman in a series of broken planes, capturing motion down several steps in a single image. The painting reflects a Cubist sense of division of space, and its portrait of motion echoes the work of the Futurists. The Persistence of Memory , by Salvador Dalí . First shown in 1931, The Persistence of Memory is probably the most famous of surrealist paintings. The landscape of the scene echoes Port Lligat, Dalí’s home.

The ants, flies, clocks, and the Port Lligat landscape are motifs in many other Dalí paintings, and the trompe l’oeil depiction of figures is typical of his works. It currently belongs to MOMA ; its 1951 companion piece, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory , hangs at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , by Pablo Picasso . This painting depicts five women in a brothel. However, the images of the women are partly broken into disjointed, angular facets. The degree of broken-ness is rather mild compared to later Cubist works, but it was revolutionary in 1907. The rather phallic fruit arrangement in the foreground reflects the influence of Cezanne’s “flattening of the canvas.” The two central figures face the viewer, while the other three have primitive masks as faces, reflecting another of Picasso’s influences. It is currently housed at the MOMA . Broadway Boogie Woogie , by Piet Mondrian .

While Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and other Cubist paintings represent an extension of Paul Cezanne’s division-of-space approach to the canvas, Mondrian’s De Stijl works are a still further abstraction, such that the canvas is often divided up into rectangular “tile patterns,” as in Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue . The painting simultaneously echoes the bright lights of a marquee, resembles a pattern of streets as seen from above, and creates a feeling of vitality and vibrancy, not unlike the music itself. This work can also be found at the MOMA . Campbell’s Soup Can , by Andy Warhol . Pop Art parodies (or perhaps reflects) a world in which celebrities, brand names, and media images have replaced the sacred; Warhol’s series of Campbell’s Soup paintings may be the best illustration of this. Like the object itself, the paintings were often done by the mass-produceable form of serigraphy (silk screening). Also like the subject, the Warhol soup can painting existed in many varieties, with different types of Campbell’s Soup or numbers of cans; painting 32 or 100 or 200 identical cans further emphasized the aspect of mass production aspect in the work.

The same approach underlies Warhol’s familiar series of prints of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other pop culture figures. Nighthawks , by Edward Hopper . As is often the case with his works, Hopper uses a realistic approach (including such details as the fluorescent light of the diner, the coffee pots, and the Phillies cigar sign atop the diner) to convey a sense of a loneliness and isolation, even going so far as to depict the corner store without a door connecting to the larger world. Hopper’s wife Jo served as the model for the woman at the bar. Nighthawks is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago . I and the Village , by Marc Chagall . Painted in 1911, I and the Village is among Chagall’s earliest surviving paintings. It is a dreamlike scene that includes many motifs common to Chagall, notably the lamb and peasant life. In addition to the two giant faces—a green face on the right and a lamb’s head on the left—other images include a milkmaid, a reaper, an upside-down peasant woman, a church, and a series of houses, some of them upside-down. I and the Village is currently housed at MOMA .

Christina’s World , by Andrew Wyeth . The Christina of the title is Christina Olson, who lived near the Wyeths’ summer home in Cushing, Maine. In the 1948 painting, Christina lays in the cornfield wearing a pink dress, facing away from the viewer, her body partly twisted and hair blowing slightly in the wind. In the far distance is a three-story farmhouse with dual chimneys and two dormers, along with two sheds to its right. A distant barn is near the top middle of the painting. One notable aspect is the subtle pattern of sunlight, which strikes the farmhouse obliquely from the right, shines in the wheel tracks in the upper right, and casts very realistic-looking shadows on Christina’s dress. The Olson house was the subject of many Andrew Wyeth paintings for 30 years, and it was named to the National Register of Historic Places for its place in Christina’s World. American Gothic , by Grant Wood . Wood painted his most famous work after a visit to Eldon, Iowa, when he saw a Carpenter Gothic style house with a distinctive Gothic window in its gable. Upon returning to his studio, he used his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr.

Byron McKeeby, as the models for the two figures. The pitchfork and the clothing were more typical of 19th-century farmers than contemporary ones. American Gothic is among the most familiar regionalist paintings, and it is said to be the most parodied of all paintings. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was submitted for a competition by Wood upon its completion in 1930 (Wood won a bronze medal and a $300 prize).

Question: Which 20 century artist was famous for his ‘drip’ style of painting?
Answer: Jackson Pollack