Post war european art
Extensionalism
The atrocities of WWII made people no longer believe in rationality. → Existentialism became
the dominant philosophical response to the madness and pointless violence seemingly endemic
to Western civilization. Extensionalists had no rules or expectations preceding the artwork; only
the artist’s actions as a record of his or her thoughts were necessary to produce art.
Theater of the Absurd: a movement in dramatic literature and performance that overturned
conventional narrative features, with characters who deliver irrational dialog in the context of
unstable or dream-like plots and settings
Giacometti (extensionalist) → made sculptures using empty space
and his experience, creating disfigured, rocky textures. His figures
used individual isolation.
Germaine Richer (extensionalist) → abandoned the method of
“analyzing forms” that had been practiced by figural sculptors since
the Renaissance. Instead, she sought to fuse her perception of
nature with her own emotional experiences and personal memories,
resulting in hybrid or distorted forms that seem simultaneously
familiar and strange.
Jean dubuffet → The female body is presented
frontally and two dimensionally, as if run over by a
cement roller. Dubuffet rejected out of hand the
Western tradition of the nude, and his paintings
are an assault on “normal” standards of beauty.
(raw art: the art of the mentally disturbed, the
“primitive,” and the “naive”—“anyone,” Dubuffet
said, “who has never learned to draw.”)
Francis bacon → He painted grim, violent, and grotesquely distorted
imagery in the most seductive painterly style, producing what one writer
described as “a terrible beauty.”
,Art informel
Art Informel (formless art) was a movement as a response to abstract expressionism, and had a
shared sense of the need to reject geometric abstraction and to create a spontaneous art that
was guided by emotion and intuition rather than by rational systems of composition.
→ intuitive spontaneity, impulsive gestures
Bram van Velde → painted loosely delineated triangular, round,
and ovoid forms that are situated in allover compositions and
accentuated with patterns of dripping paint
Hans hartung → he was inspired by kandinsky (expressionism) and
surrealism, but always with an emphasis on the spontaneous, gestural
stroke. He would create brisk graphic structures.
Nicolas de Stael → combined figurative with abstract art. His paintings
were abstract to the extent that it is a flat surface, figurative to the extent
they were a representation of space.
, Concrete art
Concrete art took another turn to abstract expressionism. “Concrete painting eliminates all
naturalistic representation; it avails itself exclusively of the fundamental elements of painting, the
color and form of the surface. Its essence is, then, the complete emancipation of every natural
model; pure Creation.” Painting and sculpture always had a mathematical bases (rationality,
clarity, harmony)
Cobra
Movement based in the Netherlands. They sought new forms of elemental expression, as much
opposed to Mondrian and de Stijl as to the Academy. Their art had unconstrained formal
experimentation; their emphasis on brush gestures; and their rejection of rationalism and
geometric abstraction.
British sculpture
In British art after the war a strong emphasis on the figure reasserted itself. The relationship
between the figure, or sculpture, and its surroundings was of crucial importance. Empty space
played an important role.
Barbara Hepworth →Hepworth heightens the tension between the
geometric forms, with their smooth, perfected finish, through the
precarious positioning. In her work, the stone is penetrated in the
center by a large hole to make, in the artist’s words, “an abstract form
and space.”
