Word: expressionist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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LULU. Justine Bateman (airhead Mallory on TV's Family Ties) shifts gears to play, competently if without much shading or subtlety, the ultimate femme fatale in Frank Wedekind's expressionist classic, deftly adapted by Roger Downey, at California's Berkeley...
...Frankenthaler painted it after a trip to Nova Scotia, whose coast is plainly visible in it: the pine-forested mountains and humpy boulders, the dramatic horizontal blue. It was made flat on the floor, like a Pollock, and records the influence of Cezanne's watercolors, as well as abstract expressionist painters whom Frankenthaler had studied -- in particular, Arshile Gorky, whose looping organic line is reflected in her sketchy charcoal underdrawing. For all its size, it is an agreeably spontaneous image (and was painted in one day), pale and subtle, with a surprising snap to its trails and vaporous blots...
...would, in certain ways, remain an abstract expressionist at heart, a painter who loved spontaneous gesture and the kind of unforeseen imagery that popped out of it. From the big red hand (of God?) that appears in Eden, 1956, to the shamelessly romantic sky space that hangs behind the lavender blobs of pigment in Sacrifice Decision, 1981, one sees traces of the surrealist ideas that had formed Pollock -- an openness to the kind of unsought private image that was generally barred from color-field painting. Frankenthaler disliked programs and was not a self-conscious avant-gardist...
...wall; one realizes this was always part of their intent. Even the Italian artists dealing with popular imagery in the early '60s, like Mimmo Rotella, lack the bluntness of their American counterparts. Rotella's Marilyn, 1962, a torn poster "found" and peeled from the wall, is partly about abstract expressionist gesture, partly about the ruin of images by time, and not in the least concerned with the shiny newness Pop art liked...
...back in 1986. This year's Leone d'Oro was won, amid general acclamation and to no one's surprise, by Jasper Johns for his show in the U.S. pavilion. One long-overdue new pavilion has been added: Australia's, showing a group of enormous paintings by the veteran expressionist Arthur Boyd, an artist of exceptional if uneven power whose work is hardly known...