Hi, my name is Corey Augustine, and I'd like to be the first to welcome you to this course, where we'll be studying the materials and techniques of New York School painting together. Just a quick word about myself. I am an art historian, I'm a conservator, and an artist as well. So, I'll be bringing these different perspectives in as much as possible to the course. So let's begin by talking about who or what exactly the New York School was. And as a matter of fact, this is not really a school at all with a campus in the traditional sense. Instead, we're talking about a very interdisciplinary movement, painters and sculptors, but we're also talking about poets, writers, dancers, musicians, composers, et cetera. So, we're talking about a very interesting moment in not only art history, but New York history begins somewhere in the 1930s and stretches somewhere in the 60s or maybe even the 70s. So, where did it take place mostly? Well, done in Greenwich Village here in New York City, in Lower Manhattan, an area that at the time was very inexpensive. So, all of these different kinds of artists really all lived within walking distance of one another, which goes a long way to understanding how this movement really crossed fertilized itself and became so rich so quickly. There wasn't a campus per se. But in fact, there were three places that really the New York School took place at, we could say. One of them is in fact a bar. We're talking about the Cedar Bar, a Tavern that no longer exists unfortunately, but a place where many of the painters, specifically of the New York School, would gather literally on a nightly basis. Well, around the corner from the Cedar Bar, was a place called the Club. And if the Cedar Bar was a bit of a riotous place, the Club was a much more serious, academic, civilized kind of a place, where you'd give a nickel at the door and you would have a meeting, where the business was art. And the question here was, how, as Americans, can we be taken seriously as modern artists? Because at that time, the idea of a modern American art movement was almost laughable since the Europeans dominated the modern art worldwide and Paris was the unquestioned center of modern creative activity. I'd be remiss here if we didn't talk about the role of the third part of the campus, so to speak. And that's the Museum of Modern Art. Part of the reason why these artists were able to grow up so quickly is because they had one of the greatest collections of modern art in the world to look at as often as they wanted to. So, as we're looking at this image, we have actually a pretty high percentage of the New York School painters here in one room, and this is the Club, Willem de Kooning, perhaps the leader of this movement. I say perhaps because there wasn't one leader. But I think if we took a vote, most of these characters would nod into Kooning's direction. To Ad Reinhardt, an oppositional figure, later would become known as the father of minimalism. And this figure here is Alfred Barr, who is not an artist at all. He's an academic, and he was the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA was founded in 1929. You're looking at the cover of a catalog Cubism and abstract art. This is an exhibition at MoMA in 1936. This really is the background through which we'll be exploring the New York School. And these are the influences, most of the influences that The New York School was working their own way through. Cubism, the work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, centered in Paris, but quickly becoming a dominant modern art movement throughout Europe and elsewhere. Here in Picasso's 1912 painting, the architects table, you see a late Cubist work, the division of the pictorial surface here, a very shallow space in which this composition is densely enmeshed. These are some very important references for Willem de Kooning, but not only de Kooning since Jackson Pollock was also deeply interested in Cubism. And for Pollock, even more so in surrealism, surrealism, a movement also European which is deeply indebted to the thinking of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and interest in the dream state versus the waking state. Perhaps other realities out there are not just the one that we inhabit with our eyes open. Well, here, a painting by Yves Tanguy, this is one of my favorite titles in the history of modern painting, Mama, Papa is Wounded, of 1927. Some artists with a sense of humor, a sense of humor something that is a bit lacking for many of the New York School artists as they are deadly serious, deadly intent on moving the capital of the art world from Paris here to New York City. They got a hand in that process because, thanks to World War II, many of Europe's greatest, not only painters, but thinkers moved here to New York City. In fact, Yves Tanguy, the painter of this image here, just lived uptown from many of the New York School artists who lived downtown. Piet Mondrian, who's homage in New York City, Broadway Boogie-Woogie painted in 1942. And the following year, also moved from the chaos of World War II in Europe to the relative column of New York City. Mondrian also was very much accessible. Not only could the New York School artist go to MoMA to see Mondrian's works, but they could have a beer with him and learn modernism from one of the living sources of that movement. Hans Hofmann and his ally, Josef Albers, these are two of the great color theorist and great painting instructors of the 20th century. Both of them are German, and both of them immigrated here to New York City. Hofmann set up a school downtown. Josef Albers here, we're looking at one of his many paintings called Homage to the Square. Albers was deeply interested in how colors are interdependent, because the same color will look different in your eye depending on what color it's adjacent to. Now let's switch from Alfred Barr's chart, mapping out all of the influences of Cubism and abstract art to a kind of satire and analyzation of that chart, this one penned by Ad Reinhardt. Reinhardt was an art historian himself, not only of European modernism, but of European old master painting and of East Asian, and we're talking specifically about Chinese and Japanese Classicism. Reinhardt was interested in Asian calligraphy and these classical painting traditions. We'll find that influence working its way into the gestural paintings of the New York School. And Reinhardt was also interested in philosophy, specifically in Zen or Chan Buddhism. And this came to New York City, a very fatal moment, thanks to a teacher named Daisetsu Suzuki. Suzuki was the first significant Zen teacher here on the East Coast in the United States. And many of the artists that we'll talk about in this course, more so Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt, were deeply influenced by this way of thinking as well. We'd also be remiss not to mention the Southern influence. Let's not forget that the influence of the great Mexican muralists is a huge impact on the New York School here. We're looking at a painting called Collective Suicide, 1936, painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros here did most of his work in Mexico, but in 1936, sets up his own school on the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop. His prized pupil, Jackson Pollock. What did they do in this experimental workshop? Well, anything new with materials and techniques, getting rid of the old, getting rid of the European, no more fine oil paints and fine brushes, et cetera, and no more delicacy. Instead, working class materials, industrial materials, enamel paints, spray paint, using stencils, throwing paint, flinging paint. If this begins to sound a little bit like Jackson Pollock, you might be onto something. Let's take a look at another one of the iconic photos of the New York School, this one called the Irascibly. Well, we're talking after all about an avant-garde, a self-defined movement where the practitioners, the artists here, that I was speaking about, consider themselves outside of society. In other words, society doesn't understand them, and that's a good thing. This is their critical distance. This is the way they define their strength, and is an oppositional one. Now, the irascibly, and let's just talk about that word for a second, irascible means angry or pissed off, something like that. What were they irascible about? An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that championed new American painting. Well, as you might imagine, none of these artists were in that show, hence their irascibility. Who are these artists? Well, let's introduce a couple new faces here. There's Barnett Newman. Here's Mark Rothko. And front and center of course, here's Jackson Pollock posing cigarette dangling. This, Jackson Pollock's, One: Number 31 of 1950, is really progressive new American painting. This is the kind of thing that they thought should have been recognized by the Metropolitan Museum. One of the stories of this course is that this was a struggle. It was a struggle from the get go, and it was a very, very difficult moment for these artists to build themselves in avant-garde or New York City. That really was not ready for one. This goes a long way into understanding how aggressive these artists had to be, how headstrong in other words. And this is also the story of how New York did become the center of the art world. So, what are the ideas that are being explored in this New York School group of painters that was so on European or what was so new? As a way to understand this, let's introduce two of the most important art historians who are associated with this movement. Harold Rosenberg was a poet. As a matter of fact, a New York School poet. And his way to understand what was so interesting, what was so new about the New York School painting was called Action Painting. Rosenberg was thinking about the gestures, the physical movements, how the body moved in space, and how the painting was a kind of recorded image of that event. In other words, something performative transpired, and the painting is the leftover, is the reminder of something that occurred. And Jackson Pollock, we're talking about the torso, the hips, the knees, the shoulders, the wrist, the elbow, et cetera, the entire body dramatically inserting itself into the presence of this painting. On the Clement Greenberg, Greenberg central drive is a term called Medium Specificity. For Greenberg, and by the way, for Ad Reinhardt and some of the other artists we'll study together, the role of a painter in the 1940's, in the 1950's was to purify painting of anything external to it. In other words, get rid of subject matter. And here, if we look back at that Reinhardt image of the tree, its subject matter that is weighing down this bow of the tree into the dustbin of history populated by, well, Encyclopedia Britannica and not non-art sources like that. Well, already in this brief introduction, I think we can agree that this is some extraordinarily rich subject matter, and I'm looking forward to exploring this together over the coming weeks.
