Academic literature on the topic 'Figurative painting, American'

The definitions of the sublime given by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant are examined in order to see how they may provide an insight into the evolution of Western painting from its figurative to its abstract forms, through examples drawn from British Romantic art and American abstract expressionism.

American Expressionists were a group of American artists who valued free expression of unconscious elements, combining emotional intense expressions with anti-figurative abstract style. Their main place of creative debates was Cedar Tavern in New York City, considered by art critics an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock, one of the most prominent figures of this movement, suspected of having bipolar disorder, abused alcohol during long periods of his life, for which he even underwent psychotherapy. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident while driving under influence, after decades of innovative work, during which he created a new painting method and produced compositions which are nowadays between the most expensive works of art. Mark Rothko also had periods of heavy drinking, and finally he died by cutting his arms with a razor. He is considered a genius, who created a completely new perspective over painting, and his works are also between the most expensive paintings in the world. Willem de Kooning was affected by alcoholism since his early years, and developed dementia, at least partially induced by abusive drinking. Although affected by neurocognitive disorder, he continued to produce amazingly creative paintings until his final years and in 2016 one of his works obtained the record for the most expensive painting ever sold. Using alcohol as a tool for increasing creativity risks to expose the creator to severe disorders or even death, the subject walking on a narrow line between sublimation of unconscious impulses and tragic resignation before them.Disclosure of interestThe presenting author was speaker for Bristol Myers Squibb and Servier, and participated in clinical research funded by Janssen Cilag, Astra Zeneca, Eli Lilly, Sanofi Aventis, Schering Plough, Organon, Bioline Rx, Forenap, Wyeth, Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, Dainippon Sumitomo.

Before his international breakthrough shortly before the turn of the century, Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012) had a long career that reaches back to the 1960s, when he was associated with Roger Raveel and the so-called Nieuwe Visie (New Vision in Dutch), Belgium’s variation on postwar figurative painting that also entails Anglo-Saxon Pop Art and French nouveau réalisme. Dealing with De Keyser’s works of the 1960s and 1970s, this article discusses the reception of American late-modernist art currents such as Color-Field Painting, Hard Edge, Pop Art, and Minimal Art in Belgium. Drawing on contemporaneous reflections (by, among others, poet and critic Roland Jooris) as well as on recently resurfaced materials from the artist’s personal archives, this essay focuses on the ways innovations associated with these American trends were appropriated by De Keyser, particularly in the production of his so-called Linen Boxes and Slices. Made between 1967 and 1971, Linen Boxes and Slices are paintings that evolved into three-dimensional objects, free-standing on the floor or leaning against the wall. Apart from situating these constructions in De Keyser’s oeuvre, this article interprets Linen Boxes and Slices as particular variations on Pop Art’s fascination for consumer items and on Minimalism’s interest in the spatial and material aspects of “specific objects”.

Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream media, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the late 1970s New York City street art scene – then he called himself “SAMO.” Not long thereafter, Basquiat grew into one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by a return to figurative painting. Given its rough, seemingly untrained and extreme, conceptual nature, Basquiat's high-art oeuvre might not look so sophisticated to the uninformed viewer. However, Basquiat's work reveals a powerful poetic and visual gift, “heady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip hop nation,” as Greg Tate has remarked. As noted by Richard Marshall, Basquiat's aesthetic strength actually comes from his striving “to achieve a balance between the visual and intellectual attributes” of his artwork. Like Marshall, Tate, and others, I will connect with Basquiat's unique, self-reflexively experimental visual practices of signifying and examine anew Basquiat's active contribution to his self-alienation, as Hebdige has called it. Basquiat's aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency from the mainstream's constructions of race. This aesthetic move speaks to a need for escape from the perceived epistemic necessities of blackness. Through these economies of accumulation we see, as Tate has pointed out, Basquiat's “intellectual obsession” with issues such as ancestry/modernity, personhood/property and originality/origins of knowledge, driven by his tireless need to problematize mainstream media's discourses surrounding race – in other words, a commodified American Africanism.

Still life as an independent painting genre in Chinese fine art was formed in the second half of the XX century under the strong influence, first of all, of Western European and Russian, and then American art. This relatively short period of time includes several periods at once, in which one or another influence dominated. However, it was the integration of the ideas and principles of foreign art schools that allowed Chinese masters to develop those features of the artistic and figurative language that determined the features of the genre of still life in the space of modern art. The object of the article is the process of development of Chinese still life in the second half of the twentieth century, the subject is a set of expressive and artistic means used by Chinese artists to create a still life under the influence of foreign artistic trends. This article aims to determine the place and features of the genre of still life in the works of Chinese painters of the second half of the XX century, as well as to characterize the conformity of this genre to the trends of Russian and Soviet, as well as European art. The study concluded that this genre received rapid development in the second half of the XX century, which occurred under continuous foreign artistic influence. The occupation of a strong position in the space of Chinese art by still life and the formation of its original character with national specifics occurred at the end of the twentieth century.

Abstract How can we understand the phrase “Painting After the Subject of History,” which forms the subtitle of Benjamin Buchloh's opus on Gerhard Richter? This essay proposes that that post-subject might be addressed by shapes, rather than figures, closely examining paintings from Philip Guston's celebrated “return to figuration” in the 1970s, when, it is argued, figuration's referentiality is exceeded by the force of Guston's painted shapes. Indeed that force registers as the public dimension of the artist's paintings, addressing an American hellscape, or its unconscious register, populated by images from Kent State, Civil Rights massacres, Vietnam, and more. As Gestalt theorists (Max Wertheimer) and philosophers (Ludwig Wittgenstein) have determined, shapes are respectively “imprinted as wholes” and participate in sign systems––becoming, thereby, not-whole. It is with this ambivalent relation to the sign that Guston's painting explores how shapes can make unconscious forces public. Rather than understanding shapes along a continuum between figuration and abstraction, however, this essay argues that it is Guston's collaborations with poets such as Frank O'Hara that serve as the origin point of his “shape painting.”

Eleonora Mattia: Three Italian illuminated Cuttings in the Royal Library of Copenhagen
 Some observations on the history of collecting illuminated cuttings serve to introduce three unpublished Italian fragments that are part of a collection of illuminated fragments conserved in the Royal Danish Library. The miniatures are described from the point of view of their liturgical and art-historical content and are presented in the form of entries in a catalogue raisonné. The Master B. F., who grew up under the shadow of Leonardo de Vinci, was among those miniaturists most sought-after by collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century because of his evident stylistic debts to the great painter. The beautiful miniature in Copenhagen can now be added to the other known works of this Master and is critical not only to the reconstruction of his corpus, but also for the history of collecting, as it comes from the prestigious Holford Collection. It was already correctly attributed when it entered the collection of the Royal Library; it is here inserted into the activity of the artist, a dating is proposed, and a provenance is suggested from the series of choir books in the monastery of Santi Angelo e Nicolò a Villanova Sillaro in Lombardy, which were broken up around 1799. The Danish cutting here attributed to Attavante has a specific iconography that demonstrates an originality and an independence from models followed by contemporary Florentine painting, qualities not always acknowledged to the well known miniaturist whose extensive figurative production has sometimes been considered repetitive. A third fragment is here attributed to the Pisan Master of Montepulciano Gradual I. This anonymous miniaturist is at the centre of the most recent and innovative studies of fourteenth-century Tuscan painting: his activity belongs to the diversified texture of artistic production between Florence and its nearby cities, with expressive modalities independent of the tradition of the more strictly Giottesque masters. The miniature attributed to him here is to be added to the catalogue of his works, dispersed as they are in many European and American collections.

‘Emotional Weather Report’ is a song by Tom Waits from his 1975 album, Nighthawks at the Diner. ‘Nighthawk’ is a US colloquial term popularised by its use as the title of Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting ‘Nighthawks’, which depicts a nocturnal scene in a New York diner. The term is used to describe people who habitually seek entertainment or companionship in the night-time hours. Waits refers implicitly to Hopper’s work throughout the song, using metaphorical language to present a first-person account of the emotional state of a nighthawk by drawing on the weather report format. Waits’ language relies on the listener’s specific geographical, meteorological and cultural knowledge to understand his communicative intention. The song prompts the listener to bring different levels of encyclopaedic knowledge to an interpretation, and affords differing levels of understanding without distorting the extended metaphor of ‘weather is Waits’ emotions’. This article explores the advantages of a relevance theoretic approach to the stylistic analysis of lyrics. We discuss how the figurative language in Waits’ lyrics is foregrounded by the listener’s schematic/encyclopaedic knowledge of Waits’ history as a performer, of meteorological phenomena and of American culture. We argue that a comprehensive stylistic analysis of a song necessitates a consideration of numerous factors in addition to linguistic choice, including the presentation of the performer, the genre of music and the performer’s history. Such a consideration is paramount to (a) successful metaphorical mapping for the listener, (b) a full analysis of the text as a cultural artefact for the critic, and (c) the achievement of a cohesive and distinct style for the performer.

It is now understood that the two great defining points in the history of western painting ‐ the emergence of illusory space in the Quattrocento and its disavowal in the mid-twentieth century ‐ represent significant shifts in a perpetual tide in which pictorial space is re-invented. Outside of modernist teleology, the ‘abstract’ in painting is a malleable term, denoting a tendency, or a move away from, rather than a polemic against depiction. How productively, then, can notions of pictorial space be mapped between ‘abstraction’ and ‘figuration’? In this article, I focus on the work of the American painter Robert Ryman (1930‐2019). Ryman defined his work as ‘realist’ and deployed a materialism that foregrounded the processes of painting. His paintings are both disarmingly simple and spatially complex, and, despite his disavowal of illusion, this complexity is, paradoxically, concerned with the production of pictorial space. I bring together two texts, Hubert Damisch’s A Theory of /Cloud/ and Hanneke Grootenboer’s The Rhetoric of Perspective, to address the complex and contradictory spaces in Ryman’s paintings and to suggest that they enter into a negotiation with a perspective that is something very different to a rebuttal. To look at Ryman again in this way is to offer a rethinking of the paradoxical spaces of abstract painting, its past and its present.

In recent decades, there has been increasing interest in including the spirit­ual dimension in artistic practice and in discourse on art. This phenomenon seems to be universal but is definitely not homogenic. I examine it by referring to meaningful examples of abstract paintings from different cultural and reli­gious backgrounds. I analyze artworks by two contemporary bicultural paint­ers: the American-Japanese artist, Makoto Fujimura, and American-Iranian artist, Yari Ostovany. The Polish non-figurative artist Tadeusz G. Wiktor is also considered. Their oeuvre can be set within the larger context of great reli­gious and spiritual traditions. I stress the influence of Oriental legacy in con­temporary examples of abstract art. I investigate how the selected artworks refer to an invisible reality, and I focus especially on the silence they evoke. My aim is to show how contemporary non-figurative art can influence the viewer by creating a contemplative experience. I also place the selected artworks in the theoretical contexts presented by the artists themselves and refer to classi­cal and contemporary texts.