Theories

Clement Greenberg "Modernist Painting".
- Moderism includes more than just art and literature. It includes what is truely alive in our culture.
- Western civilisation is not the first to turn around and question its own foundations, but its the civilisation that has gone the furthest in doing so.
- Modernism criticizes the procedures themselves of what is being criticized.
- At dfirst glance the arts might seem to have been in a situation like religions. All tasks they could take seriously , looked as though they were going to be assimilated.
-Limitations that constitute the medium of painting- flat surface, shape, properties of pigment
- Manet's paintings became the first modernist ones by virtue.
- The Impressionists abandoned underpainting and glazing
- Western painting, insofar as it strives for realistic illusion, owes an enormous dept to sculture
- The flatness towards which modernist painting orients itself can never be an utter flatness. The first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness
- Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as moderist art would be impossible.

Abstract Expressionism is an emotional and expressive form of painting that started in the mid 1940’s in New York. This type of painting was a great way of expressing feelings and communicating these thoughts and emotions through a large canvas.

My favorite abstract expressionist artists are Jackson Pollock and Hans Hoffman. When looking at their work it seems thrown together and rushed yet it was planned out. Pollocks art is more expressive that consists of paint slattered on large canvases. He stood over his canvases while they lay on the floor and he also became apart of his work as he walked through and over his paintings. Having this much movemennt and freedom allowed him to create art with strong meaning Hoffmans is more colourful and full of shapes such as squares and circles. His art focused on these geometric forms and the volume in his painting.
The aim of this new form of expressive art was to seek answers to the existance of human life and express this through the emotional artworks during this period after the war.



I found this assignment one of the hardest and i had to read Greenbergs text many times before i could actually understand what he was saying. I also found the movie a little dull and wasnt very interesting and much preferred the text over the movie.