Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s - Softcover

Leja, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300070829 ISBN 13: 9780300070828

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1997

Synopsis

In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity—a new experience and idea of self.

In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping "primitive" and unconscious components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors—including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness—that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated. According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity, a feature that helps to account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions alike.

About this title

From the Back Cover

In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothki, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionist artist were part of a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. Leja demonstrates that the interests of these New York School artist in tapping 'primitive' and unconscious components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers of the period.

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300070829
• ISBN 13: 9780300070828
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400