London’s Royal Academy to showcase abstract expressionist masterpieces

Featuring masterpieces by painters Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky or Mark Rothko, London’s Royal Academy of Arts on Tuesday inaugurated a wideranging exhibition showcasing the artistic movement that swept over the United States after World War II: abstract expressionism.

The exhibit, spread out over 12 halls, contains more than 150 oil paintings, photographs and sculptures by the likes of Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline, prominent members of the group of artists now known as the New York School.

“In the ‘age of anxiety’ surrounding the Second World War and the years of free jazz and Beat poetry, artists like Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning broke from accepted conventions to unleash a new confidence in painting,” the RA said in a statement.

With their dynamic brushstrokes and compact colors, the works of these creative geniuses, who came from different backgrounds but were all influenced by their shared historical context, became the backbone of the first properlyAmerican artistic movement, one of the most influential in art history.

“Abstract Expressionism,” the first exhibit dedicated to the movement in the United Kingdom in the past six decades, is set to captivate visitors between Sept. 24 of this year and Jan. 2, 2017, before changing venues to Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum.

The exhibit will then remain open between Feb. 3 and June 4 at the northern Spanish city’s emblematic museum designed by Frank Gehry.

The London exhibition aims to “reevaluate the movement,” which, according to its curator, independent art historian Dr. David Anfam, has often been perceived to be “unified.”

In fact, Anfam said at the press event presenting the new exhibit, “it was a highly complex, fluid and manysided phenomenon.”

For example, not all abstract expressionist artists were based in New York City, as is often believed to be the case.

Some, such as Sam Francis, Mark Tobey or Minor White, created their masterpieces on the West Coast, while Clyfford Still predominantly lived in North Dakota and Canada.

The line dividing “colorfield” painters such as Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman and “action” or “gesture” artists like De Kooning or Pollock is also not as clear as many people think, Anfam stressed, adding that all shared a vision of an “allover composition, without a single or central focus.”

This common theme can be seen in every abstract expressionist painting, where the entire canvas is a single plane of energized fields, be it dominated by Rothko’s vibrant color bands or Pollock’s paint splatters.

Rothko and Pollock each have a hall consecrated to showing off some of their best works in the exhibit, with masterpieces such as Pollock’s colossal 1943 canvas “The Mural” (commissioned by art collector Peggy Guggenheim) commanding its room of the Royal Academy’s 17thcentury Burlington House.

Also present is “Number 11, 1952,” also known as “Blue Poles,” a large canvas that has made a trip from the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra.

Nearby hangs “The Eye is the First Circle” by Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, who painted the massive beigeandbrown oil on canvas piece following her gifted husband’s death in a 1956 alcoholrelated car crash.

According to Anfam, the “urge to stress the human presence, even in abstraction, also connected the artists,” who reacted viscerally to the events of their era, such as the two world wars, the Great Depression, the start of the nuclear age or the Cold War.

For example, Robert Motherwell focused his attention on the Spanish Civil War (193639), creating a series of paintings over the course of 40 years including the iconic “Elegies to the Spanish Republic,” intended as a lamentation or funeral song.

The London exhibit also dedicates space to Clyfford Still’s influential oeuvre, as he was one of the first expressionists and a crucial reference for Pollock and Rothko, who would later lead the transition from figurative to abstract art.

Another hall showcases Armenianborn Gorky, whose “Still Life on a Table” is reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s postcubist style during the interwar period.

Gorky’s dazzling “Water on the Flowery Mill,” painted four years before his suicide in 1948, is also on display in his hall.

Also of note are the rooms featuring Kline, whose bold, blackonwhite brushstrokes demonstrated stunning technical mastery, and De Kooning, a genius clearly obsessed with female sexuality.

The last stop in the fascinating walk through abstract expressionism is a hall reflecting these artists’ final works in life, such as Philip Guston’s criticallypanned return to figurativism with his 1976 “Low Tide.”

By Judith Mora