Abstract Expressionism Art History Posters & Prints
for history of art and social studies classrooms.

William Baziotes
b. 6-11-1912; Pittsburgh, PA
d. 6-6-1963; New York City

Baziotes was friends with many artists in the Abstract Expressionist movement though his work is most often considered in the Surrealist group. Baziotes was also an instructor in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project and "easel artist" between 1936 and 1941.

Pierrot is a stock clown character used in impromtu presenations to represent the naive and trusting fool, sometimes a lunatic, who is without cares.

William Baziotes quotes:
• "Each painting has its own way of evolving... When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself."

• William Baziotes
• more teachers posters

Willem de Kooning
b. 4-24-1904; The Netherlands
d. 3-19-1997; New York City

De Kooning entered the US as a stowaway in 1926 and he supported himself with commercial art work based on his eight years of training at the Rotterdam Acadmey of Fine Arts. He also worked for two years with the WPA Federal Art Project until his undocumented status was revealed at which time he began to explore creative art through painting. His most noted stark black and white works arose out the poverty of not being able to afford anything more than black and white house paint.

He and his wife Elaine de Kooning were prolific artists of the mid 20th century.

Willem de Kooning quotes:
• "The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves."
• "The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time."
• "I don't paint to live, I live to paint."

• Willem de Kooning: Works, Writings, Interviews

Sam Francis
b. 6-25-1923; San Mateo, CA
d. 11-4-1994

Sam Francis, American painter and printmaker, was associated with "color field" and "Tachisme" art which was influenced by his study of Zen Buddhism.

Sam Francis quotes:
• "What we want is to make something that fills utterly the sight and can't be used to make life only bearable."
• "An increase in light gives an increase in darkness."
• "Color is born of the interpenetration of light and dark."
• "Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment."

• Sam Francis: Color is the essence of it all

Helen Frankenthaler
b. 12-12-1928; New York City

Married to Robert Motherwell.

Helen Frankenthaler quotes:
• "There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about."

• "You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once."

• Helen Frankenthaler: Painting History, Writing Painting

Arshile Gorky, née Vosdanig Adoian
b. 4-15-1904; Ottoman Turkey
d. 7-21-1948; Connecticut (suicide)

Arshile Gorky quotes:
• "Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint."
• "Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes ... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas."
• "Art must always remain earnest... Art must be serious, no sarcasm, comedy. One does not laugh at a loved one."
• "I seek a form or language which will express my ideas for our time."
• "My recollections of Armenia open new visions for me. My art is therefore a growth art where forms, pines, shapes, memories of Armenia germinate, breathe, expand and contract, multiply and thereby create new paths for exploration."

• Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work
• Ararat DVD

Adolph Gottlieb
b. 3-14-1903; New York
d. 3-4-1974

Adolph Gottlieb left high school in 1920 to take classes with John Sloan and Robert Henri at the Art Students League in New York.

Adolph Gottlieb quotes:
• "When I was a boy studying art I became aware of and accepted the difficulties of the modern artist. By the age of 18 I clearly understood that the artist in our society cannot expect to make a living from art; must live in the midst of a hostile environment; cannot communicate through his art with more than a few people; and if his work is significant, cannot achieve recognition until the end of his life, if he is lucky, and more likely posthumously."

• Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective

Hans Hofmann
b. 3-21-1880; Bavaria
d. 2-17-1966; NY

“The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.” -Hans Hofmann

Hans Hofmann quotes:
• "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
• "Painters must speak through paint, not through words."
• "Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind."
• "It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form."
• "Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel."
• "When the impulses which stir us to profound emotion are integrated with the medium of expression, every interview of the soul may become art. This is contingent upon mastery of the medium."
• "To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction."

• Hans Hofmann: Revised and Expanded )
• more notable educator posters

Franz Kline
b. 5-23-1910; Wilkes-Barre, PA
d. 5-13-1962; NYC (heart disease)

Franz Kline best known paintings are in black and white rememiscient of Japanese calligraphy and very enlarged sections of industrial and architectural structures. Despite the seeming lack of planning, the works are in fact examples of practiced spontaneity - Kline was known to make many draft sketches.

Franz Kline quotes:
• "If you're a painter, you're not alone. There's no way to be alone."
• "The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?"
• "The nature of anguish is translated into different forms.
• "You instinctively like what you can't do.

• Franz Kline (1910-1962)

Morris Louis (Morris Louis Bernstein)
b. 11-28-1912; Baltimore, MD
d. 9-7-1962; Washington, DC

His "veil" paintings consist of bands of brilliant colors, or long parallel strips of pure color, arranged in a rainbow effect.

• Morris Louis in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Robert Motherwell
b. 1-24-1915; Aberdeen, WA
d. 7-16-1991; Cape Cod, MA

Motherwell's work falls between the experimental painting of the European Surrealist and Dada schools and the more vibrant work of Abstract Expressionism. He was married to artist Helen Frankenthaler.

Robert Motherwell quotes:
• "It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it. "
• "The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with."
• "Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."
• "Wherever art appears, life disappears."
• "Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask."

• The Writings of Robert Motherwell

Louise Nevelson
b. 9-23-1899; Kiev, Czarist Russia
d. 4-17-1988; NYC

Nevelson used found objects and everyday discards in putting together her “assemblages”.

Louise Nevelson quotes:
• "The freer that women become, the freer men will be. Because when you enslave someone, you are enslaved."
• "What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable."
• "You must create your own world. I'm responsible for my world."
• "I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within."
• "I never feel age ... If you have creative work, you don't have age or time."

• The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend

Barnett Newman
b. 1-29-1905; New York City
d. 7-4-1970; NYC

Newman was a major figure in abstract expressionism and a leader in the color field movement.

Barnett Newman quotes:
• "In times of violence, person predilections for niceties of color and form seem irrelevant." (1945)
• "A painter is a choreographer of space."
• "Man's hand traced the stick through the mud to make a line before he learned to throw the stick."
• "Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'."
• "I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality."
• "... if ... could read it (my paintings) properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism."

• Barnett Newman

Jackson Pollock
b. 1-28-1912; Cody, Wyoming
d. 8-11-1956; Springs, NY (car accident)

Jackson Pollock underwent Jungian analysis and was influenced by Jung's theory of archetypes.

Jackson Pollock quotes:
• "The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them."
• "It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said."
• "When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about."
• "In his early work, Pollock had made use of mythology, animal sexuality and ancient rituals; after 1948 he eliminated all conventional signs from his paintings. What Pollock created was a system of signs that he refused to imbue with message or meaning. The new style became known as Abstract Expressionism." Alberto Manguel in The Artist's Mentor

• East Village Guide Map poster
• Jackson Pollock - Love & Death on Long Island (1999) DVD

Mark Rothko (neé Marcus Rothkowitz)
b. 9-25-1903; Latvia
d. 2-25-1970; NY, suicide

Mark Rothko, a Russian immigrant, had an insatiable scholarly quest and fascination with concepts of mortality and spirituality that deeply influenced his art.

Mark Rothko quotes:
• "It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter isvalid which is tragis and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art." Letter to the New York Times from Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barrett Newman; June 13, 1943
• "I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny."
• "Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature."

• more 20th Century Art Masterpieces Educational posters

Mark Tobey
b. 12-11-1890; Centerville, WI
d. 4-24-1976; Basel

Tobey was interested in philosophy, Eastern religions and joined the Bahai Faith in 1918. He was the first American after Whistler to win the prize for painting at the Venice Biennale (1959) and the first American painter ever to exhibit at the Louvre's Pavillon de Marsan in Paris, in 1961. He was also close friends with British potter Bernard Leach.

Mark Tobey quotes:
• “I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.”
• “The dimension that counts for the creative person is the space he creates within himself. This inner space is closer to the infinite than the other, and it is the privilege of the balanced mind ... and the search for an equilibrium is essential - to be as aware of inner space as he is of outer space.”
• “On pavements and the bark of trees I have found whole worlds.”
• “According to one critic, my works looked like scraped billboards. I went to look at the billboards and decided that more billboards should be scraped.”

• Mark Tobey: Art and Belief

Cy Twombly
b. 4-25-1928; Lexington, VA

Cy Twombly quotes:
• "My line is childlike but not childish. It is very difficult to fake.. to get that quality you need to project yourself into the child's line. It has to be felt."
• "I work in waves, because I'm impatient. Because of a certain physicality, of lack of breath from standing. It has to be done and I do take liberties I wouldn't have taken before."
• "Graffiti is linear and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls. But in my paintings it's more lyrical."
• "When I work, I work very fast, but preparing to work can take any length of time.
• Paint is something that I use with my hands and do all those tactile things. I really don't like oil because you can't get back into it, or you make a mess. It's not my favourite thing... pencil is more my medium than wet paint."
• "When I asked Cy [Twombly] about the near absence of brushes, he said, 'Oh, I never use brushes.' 'What do you use?' I asked. And he answered, 'Oh, rags, sticks . . . whatever I can get my hands on.'" - David Seidner quoted in The Artist's Mentor

• Woman Kisses Twombly Painting
• Cy Twombly: Paintings, Works on Paper, Sculpture