AMERICAN ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM IN SPANISH COLLECTIONS

American Abstract Expressionism is, arguably, the most important pictorial movement of the second half of the twentieth century. It reached its peak during the decade of the fifties, even though the artistic careers of its members and its influence have continued until the present day. In the catalog of this exhibition, Francisco Calvo Serraller has called it “the last triumph of painting”, referring to the culmination of this tendency, but also alluding to the point of no return of the adventure of modern painting.

This exhibition brings together works by its most outstanding members, organized according to its most characteristic divisions: “Action Painting” and “Color Field.” The first group, emphasizing the expressionist element of gesture and action, includes Arshile Gorky (1905-1958), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) and Lee Krasner (1911-1984). In the second group, made up of Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Clifford Still (1904-1980), Barnett Newman (1905-1970) and Morris Louis (1912-1962), color, its intensity and extension are the protagonists: A third group is comprised of abstract expressionists with a more lyrical orientation, whose feeling for landscape recalls the late Monet: Sam Francis (1923-1994), Joan Mitchel (1926-1992) and HelenFrankenthaler (1928). Esteban Vicente (1903-2001), whose painting, according to critics, has a “European” air about it, could be placed within this latter category. The case of Philip Guston (1913-1980) is exceptional because of his turnabout to figuration at the height of his career.In another perspective, but not in another group, are the immediate predecessors, Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Hans Hoffmann (1880-1966), the two European artists who created a school in America. Finally, there are the two separate cases of Mark Tobey (1890-1976), with his feeling for calligraphy, and David Smith (1906-1965), the only sculptor who could properly be included in the category of Abstract Expressionism.

The name “American Abstract Expressionism” might seem a contradiction in terms, for it brings together two tendencies which, until that time, were considered to be antithetical within the diehard core of the historical avant-garde. On the one hand, there was the Expressionist line that exploited the subjective and emotional, stemming from Fauvisme and crystalizing in the two German groups of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. On the other, there was Analytic Cubism and the handful of variegated tendencies derived from it that converged in the Abstraction-Creation group in the 1930s. Nevertheless, this label does not include another of the basic components of Abstract Expressionism: the influence of Surrealism, which took on a special relevance during those years, thanks to those artists who had taken refuge in America fleeing from the war in Europe.

With American Abstract Expressionism in Spanish Collections this Museum continues its research and investigation into the public and private collections of Spain as a means of knowing our own artistic patrimony better while, at the same time, it presents carefully chosen selections of the works of specific artists or movements.