Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury
Through June 5, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400; moma.org. Timed tickets required.
Art may be long, but it is also extremely broad and varied — more than any single narrative can encompass. This smart show provides a new sense of art’s irrepressible breadth at a museum that is expanding its vistas, including some that were built into the collection more than half a century ago.
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Examines the critical concept ‘zero degree’ through the work of Roland Barthes and Victor Burgin
In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes’ 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors’ ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin.
Another denizen of the 1950s with a rising profile today is Sari Dienes. In 1953 she began making rubbings of manhole covers, subway grates and other urban features, sometimes assisted by her friend Jasper Johns. Johns later said that his paintings of American flags and targets, which he started making in 1954, represented “things the mind already knows,” which Dienes’s rubbings did as well, and maybe first. Dienes’s “Tomb” from around 1953-54 is a rubbing of a tombstone above a small fabric flag, given to MoMA by the artist’s foundation in 1999. Full disclosure: I initially mistook it for one of David Hammons’s body prints currently on view at the Drawing Center (through May 23).
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s.[1] It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the Western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. Although the term "abstract expressionism" was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates, it had been first used in Germany in 1919 in the magazine Der Sturm, regarding German Expressionism. In the United States, Alfred Barr was the first to use this term in 1929 in relation to works by Wassily Kandinsky.[2]
Style
expressionism, a general term for a mode of literary or visual art which, in extreme reaction against realism or naturalism, presents a world violently distorted under the pressure of intense personal moods, ideas, and emotions: image and language thus express feeling and imagination rather than represent external reality. Although not an organized movement, expressionism was an important factor in the painting, drama, poetry, and cinema of German‐speaking Europe between 1910 and 1924. The term did not come into use until 1911, but has since been applied retrospectively to some important forerunners of expressionist technique, going as far back as Georg Büchner's plays of the 1830s and Vincent Van Gogh's paintings of the 1880s; other significant precursors include the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (in his Dream Play, 1902), and the German playwright Frank Wedekind. Within the period 1910–24, consciously expressionist techniques of abstraction were promoted by Wassily Kandinsky and the ‘Blue Rider’ group of painters, while in drama various anti‐naturalist principles of abstract characterization and structural discontinuity were employed in the plays of Ernst Toller, Georg Kaiser, and Walter Hasenclever; these had some influence on the early plays of Bertolt Brecht, notably Baal (1922). The poetry of Georg Trakl, Gottfried Benn, August Stramm, and Franz Werfel displayed comparable distortions of accepted structures and syntax in favour of symbolized mood. The nightmarish labyrinths of Franz Kafka's novels are the nearest equivalent in prose fiction. German expressionism is best known today through the wide influence of its cinematic masterpieces: Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). Along with their much‐imitated visual patterns of sinister shadows, these films reveal a shared obsession with automatized, trance‐like states, which appears in expressionist literature too: a common concern of expressionism is with the eruption of irrational and chaotic forces from beneath the surface of a mechanized modern world. Some of its explosive energies issued into Dada, Vorticism, and other avant‐garde movements of the 1920s. Inthe English‐speaking world, expressionist dramatic techniques wereadopted in some of the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Sean O'Casey, and in the ‘Circe’ episode of James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922); in poetry, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) may be considered expressionist in its fragmentary rendering of post‐war desolation. In a further sense, the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially expressions of their authors' moods and thoughts; this has been the dominant assumption about literature since the rise of Romanticism. For a fuller account, consult R. S. Furness, Expressionism (1973).
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