#abstract expressionists

Exhibition Review: “Abstract Expressionists: The Women” | Observer https://share.google/Rv8dwmhRwmMjsYTXm

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM 🎨 love, ur local art mom 🩵

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The cover for Ninth Street Women (left), and American abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner in Jackson Pollock’s studio, ca. 1949 (right)Image: Courtesy of Mary Gabriel

Rethinking abstraction: Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women

A review of Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, a book discussing the lives and work of five women Abstract Expressionists, and their role in the development of American modernism.

by Paromita PatranobishPublished on : Oct 24, 2019

Daily Painting

Robert Motherwell

The Blue Door

1973

Some of the painters who frequented the Five Spot with Jack Tworkov were the friends who first introduced David Amram to the club. Amram thinks part of the affinity of painters and jazz musicians in the fifties was that they shared a common experience: “The struggle painters had was like that of jazz musicians. People still thought that if art wasn’t from Europe it was worthless. Jazz was an accepted art form in Europe in the fifties, but only a small group of people recognized it here. Miles and Bird were playing an incredibly sophisticated kind of music, like spontaneous chamber music at the best level.”

     —Dan Wakefield, New York in the ‘50s

Above: A back table at the Five Spot, 1957: sculptor David Smith, painter Helen Frankenthaler (back to camera), poet and art guru Frank O'Hara, painter Larry Rivers, painter Grace Hartigan, unidentified man, sculptor Anita Huffington, and poet Kenneth Koch.

Today we honor the life and groundbreaking contributions of artist Toko Shinoda (1912-2021), who died March 1 at the age of 107. Trained from a young age in classical Japanese calligraphy, Shinoda was one of the first and only women to gain acclaim in that conservative field. In the 1950s she moved to New York, where she became friends with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and other Abstract Expressionist artists of the time. Already interested in moving beyond calligraphy, Shinoda began to use its gestural forms and disciplined brushwork to create abstract compositions, often using traditional Japanese inks and paper. She returned to Japan and continued to make deceptively simple compositions of wide and thin brushstrokes for the rest of her long career, designing murals and temple interiors, a large body of lithographs, canvases, and traditional scroll-format paintings. In 2016 she became the only living artist ever to appear on a Japanese postage stamp.⁠