HESS BARBARA

(H/B) ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies but two particularly prominent sub-categories: action painting, exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and color field painting, made most f...
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(H/B-25) ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
(...) "Abstract Expressionism" is no exception. On 30 March 1946 there appeared in the "New Yorker" a discussion of an exhibition in the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, the first comprehensive presentation of works by the painter Hans Hofmann, who had emigrated to the USA from Germany in 1932. The author of the review, Robert Coates, observed that until then the artist had been accorded little attention, and explained this in part by his painting technique: "For he is certainly one of the most uncompromising representatives of what some people ha...
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FONTANA LUCIO, 1899-1968
Seldom has an artist's name been so closely linked with a singular achievement as in the case of Lucio Fontana. In 1949 he mounted a square, one meter by one meter sheet of white paper on a canvas (p. 8). Instead of drawing or painting on it, Fontana perforated the sheet from the back with a number of holes, concentrated at the center and extending across the sheet in irregular circular and spiral patterns. Around the edges of the holes, the material protruded above the picture surface and, in oblique light, cast shadows on it. Rather than...
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