Research Catalog

Reframing abstract expressionism : subjectivity and painting in the 1940s

Title: Reframing abstract expressionism : subjectivity and painting in the 1940s / Michael Leja.
Author: Leja, Michael, 1951-
Publication: New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [1993], ©1993.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	ND212.5.A25 L45 1993	Off-site
Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library		Off-site

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Description

viii, 392 pages : illustrations; 27 cm

Summary

In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity - a new experience and idea of self. In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping "primitive" and "unconscious" components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors - including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness - that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated. According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity, a feature that helps to account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions alike.
In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity - a new experience and idea of self.
In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping "primitive" and "unconscious" components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors - including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness - that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated.
According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity, a feature that helps to account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions alike.

Subjects

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 370-388) and index.

Contents

Introduction : Framing abstract expressionism -- The formation of an avant-garde in New York -- The mythmakers & the primitive : Gottlieb, Newman, Rothko & Still -- Jackson Pollock & the unconscious -- Narcissus in chaos : subjectivity, ideology, modern man & woman -- Pollock & metaphor Epilogue.

ISBN

0300044615
9780300044614
9780300070828
0300070829

LCCN

92032992

OCLC

ocm26672937
26672937

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries