The Making of "Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970" (Part 2)

October 1989 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002ZMZBIM?ie=UTF8&tag=doc06-20&link... Watch the full program: http://thefilmarchived.blogspot.com/2010/08/making-of-painters-painting-new-y...

Film footage courtesy of Turin Film Corp.: http://www.youtube.com/user/TurinFilmCorp

Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970 is a 1972 documentary directed by Emile de Antonio. It covers American art movements from abstract expressionism to pop art through conversations with artists in their studios. Artists appearing in the film include Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Hans Hofmann, Jules Olitski, Philip Pavia, Larry Poons, Robert Motherwell, and Kenneth Noland.

Barnett Newman (January 29 1905 - July 4 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.

Barnett Newman wrote catalogue forewords and reviews before having his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948. Soon after his first exhibition, Newman remarked in one of the Artists' Session at Studio 35: "We are in the process of making the world, to a certain extent, in our own image."

Throughout the 1940s he worked in a surrealist vein before developing his mature style. This is characterised by areas of color separated by thin vertical lines, or "zips" as Newman called them. In the first works featuring zips, the color fields are variegated, but later the colors are pure and flat. Newman himself thought that he reached his fully mature style with the Onement series (from 1948). The zips define the spatial structure of the painting, whilst simultaneously dividing and uniting the composition.

The zip remained a constant feature of Newman's work throughout his life. In some paintings of the 1950s, such as The Wild, which is eight feet tall by one and a half inches wide, the zip is all there is to the work. Newman also made a few sculptures which are essentially three-dimensional zips.

Although Newman's paintings appear to be purely abstract, and many of them were originally untitled, the names he later gave them hinted at specific subjects being addressed, often with a Jewish theme. Two paintings from the early 1950s, for example, are called Adam and Eve (see Adam and Eve), and there is also Uriel (1954) and Abraham (1949), a very dark painting, which as well as being the name of a biblical patriarch, was also the name of Newman's father, who had died in 1947.

The Stations of the Cross series of black and white paintings (1958-66), begun shortly after Newman had recovered from a heart attack, is usually regarded as the peak of his achievement. The series is subtitled "Lema sabachthani" - "why have you forsaken me" - words spoken by Christ on the cross. Newman saw these words as having universal significance in his own time. The series has also been seen as a memorial to the victims of the holocaust.

Newman's late works, such as the Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue series, use vibrant, pure colors, often on very large canvases - Anna's Light (1968), named in memory of his mother who had died in 1965, is his largest work, twenty-eight feet wide by nine feet tall. Newman also worked on shaped canvases late in life, with Chartres (1969), for example, being triangular, and returned to sculpture, making a small number of sleek pieces in steel. These later paintings are executed in acrylic paint rather than the oil paint of earlier pieces. Of his sculptures, Broken Obelisk (1968) is the most monumental and best-known, depicting an inverted obelisk whose point balances on the apex of a pyramid.

Newman also made a series of lithographs, the 18 Cantos (1963-64) which, according to Newman, are meant to be evocative of music. He also made a small number of etchings.

Newman is generally classified as an abstract expressionist on account of his working in New York City in the 1950s, associating with other artists of the group and developing an abstract style which owed little or nothing to European art. However, his rejection of the expressive brushwork employed by other abstract expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, and his use of hard-edged areas of flat color, can be seen as a precursor to post painterly abstraction and the minimalist works of artists such as Frank Stella.

Newman was unappreciated as an artist for much of his life, being overlooked in favour of more colorful characters such as Jackson Pollock. The influential critic Clement Greenberg wrote enthusiastically about him, but it was not until the end of his life that he began to be taken really seriously.

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[surfmost]

silence it and play Django in the background

[polypus74]

@proust2020 That all art is political, we'll take as given, but that because some art A does not attack some party (social class, group etc.) P does not imply that A is therefore in favor of P. That is not to say that your conclusion is necessarily incorrect, just that your argument doesn't hold. I'd suggest that a convincing argument would be far more complicated, just as real life politics is.

[alleygh0st]

Revelation! ''AbstractExpressionism'' was financed by CIA...

see Donald Jameson, ex-CIA or article by historian Frances Stonor Saunders...

[skipper2379]

@proust2020, I agree that all art is political, in so far as life is unavoidably political. But art's correctness as propaganda is a very different issue than art's aesthetic quality. Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning were better, more important artists than the social realists of the 1930s. Warhol's art troubles me with its sycophantic love of celebrity, but I still think he made the best paintings of the 1960s. Political artists like Grosz, Rivera, Shahn and Kienholz are collected by the rich too.

[freekster1]

Check out banksy - he rulez.

[artregeous]

art for centuries executed to mislead perception by puzzling depictions.today there isnt much meterial but nostalgia waiting to be adapted for coming generation but hence their concious is not here yet and seems like never be .

[proust2020]

All art is political. All these AbEx painters and Pop artists upheld, whether they knew it or not, the political values of those powerful and wealthy enough to buy their work. The reason overt political work isn't mainstream is because it often attacks those values of trustees, directors and collectors that decide whose career is catapulted to stardom status or left in obscurity. No one is going to promote work that directly attacks them.

[chandru1103]

lame ass. Fuck intellectual Property laws everyone knows their bullshit!

[jeffreycollins]

up to 1:28 i've seen all of that, as it was on the film. But the interviews about the film are what I was seeing if they were on the new DVD. As I wanna know what's on it before I buy it. If it's really just a restored version fo the film. I'm not going to buy that. Especially not for the money they are charging for it.

[jeffreycollins]

is these extra stuff to be on the newly restored DVD?