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Happy 82nd birthday to Jasper Johns! From our website: In the 1950s Jasper Johns developed a distinctive painting style that would help lead American art away from the then-dominant movement of Abstract Expressionism. The exact correspondence of figure and ground in his work challenged the traditional distinction between an object and its depiction. At the same time, variations on each theme dissolved the “natural” link between the symbol and its meaning. Johns thus questioned the basic underpinnings of our representational system, and specifically the mechanisms of fine art. Pictured: Jasper Johns, Flag (1960-1969) 

Happy 82nd birthday to Jasper Johns!

From our website: In the 1950s Jasper Johns developed a distinctive painting style that would help lead American art away from the then-dominant movement of Abstract Expressionism. The exact correspondence of figure and ground in his work challenged the traditional distinction between an object and its depiction. At the same time, variations on each theme dissolved the “natural” link between the symbol and its meaning. Johns thus questioned the basic underpinnings of our representational system, and specifically the mechanisms of fine art.

Pictured: Jasper Johns, Flag (1960-1969) 

Happy birthday Willem de Kooning! A central figure in the mid-century New York school of painting, Willem de Kooning was trained in Rotterdam in commercial arts. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1926 and worked initially as a house painter, and as an artist for the Works Progress Administration. By the 1940s, de Kooning had developed an abstract style distinguished by thick, heavily worked surfaces and vigorous brushwork. He then shocked the art world in 1953 by returning to figuration at the moment of abstraction’s greatest success. His flattened depictions of women provide both a critique of Western standards of beauty and an exploration of male sexual fantasies and anxieties. De Kooning’s later period focused mainly on abstracted landscapes. In the 1980s, in failing health, he developed an entirely different abstract style, using primary colors and open, ribbonlike forms. Source: SFMOMA Pictured here: de Kooning’s Woman, 1950

Happy birthday Willem de Kooning!

A central figure in the mid-century New York school of painting, Willem de Kooning was trained in Rotterdam in commercial arts. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1926 and worked initially as a house painter, and as an artist for the Works Progress Administration.

By the 1940s, de Kooning had developed an abstract style distinguished by thick, heavily worked surfaces and vigorous brushwork. He then shocked the art world in 1953 by returning to figuration at the moment of abstraction’s greatest success. His flattened depictions of women provide both a critique of Western standards of beauty and an exploration of male sexual fantasies and anxieties.

De Kooning’s later period focused mainly on abstracted landscapes. In the 1980s, in failing health, he developed an entirely different abstract style, using primary colors and open, ribbonlike forms.

Source: SFMOMA

Pictured here: de Kooning’s Woman, 1950

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born 126 years ago today. (via Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born 126 years ago today.

(via Ludwig Mies van der Rohe)

Happy Birthday to sculptor David Smith, an esteemed American Abstract Expressionist best known for his large steel geometric sculptures. (via SFMOMA)

Happy Birthday to sculptor David Smith, an esteemed American Abstract Expressionist best known for his large steel geometric sculptures.

(via SFMOMA)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PIET MONDRIAN!

Okay, just ONE more for Richter’s birthday (this is a personal favorite, so I just had to sneak it in before the end of the day). Gerhard Richter’s Lesende (Reading) (1994) | painting | oil on linen (via SFMOMA)

Okay, just ONE more for Richter’s birthday (this is a personal favorite, so I just had to sneak it in before the end of the day).

Gerhard Richter’s Lesende (Reading) (1994) | painting | oil on linen

(via SFMOMA)

One more for Gerhard Richter’s birthday: Untitled (1973) Photograph | chromogenic print (via SFMOMA)

One more for Gerhard Richter’s birthday: Untitled (1973)

Photograph | chromogenic print

(via SFMOMA)

Today is the birthday of German visual artist Gerhard Richter! Be it a rural landscape, a colorful gestural abstraction, or a black-and-white painting based on a family snapshot or image from the newspaper, a certain set of tensions consistently drives Richter’s work: belief versus skepticism, gesture versus erasure, planning versus chance, personal engagement versus objective neutrality. In Richter’s paintings one can identify many of the marks, methods, and forms that have driven the development of modern and contemporary art since the 1950s. But the often discordant way in which the artist brings them together on the canvas cools their rhetorical intensity. The restless quality of these works, in which different modes of painting collide, reflects Richter’s simultaneous hope and uncertainty that painting can faithfully assess contemporary reality. Pictured here: Richter’s 1969 work, 9 Objekte (9 Objects) (via SFMOMA)

Today is the birthday of German visual artist Gerhard Richter!

Be it a rural landscape, a colorful gestural abstraction, or a black-and-white painting based on a family snapshot or image from the newspaper, a certain set of tensions consistently drives Richter’s work: belief versus skepticism, gesture versus erasure, planning versus chance, personal engagement versus objective neutrality. In Richter’s paintings one can identify many of the marks, methods, and forms that have driven the development of modern and contemporary art since the 1950s. But the often discordant way in which the artist brings them together on the canvas cools their rhetorical intensity. The restless quality of these works, in which different modes of painting collide, reflects Richter’s simultaneous hope and uncertainty that painting can faithfully assess contemporary reality.

Pictured here: Richter’s 1969 work, 9 Objekte (9 Objects)

(via SFMOMA)

Another work for Pollock’s 100th birthday: Jackson Pollock, Untitled (1939-1940) | drawing | graphite and colored pencil on colored paper (via SFMOMA)

Another work for Pollock’s 100th birthday:

Jackson Pollock, Untitled (1939-1940) | drawing | graphite and colored pencil on colored paper


(via SFMOMA)

We want to wish a HUGE happy birthday to Jackson Pollock, who was born 100 years ago today. Jackson Pollock was one of the first American artists to achieve a worldwide reputation, and he became an icon of the abstract expressionist movement. He spent his childhood moving between farming communities in Arizona and Southern California. At 18, he moved to New York, where he studied art and painted for the Works Progress Administration. In 1939, Pollock entered psychoanalysis as treatment for his lifelong alcoholism, and his work of this period was heavily influenced by C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypal collective symbols. During the late 1940s, Pollock developed a groundbreaking abstract painting technique. He laid his large canvases on the floor and moved around them; rather than brushing on his paint, he poured it directly from the can or flung it in drips and spatters with a brush or stick. The resulting “all-over” paintings were an unmediated trace of his physical actions; they also did away with the artistic conventions of illusionistic depth and distinct figure and ground. Within a few years, however, and perhaps in rebellion against his tremendous critical success, Pollock began to re-introduce symbolic figures into his paintings. His life was perpetually marked by self-destructive behavior; he was killed in a car crash at the age of 44. Featured here: Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret (1943)

We want to wish a HUGE happy birthday to Jackson Pollock, who was born 100 years ago today.

Jackson Pollock was one of the first American artists to achieve a worldwide reputation, and he became an icon of the abstract expressionist movement. He spent his childhood moving between farming communities in Arizona and Southern California. At 18, he moved to New York, where he studied art and painted for the Works Progress Administration. In 1939, Pollock entered psychoanalysis as treatment for his lifelong alcoholism, and his work of this period was heavily influenced by C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypal collective symbols.

During the late 1940s, Pollock developed a groundbreaking abstract painting technique. He laid his large canvases on the floor and moved around them; rather than brushing on his paint, he poured it directly from the can or flung it in drips and spatters with a brush or stick. The resulting “all-over” paintings were an unmediated trace of his physical actions; they also did away with the artistic conventions of illusionistic depth and distinct figure and ground. Within a few years, however, and perhaps in rebellion against his tremendous critical success, Pollock began to re-introduce symbolic figures into his paintings. His life was perpetually marked by self-destructive behavior; he was killed in a car crash at the age of 44.

Featured here: Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret (1943)

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