ABSTRACTIONISM

Jackson Pollock

He was an influential American painter, and the leading force

behind the abstract expressionist movement in the art world.
During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and
notoriety. Jackson Pollock's greatness lies in developing one of
the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art,
detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing
and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial
space.

Jackson Pollock made it possible for American painting to

compete with European modernism by applying modernism's
logic to new problem. He created a new scale, a new
definition of surface and touch, a new syntax of relationships
among space, pigment, edge, and drawing, displacing
hierarchies with an unprecedented and powerful and
fabulously intricate self-generating structure.

Convergence

The painting was created in 1952, and is oil on canvas; 93.5 inches
by 155 inches (Karmel, 1999). With Pollock's brushstrokes he was
able to make handy use of colors, lines, textures, lights, and
contrasting shapes. This painting is enormous and its size can only
really be appreciated in person. In 1964, puzzle producing
company, Springbok Editions, released Convergence (Inspired by
Pollock's painting) the jigsaw puzzle. It was a 340-piece puzzle that
they promoted as "the world's most difficult puzzle". The impact of
Pollock's Convergence was evident in 1965 when hundreds of
thousands of Americans purchased the jigsaw puzzle.

Reflection of the Big Dipper

consists of built up layers of paint with dripped enamel as the final touch,
concluding the composition. It was around 1947 that Jackson Pollock
traded in his brushes for sticks, trowels and knives and began adding
foreign matter, such as sand, broken glass, nails, coins, paint-tube tops
and bottle caps to his canvases. From this point on, Pollock's application of
paint became his main theme, which he tried to radicalize. With the body of
work he thus created, Pollock found a unique position within the concurrent
Abstract-Expressionist movement.
 ABSTRACTIONISM

Wassily Kadinsky

One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky exploited

the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic
experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He
believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound,
transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered
with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a
universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only
loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the
artist's inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three
phases, shifting from his early, representational canvases and their
divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late,
geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color.

Composition IV (1911)
Hidden within the bright swaths of color and the clear
black lines of Composition IV, Kandinsky portrayed
several Cossacks with lances, as well as boats, reclining
figures, and a castle on a hilltop. As with many paintings
from this period, he represented the apocalyptic battle
that would lead to eternal peace. The notion of battle is
conveyed by the Cossacks, while the calm of the flowing
forms and reclining figures on the right alludes to the
peace and redemption to follow. In order to facilitate his
development of a non-objective style of painting, as
described in his text Concerning the Spiritual in
Art (1912), Kandinsky reduced objects to pictographic
symbols. Through his elimination of most references to
the outside world, Kandinsky expressed his vision in a
more universal manner, distilling the spiritual essence of
the subject through these forms into a visual vocabulary.

Composition VII (1913)

Commonly cited as the pinnacle of Kandinsky's pre-World
War I achievement, Composition VII shows the artist's
rejection of pictorial representation through a swirling
hurricane of colors and shapes. The operatic and
tumultuous roiling of forms around the canvas exemplifies
Kandinsky's belief that painting could evoke sounds the way
music called to mind certain colors and forms. Even the
title, Composition VII, aligned with his interest in the
intertwining of the musical with the visual and emphasized
Kandinsky's non-representational focus in this work. As the
different colors and symbols spiral around each other,
Kandinsky eliminated traditional references to depth and
laid bare the different abstracted glyphs in order to
communicate deeper themes and emotions common to all
cultures and viewers.