New York School
The New York School was the informal circle of painters, poets, composers and dancers who made Manhattan the center of the art world in the 1950s and 1960s. Its visual core is what is also called Abstract Expressionism - the artists shown in the 9th Street Art Exhibition of 1951 and the Stable Gallery annuals that followed - but the name deliberately spans the whole scene: Frank O'Hara's poet-curator friendships, John Cage's experimental music, and the Judson Dance Theater all belonged to the same network, and painters and poets borrowed freely from each other. Surrealist automatism and jazz improvisation fed a shared taste for spontaneity. In painting the school's signature is monumental, gestural abstraction, but the label really marks a social fact: a vanguard community whose cross-pollination defined postwar American culture.
Defining characteristics
- Monumental, gestural abstraction - drips, pours and loaded brushwork recording the act of painting
- Spontaneity and improvisation borrowed from jazz and Surrealist automatism
- The figure retained within abstraction for some painters (de Kooning, Rivers), pure color fields for others
- Painting treated as an event: scale and physical surface matter as much as image
- Cross-pollination with poetry, music and dance - paintings and poems made in the same circle
Key figures
- Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) — Drip paintings made gesture itself the school's defining image
- Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) — Fused fierce abstraction with the returning figure
- Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) — Soak-stain painting that opened color-field painting's path
- Joan Mitchell (1925-2002) — Second-generation painter of dense, lyrical gestural abstraction
- Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) — Poet and MoMA curator who connected the painters and poets
Example works
- Mountains and Sea — Helen Frankenthaler (1952)
- Blue Poles — Jackson Pollock (1952)
- Convergence — Jackson Pollock (1952)
Sources
- New York School - Wikipedia encyclopedia