Art History

Nazi Germany was as many already knew, full of useless rules to be enforced in order to make everything perfect, that meant as well as the jews, people with disabilities or different races would be rounded up and sent to camp, as well as thinkers; academics, artists, anyone who would be against or even know how wrong things were going, so many, many of them fled.

Soon a new order was passed in 1933, after the closure of the Bauhaus, for the removal of all art that would or could be classed as cosmopolitan and Bolshevik, this included abstraction in all of its forms, in total 15,997 pieces of such work was confiscated from around 101 museums, some of which were placed into the degenerate art exhibit where people were encouraged to go and laugh at all of the work.

The degenerate art exhibit mainly existed to show how no one is to fight against the government or they would be humiliated or worse, which is why people were invited into the museum in large numbers just to laugh and joke about the collected work. Everything was placed carelessly for its time, paintings leaning against the wall, crooked on the wall, writing was swayed, out of proportion or wonky, sculptures were put out of place just to make them look out of place or to make them look like trash, in our timeline this would be an exciting way to present work but back then this just represented careless behaviour or idiocy to kick the artists while they were down.

Bob and Roberta Smith

The brother and sister duo no longer work as a team, however patrick brill or better known by his alias bob, still uses the name, the contemporary artist mainly works with text and writing, his main goal in art is to show that all children should be encouraged to be creative before its too late and that the changes that are taking place should not go any further.

Abstract Expression

Experimented with in Germany by Wassily Kandinsky in 1919, became commonly associated with post war Germany because of the trouble some times in its history, it became a major american movement.

Influenced;

Surrealism

Cubism

It made colour and shape theory much more popular

Arshile Gorky 1904-1948

His work is very similar to automatic art, where you would draw without having a set image in your head and then transform the sketches into something else, however his method was just to keep them how they were, only colouring in his work but keeping the odd shapes odd.

Jackson Pollock 1904-1948

Jackson uses his paintings to express his feelings instead of illustrating a point.

  

Willem De Kooning 1904-1997

Violent movement captured in his paintings, however it was thought he was a violent man around women and his own wife, sexism is strong however his work almost always shows a feminine form.

Robert Motherwell 1915-1991

Frank Kline 1910-1962

His paintings give off the impression of chalk, making marks that dont mean much, however they are huge canvases of just solid paint, the unusual shapes made are thought provocking and i personally really like it

Mark Rothko 1903-1970

Jewish American artist, he would have obviously been through some of the harshest points in the nineteenth hundreds for jews, the obvious which was ww2 and the racism that happened within america.

I may try out this style in one of my plans, because it is quite thought provocking in choice of colour and shapes.

Hans Hofmann 1880-1966

Uses block colours to portray different effect, usually adding shapes to give the image more to process with our eyes

Barnett Newman

His work does seem to entirely be about him experimenting with colour  theory and 'zips', the line of odd colour compared to the colours it separates- or attaches, which we can only guess  was his intention, he just seems to conform or destroy the composition rules.

Clyfford Still 1904-1980

Violent work, torn as if by animals.