Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in collaboration with The Jewish Museum, New York and the Saint Louis Art Museum, this special exhibition revisits the watershed period of American art from 1940 to 1976 through the writings of its two primary critics: Harold Rosenberg and Clement Green... Read more
Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in collaboration with The Jewish Museum, New York and the Saint Louis Art Museum, this special exhibition revisits the watershed period of American art from 1940 to 1976 through the writings of its two primary critics: Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Curators of the exhibition are Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator, The Jewish Museum; Douglas Dreishpoon, Chief Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Maurice Berger, the senior research scholar at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland; and Charlotte Eyerman, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
In a period fueled by Cold War politics, the mushrooming of mass media, and surging consumerism, Rosenberg promoted action—his idea of the creative, physical act of making art—against Greenberg’s belief in abstraction and the formal purity of the art object. The artists they championed included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann and Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, Jules Olitski and Philip Guston, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Action/Abstraction presents key paintings and sculptures from this decisive era, surveying the first generation of Abstract Expressionists as well as later artists who built on their achievements. Context rooms in the exhibition feature objects and moving images—including personal correspondence, publications, film clips, and photographs—that shed light on the cultural and social climate of the 1940s through the 1970s. An additional installation of ephemera drawn from the Albright-Knox’s rich archives documents the Gallery’s institutional history with the movement. The works in the exhibition, arranged in thematic sections, are grouped to evoke the rivalry of Greenberg and Rosenberg and the epic transformation of American art in the postwar period.
