American Type Painting - Essay Example

American Type Painting Advancement of the art of drawing is not a simple task. Often, an artist undergoes several challenges in determining a new course of drawing. In addition to the problems involved in discerning the facets of artwork one needs to change in order to be considered creative, there is the other challenge of condoning censure and criticism. As will be seen from this piece, Pollock’s view on advancing the drawing art is evident in the Magic Lantern. According to American-Type Painting, advanced painting creates more scandals than advancement in literature and music. According to the author, the amounts of scandals that painting causes emphasize the fact that it is the liveliest of the contemporary avant-garde arts. The author adds that only little amount of newness in the profession of painting yields immense capacity of upsetting right-thinking individuals. He poses the question on the probable reason for so much scandal that advancement in painting cause (Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison & Paul, 1998). One of the most probable reasons the author gives for this relatively more sensitive response to any show of newness in painting is the traditional relative slowness in the dynamics of painting. Clement Greenberg decries that despite all appearances to the contrary, there is relative slowness of painting evolution as a modern art. Greenberg notes that although painting had started showing signs of modernization earlier than other arts, there are several expandable conventions embedded in the art of painting. There are a great number of conventions that artists cannot isolate and this difficulty in isolation makes painting difficult to expand and change. The author reiterates that the law of modernization is to recognize and immediately discard the facets of a medium that are not essential for its viability. The process of self-purification is observed to have come to a halt in literature as the letters have few conventions to eliminate before reaching those essential to it. Likewise, music has changed over the ages to reach an in expandable state. Most of the facets of music that can be isolated and altered or eliminated have reached the limit of change (Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison & Paul, 1998). The author makes a radical simplification with the hope that the suggested and noted simplifications may be used to overhaul the existing arts to renew vitality of the arts in the face of the community that is bent on rationalizing everything as well as maintain irreplaceability. Clement Greenberg was an American specialized in the field of art critic who was closely linked with the American Modern art. His work American Type painting is generally viewed as a response to the Rosenberg’s American Action Painting, but its focus is more specific. It is an observed, unrelenting and sustained attempt to refute the idea that abstract expressionist painting has fundamentals of a break with the past. The work is a close and meticulous visual analysis to the new critics, based on the most basic element of painting rather than ideas, concepts and psychological states (Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison & Paul, 1998). It handles the emergence and development of abstract expressionist, which mainly argues for the discrimination of color field painting linking it to impressionism rather than cubism and explains that modern art evolved while artists were perusing advanced pictorial flatness. The title of the essay shows his discomfort with abstract expressionism which he believed was erroneous. Greenberg’s piece viewed abstraction as a facet for modern painting. This is the only way for any painting work to be authentically modern. Each medium had to engage in a process of rationalization which will eventually make it distinct from other related medium. Indeed it was a necessary element of modern art work because painting was being threatened by the introduction of commerce and cliches. Figurative art and the type of anectodal subjects were frequent in the American painting industry. For Greenberg distinctive of the kind of extraneous literary materials which needed to be separated from painting. The main objective being was creating an abstraction which made a reference to painting and disavowed any other source from the external world (Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison & Paul, 1998). Greenberg also argues that the emergence of avant- garde tradition in New York which is increasingly taking over the role of school of Paris which is of late exhausted is due to a number of factors. They are identified as presence of European artists, dealers, critics and collectors. His style of criticism was avowedly formalist which makes his ideas acceptable and relevant. He thought that even thought the form was not complete art. It had the only basis on which to make both judgment and assessment about the relative character about each art work. He even makes it clear that it is easy to make a contradiction about a subject matter in an art piece that its creation was without purpose. Among the earliest works of Jackson Pollock’s work is the Magic Lantern. This work reveals his mastery of the art technique; in this work he was able to coat a canvas with looping skeins of colors. He is used the free-form automatist drawing which inspired him to create a personal language of abstraction. In this work he succeeds in improving gesture and materials (Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison & Paul, 1998). In the work he used local available paints to develop a dense surface of compressed images and dotted it with carpet tacks to intensify its physicality. As Pollock states in his essay, it is not easy to give a new twist to works of art without contravention. The discovery of the technique in the Magic Lantern was as result of an accident as it has been in many cases. It was during a chance projection without using a slide when the portrait appeared partly on fabrics and partly on the wall paper. Magic Lantern is among the earliest poured paintings by Pollock. The artist was able to recognize the individual facets of artwork and disintegrate the different concepts to come up with a new painting that was not in the know before. As discussed in Greenberg’s American-Type Painting, Pollock’s advancement in painting technique attracted attention of opponents and proponents from all walks of artistic world (Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison & Paul, 1998). Unlike the previous painters, the artist was able to present the first piece of work coated in canvas with looping skeins of colors. Pollock succeeded in improving gestures and materials used in creating the Magic Lantern. Similar to the case presented in the essay by Greenberg, American-Type Painting, and Pollock was not able to impress as well as he wished to do due to the limits he could exercise in creating an original piece. The core aim of the artist was to mesmerize the artistic world with a piece of art that had not been observed before 1949 (Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison & Paul, 1998). His ingenuity could not go beyond the use of oil, carpet tacks on canvas and enamel given the limit of creativity an artist can exercise in painting profession. Of all his oil pouring paintings, the Magic Lantern attracts the most intimate scale of examination from other artists and researchers. This is due to the fact that the 1949 painting was the first of the kind in the artist’s series of revolutionizing the field of painting. As mentioned before, further prospects of revolutionizing painting in the direction suggested by Pollock has not been possible given the difficulties aforementioned. There is no doubt that there is a lot of truth to the notion placed forth by Pollock on the difficulties of advancing the art of drawing. Work Cited Frascina, Francis, Charles Harrison, and Paul Deirdre. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology : Edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison with the Assistance of Deirdre Paul. London: Paul Chapman in association with the Open University, 1988. Print. Read More