Washington Color School painter Morris Louis famously described this iconic painting as a "bridge between Pollock and what is possible." In both their expression and method, her early 1950s works marked a new departure into the second wave of the movement. This process took influence from Jackson Pollock and his "all-over" floor paintings, but whereas Pollock's work was richly textured and tightly structured with webs of dark paint, Frankenthaler's style was to become all about airy color and atmospheric space. The art critic Barbara Rose admired Frankenthaler's ability to create "the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions." This painting was a breakthrough for Frankenthaler, in which she first pioneered the "soak-stain" technique by pouring turpentine-diluted paint directly onto raw, unprimed canvas laid out flat on the floor. But she went beyond representation in this painting, evoking instead an experiential moment through abstraction. Frankenthaler made this painting when she was just 23 years old following a visit to the coastal regions of Nova Scotia, where the wide-open space and sharp, crisp air deeply moved her. Rather than depicting a realistic place, the work conveys an emotional, individualized response to the memory of time and place before it slips away. Sketchy lines hint at the outlines of mountainous forms, but they are wispy and fragile, emphasizing the fleeting effects of nature. Light, airy washes of paint breeze effortlessly through this painting, capturing the invigorating, expansive freshness of an oceanic landscape. In Washington, DC, African American painters such as Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam made innovative and lasting contributions, while the congenial artistic environment of San Francisco spawned a new school of figurative painting. The emergence of new approaches to painting in other geographic locations beyond New York, too, helped broaden the scope of the art world.Some, such as Helen Frankenthaler, even became an influence on their peers and younger male painters. Having been overlooked earlier, many women artists found a footing. Although women artists had all along been present, the most prominent Abstract Expressionists had all been white men.These techniques resulted in forms of abstraction that had never been seen before. These included the "staining" of raw, unprimed canvas with diluted paint, the physical manipulation of the canvas as a way to direct paint, even the use of a canvas so large one had to jump with a long-handled brush to reach its corners. The artists in this informal grouping experimented and came up with new painting techniques. Less beholden to a single art critical narrative, second-generation Abstract Expressionists were inventive and kept modern painting alive, a tradition which continues to the present day in the works of many contemporary artists influenced by them. Building on these, their works opened up to the outside world, rather than focusing on the expression of inner angst and drama like their predecessors: airy color and atmospheric sensations became a recurring mood, breaking from the density of the typical Abstract Expressionist canvas. Hailing from New York but also Washington, DC and the San Francisco Bay Area, they had well understood the innovation of Abstract Expressionism, such as the all-over composition, the emphasis on the flatness of the canvas, and the bold use of color drips and splashes. A group of artists with disparate styles and approaches who can be loosely categorized as second-generation Abstract Expressionists pointed the way forward. What then, in the wake of a revolution? After the rise and total dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the New York art scene, the question facing American painters in the early 1950s was whether the possibilities of painting had been exhausted, the medium's progression pushed to its logical end, following the dictum of the influential art critic Clement Greenberg. Summary of Abstract Expressionism: Second Generation
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