American Abstraction

American Abstraction at the Thysse- Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

It was such a pleasure seeing these paintings, particularly those of O'Keefe.

Georgia O'Keefe, Shell and Old Shingle, 1926, (oil on canvas)

In the early 1920s O'Keefe produced isolated images of simple shapes found in nature such as shells, bones and flowers, in reaction to the excessive intellectualisation and insularity to which painting was being subjected at the time. 'We were shingling the barn and the old shingles, taken off, were free to fly around. Absentmindedly I picked up a loose one and carried it into the house and up to the table in my room. On the table was a white clam shell brought from Maine in the spring. I had been painting it and it still lay there. The white shape of the shell and the grey shape of the weathered shingle were beautiful against the pale grey leaf of the faintly pink-lined pattern of the wallpaper. Adding the shingle got me painting again'.

Georgia O'Keefe, From the Plains II, 1954, (oil on canvas)

The vastness of the plains of Texas is imposing, heightened by the horizontal format of the canvas and by the flaming colours of the sunset. O'Keefe commented on this painting that 'the colour is just plain colour out of the tube - red and orange to lemon - it shocks me so that I'm rather struck with it - I don't know what it will get to'.

O'Keefe has simplified and enhanced the abstraction of the image in order to provide a visual equivalent of her memories. 'My first memory is of the brightness of light - light all around you', she said on one occasion. Her obssession with the light, which had moved her so greatly in Texas, led her to spend long periods away from New York from 1929 onwards in radiant New Mexico, and she settled permanently in the small village of Abiquiu in 1949. In these remote parts the luminosity of her paintings became even more transparent. She also used increasingly large formats to adapt to the imposing scale of the desert landscape.

Georgia O'Keefe, White Iris No. 7, 1957, (oil on canvas)

As in her other paintings of flowers, O'Keefe depicts the iris as if viewed from a close-up camera lens. Also derived from the photographic framing technique is the manner of cutting off the subject-matter at the edges, a device that further adds to the abstraction of her compositions.

Close-up views of flowers were a frequent theme in O'Keefe's artistic output. These images have very often been explained from a gender perspective and nearly always interpreted as having a sexual significance. The painter systematically rejected what she considered an erroneous interpretation, as evidenced by the text she published in the catalogue of the exhibition held in the New York gallery in 1939, in which she stated: 'Well - I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't'. Wonderful!

Jackson Pollock, Brown and Silver 1, 1951

Pollock, one of the foremost practitioners of Action Painting, began to work on his first drip paintings in 1947. From then on, he firmly espoused the idea of automatism, an automatism derived largely from Surrealism. 'When I'm in the painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing', he said. Furthermore, with the invention of the drip technique, he gave up easel painting and for the first time avoided any direct contact between the artist and the canvas: 'I continue to move further and further away from the painter's usual tools like easel, palettes, brushes and so on. I prefer sticks, spoons, knives, flowing paint that I drip or a thick paste with sand, ground glass and other unusual materials'.

He has applied the brown paint straight from the tin, using sticks and dry paintbrushes and has approached the composition from all four sides.

As the painting is not signed, it is not possible to ascertain its correct position.

Willem de Kooning, Abstraction, 1949-51

In this painting, De Kooning reveals a new conception of painting based on gesture and colour - an accomplished style of his own that is far removed from any previous modern language. Despite being titled Abstraction, this composition is based on traditional pictorial motifs, and is infused with figurative references.

The iconography of death, present in the skull in the lower right corner and the symbolic representation of Golgotha in the ladder and post to the right of the composition, contrasts with the unusually distorted and brutal pink and yellowish flesh tones. The force and mobility of the planes and figures result in a confusing image of life and death.