Jackson Pollock Birth ca. 1941 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
Jackson Pollock Summertime: Number 9A 1948 oil paint, enamel paint and commercial paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
Barnett Newman Moment 1946 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making them out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history."
– Barnett Newman (written in 1948)
Alan Davie Entrance to a Paradise 1949 oi paint on board Tate Gallery |
Adolph Gottlieb The Alchemist 1945 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
Arshile Gorky Waterfall 1943 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
Nicolas de Stael Marathon 1948 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
Stanley William Hayter Untitled 1946 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The love of space is there, and painting functions in space like everything else because it is a communal fact – it can be held in common. Only time can be felt in private. Space is common property. Only time is personal, a private experience. That's what makes it so personal, so important. Each person must feel it for himself. Space is the given fact of art but irrelevant to any feeling except insofar as it involves the outside world. Is this why all the critics insist on space, as if all modern art were an exercise and ritual of it? They insist on having it because, being outside, it includes them, it makes the artist "concrete" and real because he represents or invokes sensations in the material objects that exist in space and can be understood.
The concern with space bores me. I insist on my experiences of sensations in time – not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time."
– Barnett Newman (written in 1949)
Kurt Schwitters (Relief in Relief) ca. 1942-45 oil paint on wood and plaster Tate Gallery |
Ivon Hitchens Forest Edge No. 2 1944 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
Gerald Wilde Fata Morgana1949 oil paint on canvas Tate Gallery |
David Bomberg Bomb Store 1942 oil paint on board Tate Gallery |
Marlow Moss Composition in Yellow, Black and White 1949 oil paint and wood on canvas Tate Gallery |
Lucio Fontana Spatial Concept 1949-50 painted and pierced canvas Tate Gallery |