Gestural Painting
Style of expressive, gesturalist art like
Action Painting.
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Gestural Painting
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Gestural Painting (1950s, 1960s)Contents • What is Gestural
Painting? (Characteristics) |
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Paintings Woman (1950)
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What is Gestural Painting? (Characteristics) The term "gestural painting", also known as "gesturalism", is used to describe a method of fine art painting characterized by energetic, expressive brushstrokes deliberately emphasizing the sweep of the painter's arm or movement of the hand. In other words, the brushwork in a gesturalist painting expresses the artist's emotions and personality just like a person's gestures reflect their feelings in everyday life. Gesturalism also emphasizes the physical act of painting itself, drawing attention to the "process of creating". Up until the mid-19th century, the art world was dominated by a style of painting known as Academic art. This highly polished form of oil painting was promoted by Europe's great Academies of fine art for its classical, high-brow appearance, in which no trace of the artist's brush was visible. From about 1850 onwards, as these ultra-conventional aesthetics began gradually to relax, painters acquired greater freedom to paint as they felt. New themes began to emerge (eg. the everyday lives of ordinary people - as championed by Barbizon and French Realism), as well as new styles of brushwork and impasto texturalism. One of the most famous gesturalists was Van Gogh (1853-1890), many of whose oil paintings - notably Wheat Field with Crows and Roots and Branches (both 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam) - are marked by feverish, highly animated brushstrokes that express all too clearly the mental anguish from which he was suffering. In terms of movements, the gesturalism tag has been applied especially to Abstract Expressionism, notably painters of the New York School, such as Willem De Kooning (1904-97), Jackson Pollock (1912-56), his wife Lee Krasner (1908-84), and Franz Kline (1910-1962). Other gesturalists in the movement included Robert Motherwell (1915-91) (famous for his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series), and Mark Tobey (1890-1976) (calligraphic style). Within the genre of abstract expressionist painting the purest form of gestural art can be seen in Jackson Pollock's Action Painting - in which paint is applied all-over a horizontal canvas using a "drip, dribble and splash" method. See also: Jackson Pollock's paintings (c.1940-56). In contrast, Pollock's contemporary De Kooning became famous for his gestural figurative painting, a tradition later pursued by neo-expressionist artists during the late 1970s and early 1980s
Pollock's and De Kooning's methods heralded a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of North American painters and critics. Several art critics - such as Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) and Clement Greenberg (1909-94) - saw these methods as revolutionary. Greenberg saw the clotted and oil-caked surfaces as reflecting the artists' existential struggle; Rosenberg saw the finished object as only a kind of residue of the actual work of art, which he thought lay in the "process" of the painting's creation. Neo-Expressionism embraced a variety of different painting styles but which shared certain common characteristics. The latter included an extreme expressiveness of colour, figurative subject matter, as well as significant surface activity and texturalism.
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