Search Results (11)

This research presents a generative AI mechanism designed to assist artists in finding inspiration and developing ideas during their creative process by leveraging their emotions as a driving force. The proposed iterative inspiration cycle, complete with feedback loops, helps artists digitally capture their creative emotions and use them as a guiding “vision” for creating artwork. Within the mechanism, the “Emotion Vision” images, generated from sketch line drawings and creative emotion prompts, are a medium designed to inspire artists. Experimental results demonstrate a positive inspirational effect, particularly in the creation of ‘Abstract Expressionism’ and ‘Impressionism’ artworks. In addition, we introduce the Emotion Vision Score metric, which quantifies the effectiveness of emotional inspiration. This metric evaluates how well “Emotion Vision” images inspire artists by balancing sketch intentions, creative emotions, and inspirational diversity, thus identifying the most effective images for inspiration. This novel mechanism integrates emotional intelligence into AI for art creation, allowing it to understand and replicate human emotion in its outputs. By enhancing emotional depth and ensuring consistency in generative AI, this research aims to advance digital art creation and contribute to the evolution of artistic expression through generative AI. Full article

A visual stimulus that is divided in harmonic proportions is often judged as more pleasant than others. This is well known by artists that often used two main types of geometric harmonic patterns: symmetry and the golden ratio. Symmetry refers to the property of an object to have two similar halves, whereas the golden ratio consists of dividing an object in a major and a minor part so that their proportion is the same as that between the whole object and its major part. Here we investigated looking behaviour and explicit preferences for different regularities including symmetry and golden ratio. We selected four Mark Rothko’s paintings, a famous abstract expressionism artist, characterized by two main areas depicted by different colours: one symmetric (ratio between areas: 50–50%), one in golden ratio (38–62%), one in an intermediate ratio (46–54%), and one in a ratio exceeding the golden ratio (32–68%). Thirty-six healthy participants (24.75 ± 3.71 years old) completed three tasks: observation task (OT), pleasantness task (PT), and harmony task (HT). Findings for explicit ratings of pleasantness and harmony were very similar and were not significantly correlated with patterns of looking behaviour. Eye Dwell Time mainly depended on stimuli orientation (p < 0.001), but for the harmony task also by ratio and their interaction. Our results showed that the visual scanning behaviour of abstract arts primarily depends on the orientation of internal components, whereas their proportion is more important for the pleasantness and harmony explicit judgments. Full article

In 1969, Lynda Benglis withdrew her large latex floor painting, Contraband, from the exhibition Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials. Looking beyond the logistical problems that caused Benglis to pull the work, I suggest that it challenged the conceptual and formal parameters of the exhibition from its inception. Taking hints from feminism, modernist painting, camp aesthetics, psychedelic imagery, pop, and minimalism, Benglis’s latex pours unify an array of movements, styles, and political positions that have often been treated as antithetical. Although the refusal of traditional binaries was typical of the neo-avant-garde, Benglis’s work was “contraband” because it challenged the inflexible dictum that feminist art and modernist painting are mortal enemies. With Contraband, she drew on abstract expressionist techniques for communicating feeling by exploiting the dialectic of spontaneity and order in Pollock’s drip paintings. Simultaneously, she drew attention to gender through sexed-up colors and materials. Rather than suggesting that gender difference is repressed by abstract expressionist painting’s false universalizing, Benglis shows that modernist techniques for communicating feeling are crucial for the feminist project of understanding the public significance of seemingly private experience. Full article

The Khrushchev Thaw allowed Poland a slightly larger margin of freedom in its cultural exchange with Western Europe than it had since the end of the Second World War. In this newly relaxed political climate, two models of Polish cultural diplomacy emerged in the West. The first constituted the official foreign policy of Poland’s communist authorities, while the other remained unofficial, relying on a network of contacts with Poland’s government-in-exile. An examination of contemporary Polish art exhibited in Paris during the 1950s and 1960s reveals this dichotomy. The first type of cultural patronage was coordinated in Paris by communist representatives of the Polish Embassy. The second emerged in Paris within Polish political émigré circles. Its key proponents were the Literary Institute (Instytut Literacki), including the intellectual and artistic milieu of the monthly journal Kultura (“Polish-based Culture”) and the Lambert Gallery (Galeria Lambert). State foreign policy, funded by the state budget and anchored in agreements between Poland and France on cultural cooperation determined the former, while the latter constituted an oppositional stance against the Eastern Bloc, deriving its strength from the resolve of Polish political émigré circles, their extensive network of sympathetic foreign contacts, and an understanding of the mechanics of the art market. The communist model sought to build a friendly image of Polish culture despite the apparent ideological rift between Eastern and Western Europe. The émigré approach stemmed from a refusal to accept the political division of Europe and involved searching the world of art for evidence of forces in Poland that opposed the political status quo. Finally, the patronage model adopted by communist authorities followed the state-imposed policy of favoring figurative art over Polish abstract art, whereas the model championed by émigré circles pursued the opposite strategy. It showcased unrestrained, spontaneous, and mostly abstract art. It evidenced an affinity for international trends in the art of the time, including abstract expressionism and, in particular, Parisian Art Informel. How can these two strands of cultural diplomacy co-exist? Which resonated more with international audiences? Full article

Abstract Expressionism is often regarded as the first purely American art movement and the first to gain mass cultural recognition. Prior to the 1940s, the consideration and appreciation of abstract art belonged to a certain intellectual elite, but the intimidating complexity of Abstract Expressionism, the daring allure of its artists, and the particularities of mid-century American culture converged to transform the avant-garde into consumer spectacle. This shift represented, and was symptomatic of, a larger societal rearrangement: information and commodity superseded industrialized labor as the core of American culture. Jackson Pollock, America’s first avant-garde superstar, stood at the center of this shift, at once representing both active creative labor and the commodification of the idea of that labor. Hans Namuth’s photographs and films of Pollock placed him and his art firmly in the realm of consumable popular spectacle, underlying further connections to Hollywood film and prominent print media. This article examines how Pollock became a paradigmatic figure in the avant-garde’s proliferation into mass culture and asserts that mass culture did not simply subsume the avant-garde. Rather, the two realms engaged in a mutual construction that pushed the avant-garde across numerous social boundaries. The artistic, critical, and popular receptions that grew out of this convergence erased distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Full article

Media coverage was vital in establishing the popular reputation of the Abstract Expressionists. Reporting regularly relied on photographic portraits to present these artists as modernist innovators who were an extension of (or even a replacement for) the work of art. Jackson Pollock came to epitomize the Abstract Expressionist artist, with “action” photographs capturing his radical painting method. Pollock’s contemporary, American sculptor David Smith, similarly transformed his medium—in his case by embracing industrial methods to make three-dimensional objects. However, given the constraints inherent in the process of welding he employed, how could Smith’s image be reconstituted as a celebration of artistic individuality so crucial to modernism? The very method Smith embraced to push the boundaries of art kept him from representing the genius creator who channeled the forces of nature to produce culture. By tracing photographs documenting his career published in local and regional newspapers, popular magazines from Popular Science to Life, and mass art magazines from Magazine of Art to Arts, this paper demonstrates that images of Smith at work as an anonymous industrial worker enveloped in protective gear were regularly balanced with images of contemplation—the traditional image of the artist as mediating intelligence. Yet, over the years of his career, the problem of representing Smith was addressed somewhat differently. Early on, there was a tendency to show Smith applying his novel art-making techniques to the production of more traditional objects. During World War II, when Smith was employed as a commercial welder, Smith the artist legitimized reporting on Smith the worker. Finally, in the post-war world—as Smith benefited from the burst of publicity surrounding the triumph of Abstract Expressionism—his rigorous manipulation of metal was celebrated as masculine display, effectively shifting attention away from common industrial labor to heroic individual struggle. Full article

Abstract Expressionism has been influenced heavily by the popular theory of America’s undying, progressive spirit, originally conceived by Frederick Jackson Turner and given its most potent form in Western films. Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was embodied in stories of John Wayne and other cowboy heroes taming the supposed edges of civilization. The mythic West as constructed by Turner and these films cemented American identity as one of exploration and innovation, with the notable condition of Indigenous Americans ceding their sovereignty. While Abstract Expressionism was commonly connected to the mythic West through the origin stories of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, the critical understanding of this movement as the height of painterly achievement built on Native American precedents evinces a deeper connection to Turner’s popular Frontier theory. As critics like Clement Greenberg cast flatness as the last frontier of painting, and as artists like Pollock and Barnett Newman claimed Native American ritual practices as a part of their aesthetic lineage, Abstract Expressionism proved as effective as Hollywood Westerns in corroborating and perpetuating the idea of America’s frontier spirit. Full article

Critics have frequently employed strict binary schemes to explain Abstract Expressionism’s singular contributions to art history: the victory of abstraction over figuration, avant-garde over kitsch, pure art over anecdotal illustration, action over premeditation, or escapist detachment over direct political engagement. Taking Willem de Kooning’s Easter Monday as a case study, this paper will question the efficacy of such dyadic explanations to encapsulate the diversity of New York School practice. Easter Monday includes both figural and abstract elements, some that parade the work’s impulsive and spontaneous character and others that were created by a photo-mechanical process. Some celebrate the artist’s personal and idiosyncratic touch, others the impersonality of popular forms of advertising. In contradistinction, the semiotic terminology of C.S. Pierce reveals not only multiple points of intersection with de Kooning’s work; it also effectively identifies and differentiates the plurality of elements the artist conjoined in a single visual field, some of which qualify as iconic, indexical, symbolic, or even as hybrid combinations of the above. These more elastic descriptors, it will be argued, are well-suited to address de Kooning’s variegated surfaces: they can address his accommodation of diverse techniques, as well as the multiple ways the artist constructed meaning and responded to popular culture. Full article

The abstractionist paintings of Puerto Rican artist Olga Albizu (1924–2005) gained prominence in the late 1950s when her work debuted in galleries across the Americas and entered the commercial music industry with RCA and Verve records. However, existing scholarship has failed to capture the complex relationship between Albizu’s anti-commercial abstractionist aesthetic and its mass reproduction as cover art for vinyl records during the Cold War era. Returning to the canvas to explore the iconographic, formal, and aesthetic qualities of Albizu’s work within its sociohistorical post-World War II context, this study reveals Albizu’s devotion to formal borders, vivid color juxtapositions, and compositional tensions. I argue that Albizu’s practice constitutes an ongoing concern with a Modernist dialectic and ideals about subjective transformation in a postmodern world of mass culture, a message she conveyed through the material and experiential borders of the canvas. As an avowed formalist and Modernist existing between the postcolonial and postmodern worlds of San Juan and New York City, her work merits formal scrutiny. This paper will add to the diverse histories of Abstract Expressionism and mid-century Modernisms across the Americas while shedding light on an important post-war historical moment and artistic impulse that held on to anti-commercial values in an all-encompassing consumerist world. Full article

Jim Harvey was the artist who created the Brillo box that Andy Warhol copied and made famous. Warhol’s Brillo Boxes changed the course of art history and the entire field of aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Meanwhile, Jim Harvey died a failed second-generation Abstract Expressionist. To his death, Harvey refused to accept that his Brillo box was a work of art. However, the theory—the story—that was woven about Warhol’s Brillo Boxes transformed them from commonplace objects into multimillion-dollar masterpieces. As a counterbalance, this article appeals to narrative theology as a way to tell Jim Harvey’s story. Appealing to narrative theologian James McClendon’s notion that a biography can reveal an image—a metaphor—that serves as a prism through which that individual’s life can be seen and understood, this article suggests that the defining metaphor of Jim’s life was “artists are prophets”. Importantly, this essay is not an attempt to redeem Harvey’s artistry, although it may provoke a reconsideration of his work. Rather, it is an exploration of the tragic and luminous life of a beautiful failure. Full article