The American Abstract Artists organization was the primary force behind the development and popularization of abstract art in America in the late thirties and early forties. The artists--including Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne, Burgoyne Diller, Balcomb Greene, Carl Holty, Harry Holtzman, Ibram Lassaw, George McNeil, George Morris, Albert Swinden, and Vaclav Vylacil--developed a style of painting that stressed geometric abstraction based on the aesthetics of a European "purist" approach to painting, especially the Neoplasticism of Mondrian and the geometric compositions of Picasso. The period discussed spans roughly a decade: it opens with the earliest informal meetings of the group in 1936 and closes in 1947, when the advent of the "drip-style" painting of Jackson Pollock signals a major new direction in abstract art. / With the arrival of a large group of Surrealist French emigrants in New York in and around 1940 and the appearance of Abstract Expressionism, the works of the American Abstract Artists were quickly eclipsed. Historical opinion, until very recently, dismissed the works of American Abstract Artists as derivative and without historical importance vis-a-vis subsequent developments in American art. / Although one cannot dismiss the unique character of the inspiration which Surrealist art and theory brought to play upon the American vanguard beginning around 1940, the currently popular insistence on a definite schism between the American Abstract Artists and the Abstract Expressionist groups is not warranted. There are too many parallels which exist between the ideas and works of certain of the American Abstract Artists and the Abstract Expressionists. / The nature of the American Abstract Artists' vanguard, the roles of Hans Hofmann and John Graham in the development of the group, the American Abstract Artists' familiarity with psychological doctrines, and particulars of the group's aesthetic together constitute a continuum of interests between the American Abstract Artists and the Abstract Expressionists. The purpose of describing such a continuum is to reevaluate the prevailing views of thirties' geometric abstraction as essentially distinct in character from forties' expressive abstraction. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-08, Section: A, page: 2110. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1985.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_75609 |
| Contributors | LIZZA, RICHARD WILLIAM., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 325 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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