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7 September – 15 December 2006
E.S. Bird Library, 6th floor
Viewing Hours: Monday - Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
"The avant-garde atmosphere in New
York at that time was a close and exciting one," Grace Hartigan recalled
of the beginnings of the New York School. The close association of artists
(Hartigan, Larry Rivers, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Goodnough,
Fairfield Porter, and Alfred Leslie) and poets (Frank O'Hara, Kenneth
Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest) produced a creative
excitement that lasted from the late 1940s into the 1960s.
The painters of the New York School took their inspiration
from a group of New York artists that had been exploring the boundaries
of abstraction since the late 1930s, especially Willem de Kooning and
Jackson Pollock. Hartigan described this influence: "In the late
1940s I, along with other students in our twenties, found a new way of
painting being created in our New York backyards. Meeting with and seeing
the work of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning changed my life-I understood
what it meant to totally identify one's self with one's art." John
Ashbery was more cryptic: "We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock,
Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing."
This identity of self and art makes it impossible to ascribe
a "style" to the New York School. Hartigan's style moved back
and forth between the figurative and abstraction all through the 1950s;
Joan Mitchell was relentlessly abstract, while Fairfield Porter and Jane
Freilicher were clearly figurative. The terms "abstract expressionism"
and "action painting" were applied by critics, but Hartigan
may be more helpful when she explained that "in the late 40s and
early 50s, the painters who came to be known as 'abstract expressionist'
wanted to give emotional content to abstract art." This emotional
content, to no small degree, was fueled by the connected lives of the
artists, who studied together at Hans Hoffman's School, the Artist's Club,
and Studio 35, and drank and communed at the Cedar Street Tavern and the
Five Spot.
Also central to this creative atmosphere was the collaboration
in life and art between artists and poets. Some of the poets of the New
York School had studied together at Harvard, but they came together socially
and professionally when they gathered around the art scene in New York.
Many of the poets had their first work published by John Bernard Myers
at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, where most of the painters had their first
shows. As Frank O'Hara commented, the poets "divided our time between
the literary bar, the San Remo, and the artist's bar, the Cedar Tavern.
In the San Remo we argued and gossiped: in the Cedar we often wrote poems
while listening to the painters argue and gossip." There were so
many collaborations between the New York School poets and artists, it
is hard to keep track of them all. The painters' appreciation of the poetry
scene was not unreciprocated. Grace Hartigan, for example, wrote of her
admiration of O'Hara's poetry: "His poetry involves a tapestry of
ideas, images-the artist's inner sensibility, the observed world, art
and poetry of the past & present and modern man's life on 'the edge.'?"
It was a unique time suffused with a vigorous creative fire
that we celebrate in Imagine! Painters and Poets of the New York School.
"Imagine!"
JUST THE WORD IS ENOUGH to start the process. Imagination
is the image-making power of the mind, and we all have imagination. In
flights of fancy, in remembered experience, in considering what might
be or never could be, imagination will not be contained. This exhibit
appeals to imagination in many ways, and a tour of the items will challenge
your imagination on at least three different levels.
One level is the imagination that each of these artists
and writers used for the creation of their own works. The creative artist
uses imagination to transform experience into poetry, painting, or some
other medium. Skill, talent, and training are all important, but one can
have technical ability and never become an artist. It is imagination,
the ability to see and express the unique, even in the ordinary, that
makes for art. For Grace Hartigan and Frank O'Hara, imagination meant
seeing the artistic possibilities in everyday life: costumes bought on
the street become the painting Masquerade; a news article about a singer's
death becomes the poem "The Day Lady Died." This exhibition
celebrates the artistic imagination of a wonderfully creative group of
people who lived in New York City in the 1950s.
Cooperation and collaboration-one work of art, a painting,
flowing from the encounter with another work of art, a poem-calls for
imagination. A painter reads a poem and translates that experience into
her own medium, perhaps including the very words of the poem into the
shape of the painting. Perhaps the poem suggests visual images, or the
artist's experiences are evoked by the poet's insights. The artworks in
our exhibit are connected with poetry, and many include the written word
right in the painting or print. Writing poetry based on works of art has
a long history-the Greeks had a word for it, "ekphrasis." The
New York School poets loved the plastic arts and collaborated with painters;
Frank O'Hara even worked at the Museum of Modern Art, eventually as a
curator. The poets in our exhibit celebrated the visual arts in their
poetry and criticism; our painters wrapped their creativity around poetry,
a second level of imagination.
Imagination is not frozen in the past, in a painting completed
or a poem published. Today, now, you are reading the poem; you are taking
in the work of art. When you see a painting or a print, or when you read
a poem, you bring your experiences, your prejudices, your likes, and dislikes
with you. What you see and understand is a product of your own imagination.
In addition, the New York School, both in painting and poetry, was defined
less by specific styles and more by the relationships of its participants.
The exhibit documents the interaction of these young artists through their
letters and photographs. Your imagination can use these letters and photographs
as a window into their lives. What was it like to be alive in the creative
mix that was the painters and poets of the New York School? Imagine!
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