20th century North American abstraction

Some of the protagonists of post-war North American abstraction do not share the gestural character of abstract expressionism and opt for the development of geometric languages, especially German artists who emigrated to the United States of America in the 1930s. Among them, Josef Albers stands out. (1888 – 1976), former Bauhaus professor who always remained faithful to the constructive spirit of this prestigious school that reconciled geometric clarity with more expressive abstract forms.

Josef Albers

Color study for a "Variant/Adobe"

1948 

Oil on absorbent paper

© 2020 Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ARS, NY

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Untitled

1959

Oil on cardboard 1959 

49cm x 42cm

Manuel Pereira da Silva (1920 – 2003) was a Portuguese artist whose work, although predominantly known in the field of sculpture, also includes an important series of abstract paintings that began to be developed in 1958. These paintings are characterized by the use of rectilinear geometric shapes , such as rectangles and squares, and the application of primary colors. 

Manuel Pereira da Silva's creative process is notable for its meticulous and detailed approach. Before executing his final paintings, the artist devoted considerable time to the preparation phase. This phase involved the production of a series of detailed studies and color schemes that helped to crystallize the initial idea. These preparatory studies allowed him to plan each aspect of the painting with precision. Thus, although the execution of the final painting could only take a few hours, the preparatory work was extensive and in-depth, reflecting the importance he attached to the planning and conception of the work.

Manuel Pereira da Silva's exhibitions frequently highlighted this aspect of his creative process, presenting not only the final paintings, but also the preparatory drawings and color studies. This gave the audience a complete view of how his ideas evolved from initial conception to final realization. 

In addition to paintings, Manuel Pereira da Silva used paper in a significant way. Paper allowed for a more informal and experimental approach, a contrast to the meticulous precision of his final works. In this medium, he could freely explore variations in color and shape, allowing for a spontaneity that complemented his rigorous working method. Thus, paper served as a space for experimentation and development of ideas, a place where creativity could flow more freely and less contained.

Therefore, while sculpture can be seen as Manuel Pereira da Silva's main field of activity, his abstract paintings and the preparatory processes that preceded them reveal a fundamental aspect of his artistic work, marked by the duality between rigorous planning and spontaneous experimentation.

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Untitled

1959

Oil on cardboard 1959 

49cm x 42cm

The emotional language of Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), an emigrant from Latvia, is also detached from the gestural burden. In order to stimulate deep emotions in the viewer, the painter organizes his paintings based on color fields of vibrant rectangular shapes that seem to float over an indeterminate space. Its colorful rectangles seemed to dematerialize into pure light.

Mark Rothko

Untitled 

1949

Oil on canvas

142cm x 121cm

Anita Rogers Gallery

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Untitled

1958 

Oil on platex 

148cm x 129cm

After experimenting with abstract expressionism and surrealism, he developed, in the late 1940s, a new way of painting. Hostile to the expressionism of Action Painting, Mark Rothko (as well as Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still) invents a meditative way of painting, which critic Clement Greenberg defined as Colorfield Painting.

Mark Rothko

Untitled 

1968 

Acrylic on watercolor paper mounted on linen

Private collection, New York. Copyright © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko

Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997), one of the creators of North American abstract expressionism, represents an image of life and death, which contrasts with the idyllic world of Eden. The gestural, transcendental and moral composition explores bodily distortion and introduces the symbolism of the crucifixion with a violent dissection of the symbolic attributes of Golgotha: the nails of the cross, the ladder and the skull.

Willem de Kooning

Abstraction

1949

Oil and oleoresin on cardboard. 41 x 49 cm

Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid

Pablo Picasso

Crucifixion

1930

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Crucifixion

1955

Mixed technique on cardboard

34cm x 25cm

Manuel Pereira da Silva, like many artists from the Porto School, maintained a strong connection with the tradition of the sublime through abstraction. His artistic approach, innovative for the time, separated himself from the literal representation of nature, focusing on expressing personal emotions and visual poetics through an abstract aesthetic language.

The works of Manuel Pereira da Silva, like those of his abstractionist colleagues, did not seek to describe the natural world in a direct way. Instead, the shapes in his paintings and sculptures could suggest elements of nature – such as parts of the human body, landscapes or interiors – without the intention of representing them faithfully. Abstraction served as a means to communicate the emotions and subjective visions of artists, going beyond the mere imitation of the visible world.

A significant example of this approach can be seen in Manuel Pereira da Silva's crucifixion series. In this series, geometric shapes and abstract compositions are used to evoke feelings and reflections on suffering, pain and transcendence, themes traditionally associated with crucifixion. The works are not about representing the figure of Christ or the literal scene of the crucifixion, but rather about expressing the intense emotions and human experience associated with the event.

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Crucifixion

1978

Pen on paper

Dim. 33cm x 59cm

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Crucifixion

1979

Pen on paper

Dim. 50cm x 65cm

In this way, Manuel Pereira da Silva and his contemporaries from the Porto School explored the capacity of abstract art to communicate in a deep and subjective way. His bold works, by avoiding direct representation, allowed the viewer to connect with the artists' emotions and inner experiences, making abstraction a powerful vehicle for expressing the sublime.

Composition of Women is one of the earliest works in Willem de Kooning's long sequence of paintings of women, which culminated in one of the most aggressive revisions of the female figure in art history. Beginning as a study for a commissioned portrait that the artist never completed, the portrait served as a vehicle for de Kooning to explore his ongoing interest in merging figurative themes with the painterly concerns of abstraction. Although the intentional anatomical distortions reflect the influence of Pablo Picasso, the seated figure also recalls the sensuous women painted by 19th-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, with their tight bodices and delicate features.

Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997)

1940

Seated Woman

Oil and Coal in Masonite

Dimensions: 137 cm × 91 cm

Albert M. Greenfield and Elizabeth M. Greenfield Collection, 1974

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Seated Woman

1957

Gouache and Charcoal on cardboard 

40cm x 53cm

In 1938 he began his series entitled Mulheres, which caused a sensation in the artistic circuit, with a theme that would become recurrent in his production.[5] In the 1940s he joined a group of artists, including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, who would form the so-called New York School. They struggled to find a personal path that surpassed the major currents of the time, such as cubism, surrealism and regionalism. His emotive gestures and abstract pieces were the result of his attempt to distance himself from other movements. The style they pioneered became known as abstract expressionism or action painting.

Willem de Kooning 

1969

Seated Woman

bronze, 113 x 147 x 94 inches

Private collection

Photograph by Adam Bartos

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Seated Woman

1957

Plaster on aluminum structure

54cm x 68cm x 41cm

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Seated Woman

1957

Gouache and Charcoal on cardboard 

41cm x 65cm

Manuel Pereira da Silva shares with Willem de Kooning a deep interest in the female figure and in the integration of figurative themes with abstract concerns. In his works, Manuel Pereira da Silva frequently explores themes such as sitting women, reclining women, motherhood, family and couples. Although the figures in his works are often almost completely dissolved into abstraction, there is a constant presence of noticeable figurative references, indicating an unbreakable connection with the representation of the human.

De Kooning, in turn, began his famous sequence of paintings of women with "Woman I," which is considered one of the most aggressive revisions of the female figure in art history. This series began as a study for a commissioned portrait that was never completed, serving as a vehicle to explore the fusion of figurative themes with abstraction. Its intentional anatomical distortions reflect the influence of Pablo Picasso, while the female figures also evoke the sensuous women of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, with their tight bodices and delicate features.

Pablo Picasso

Seated Woman

1937

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Seated Woman

1952

Plaster on aluminum structure

14 cm x 23 cm x 45 cm

Manuel Pereira da Silva, despite his main focus on sculpture, also maintained a significant production of paintings and drawings in which the female body is a recurring theme. Like de Kooning, his female representations are not realistic portraits, but rather interpretations that combine figuration with abstract elements. This approach allows for a freer expression of the artist's emotions and visual poetics, moving away from mere literal representation and entering the realm of suggestion and evocation.

Manuel Pereira da Silva

Seated Woman

1957

Gouache and Charcoal on cardboard 

40cm x 53cm

Therefore, while De Kooning is known for his more aggressive and expressive approaches to the female figure, Manuel Pereira da Silva explores these themes in such a way that the figures, even almost dissolved in abstraction, maintain a perceptible reference, revealing their deep connection with figuration and human themes.

Geometric abstraction

The book Contemporary Art: Splendor and Agony; of Ilda Rodriguez Prampolini, was written for students of Art History and Contemporary Art at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico. With this text they would know the art history of the XX century. Starting, of course, to understand his development, with the Impressionists and the approach to historical problems, artistic, aesthetic and moral relevance.

When in 1916, the Dadaists launched his cry of defiance from the Cabaret Voltaire were probably not aware of the profound transformation that began in the artistic production of the western world

In this book, the author focuses on the history of Dadaism, as well as the different artistic movements that preceded and followed it. This work offers a critical appreciation of the evolution of art from the end of the XIX century (Impressionists and Expressionists) to the mid XX century (Surrealists and Abstractionists) in an exhaustive attempt to cover the “entire panorama of contemporary art”.

It is the Abstractionists that we will point out, since they relate to the content of this blog.

The line is a reference for understanding the drawing Manuel Pereira da Silva. You know it creates pure, simple, without flourishes, or waste analytical, full of substance, serious. Manuel Pereira da Silva has the power to simplify the synthesis features and shapes. Easily dominates the formal elements-building: stylistic symmetry, harmony, poetic, aesthetic balance, where the white paper is part of imaginary architecture.

The early modernist sculptures by Manuel Pereira da Silva emerged in the sculptural abstraction of the pioneers in Portugal, admittedly played from the late '40s, in Porto, by Arlindo Rocha, Fernando Fernandez and even a few years later by Aureliano Lima, after their removal to this city. These facts confer the production of abstract Manuel Pereira da Silva, held up with obvious stylistic analogy; in the same period and situation of those living with sculptors, unquestioned framework generation, must be credited.

In fact in the period immediately following World War II, in precisely that which started the career of Manuel Pereira da Silva, there were changes, important in the world of art controversies, including the two largest urban centers in Portugal: the quarrel " classical and modern, "added the debate between supporters of modernity - the neo-realists, surrealists and abstractionists - but was almost always in the studio that some modesty, very few, sculptors restless, rehearsed new avenues for his art, in productions sparsely that became public, and that, beyond a narrow elite, long ignored.


The Abstract Art

Geometric abstraction and constructive

The reconstruction of the world through painting has rarely been a problem so aware, confident and confessed to a series of artistic events that arose at the end of World War I.

No doubt the artists as they embark on the table abstraction, they were driven by a utopian need for spiritual life

Socrates had already stated these issues, the ideal of beauty through the representation of non-living beings, but of solid and plane figures created through the line, circle, etc..:

"Why should I maintain that these figures are not like other beautiful by comparison, but they are always beautiful in themselves and by their nature they seek certain pleasures that belong to them and have nothing in common with the pleasures produced by sensory stimuli."

It is through these signs of unchanging beauty that some artists try to rise above nature and themselves, to recover the art make it the expression in the service of higher ideals.

The 1930 and 1945 seem to be the triumph of geometric art with his Constructivist tendencies of abstract art trends lyrical and spontaneous. Numerous journals are created to disclose the geometric, continuous exposures at galleries welcome artists, exhibiting in legal proliferating, and the art of constructivism seems to oppose their closed forms or "concrete" composed in endless constellations to highbrow games subconscious screaming by the Surrealists absurd.

The Syndicate of Antique Dealers in Paris (1925), the exhibition also Circule et Carré in Paris, the publication of the single issue of Art Concrète performed by Van Doesburg, the group Abstraction-Creation and numerous magazines in various countries are evidence of the emergence of this new ideal language that comes with authentic validity. One of the pioneers of this art seeks to link up with the architecture is, without doubt, the wife and collaborator, the sculptor Jean Arp, painter Switzerland-Arp Sophie Trauner, whose simplified forms rigorous and fair voluntarily come to some niceties powerful proportions wisely experienced and highly intellectual.

In England, the emergence of The Circle, in 1937, organized by the sculptor Naum Gabo, the painter and architect Well Nicholson Leslie Martin marks the impact that the country, heir to the tradition of William Morris, had this constructive formalism, which addressed re-engage the work of art to life and enjoy the new language to speak universally. This crucial sense of communication through universal formulas (abstract and geometric) and not individuals is the impact of constructivist theory adopted by the same Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner in Russia 17 years earlier. The intention to establish an art of "pure" form goes beyond perfect aestheticism of "art for art" since the first case; it is the dynamic principle that moves the artist to "rebuild" the world and second to separate not at first, but the purpose of art that drowns itself.

We could hardly exhaust the review of all the artists that are somehow linked to the geometric art. One of the most extreme cases is the Felix de Marle, for whom art collective team and subordinate to architecture is the only position that justifies saving the artist, he shall be given by an art that must collaborate in the streets, cities, joy to live, not an elite, but all men.