Advanced DrawingArt History Part II

Alma Woodsey Thomas American Abstraction1891-1978 Splash Down, Apollo 13 Starry Night with Astronauts

Alma Woodsey Thomas American Abstraction1891-1978

Abstraction As an undergraduate at Howard

University in Washington, DC, she studied with African American artist James V., who founded the art department, and Lois Mailou Jones. She was the first Fine Arts major to graduate.

Thomas then graduated from Columbia Teacher's College with an M.F.A. , and taught at Shaw Junior High School until 1960. At first, she painted still lifes, fashioned ceramic sculpture and made marionettes with Tony Sarg, who supervised her thesis project.

At the age of 55, Thomas returned to formal study at American University, taking Jacob Kainen's abstract painting classes. The year was 1950 and his work was radical! Thomas switched from realism to abstract patterns of colorful geometric forms when Color Field Painting was still in its infancy.

In the 1960s, she joined the local Washington Color School, whose members included Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Sam Gilliam. Sizzlng hot with radiant colors, her inspiration came from the natural world, such as fallen leaves, the night sky or a bursting bouquet of flowers.

In 1972, she became the first African American woman artist to mount a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

Thomas died in Washington, D.C., in 1978 at the age of eighty-six. Three years later a posthumous retrospective exhibition was held at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art. Today her work can be found in many major museums.

Alma Woodsey Thomas American Abstraction1891-1978

Eclipse Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses

Philip Guston American Abstract Expressionism 1913-1980

Self Portrait Couple in Bed In the Tower The Studio

Philip Guston American Cartoon Realism 1913-1980

Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein, in Montreal, Canada, in 1913. He was the youngest of seven children born to a Jewish couple who had come to America after fleeing the pogroms in Russia.

America seemed to offer shelter from persecution, yet the family found life difficult in their new country.

Philip's father had been a saloon keeper, but he struggled to find work; in 1919 the family moved to Los Angeles with hopes of better fortunes, but they only encountered more hardship and also met with the racism that surrounded the growth of the Klu Klux Klan in the period. Around four years later, his father committed suicide by hanging and Philip discovered the body, an experience which profoundly marked him.

As he moved into adolescence, Philip retreated in the fantasy world of comics, and started to become interested in drawing, which led his mother to enroll him in a correspondence course at Cleveland School of Cartooning, thus beginning his training as an artist.

In a career of constant struggle and evolution, Philip Guston emerged as a social realist painter of murals in the 1930s.

Much later he also evolved a unique and highly influential style of cartoon realism. But he made his name as an Abstract Expressionist. He avoided the muscular gestures of painters such as Pollock and Kline, and opted for a lighter touch, painting shimmering abstractions in which forms seem to hover like mists in the foreground.

The upheavals of 1960s made Guston increasingly uncomfortable with abstract painting, and his work eventually developed into the highly original cartoon-styled realism for which he is now best known. This took him back to his early years - to the style of the comics he loved as a boy, and to the imagery of hooded Klansmen that he first explored in the 1930s.

Philip Guston American Abstract Expressionism

The Wall Sleeping

Alice NeelAmerican Expressionism 1900-1984

Two Girls in Spanish Harlem The Pregnant Woman Last Sickness

(portrait of the artist’s mother)

Alice NeelAmerican Expressionism 1900-1984

Raised in rural Pennsylvania, Neel turned her back on middle-class society by becoming a professional artist, an ardent political activist, and a resident of a poor urban neighborhood.

She was graduated in 1925 and fell in love with the Cuban painter Carlos Enríquez. They married and moved to Havana, where their daughter Santillana was born. In 1927 they settled in New York City and Neel's life began to fall apart. First, Santillana died of diphtheria; then Enríquez suddenly moved to Paris, taking their second daughter with him. In 1930-31 Neel suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide, and was hospitalized for six months.

Soon after her release, Neel began living with a drug-addicted man who slashed 60 of her paintings. Two subsequent relationships-with the Puerto Rican guitarist José Santiago and the Russian-born filmmaker Sam Brody, were also volatile.

Neel's unconventional life parallels the approach she took toward portraiture. Her images-whether of Nobel laureates, art world celebrities, relatives, or neighbors-are unfailingly, often disconcertingly, honest.

Because Neel never adjusted her painting style to fit prevailing art world fashions, her early work received limited attention. During the last decades of her life, however, Neel achieved great success. Her many honors included the National Women's Caucus for Art outstanding achievement award, which President Jimmy Carter presented to her in 1979.

Neel is best known for her raw, in-your-face, revealing portraits of models, lovers, and acquaintances, like this famous one of Andy Warhol. The portraits are more real than the people themselves, which you can readily see when the subjects stand next to their portraits.

Alice NeelAmerican Expressionism 1900-1984 Neel involved herself in radical

social movements, she had a voice’ and was well respected.  Her life was very up and down and at times she did know despair.  But she turned her tragedy into triumph ultimately and this is what gave her such empathy with her sitters. 

She called her sitters her ‘selection of souls’   She was very much  interested in the inner being and tried to show this in her paintings -  always striving to get to the core or essence of the sitter whether they were famous or not:-

As a female American artist, Alice Neel was a pioneer, living fully for her art regardless of circumstances. Near the end of her life, she finally found the recognition and fame she desired and basked in it like a sea lion in the sun.

It is hard to imagine any other painter creating such confrontational male nudes or such a startling self-portrait, wearing nothing but her eyeglasses, at the age of 81.

Even when Neel's sitters are clothed, they seem naked given the artist's uncanny ability to reveal their personalities.

Alice NeelAmerican Expressionism

Self Portrait Hartley Andy Warhol

Kenny ScharfAmerican Contemporary

Juicy Jungle The Days of Our Lives Cosmic Cavern

Kenny ScharfAmerican Contemporary 1953-

Kenny Scharf (born in 1958, in Hollywood, California) is an American painter who lives in Brooklyn, New York. The artist received his B.F.A in 1980 at the School of Visual Arts located in New York City.

Scharf's works consist of popular culture based shows with made up science-related backgrounds. Scharf uses images from the animated cartoons popular during his childhood, such as The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

The reason Scharf uses cartoon images in his art work is to bring popular culture into the fine arts. Scharf wants to see how far he can push the line between high and low art. Scharf to this day is making artwork that makes the viewers think about where the line is and how far has the artist pushed it.

Scharf was a key figure in the East Village art scene of the 1980s, with shows at Fun gallery and Tony Shafrazi , before seeing his work embraced by museums, such as the Whitney, which selected him for the 1985 Whitney Biennial.

He did the album covers of The B-52s in the mid-80s.

Scharf designed a room at the Tunnel nightclub in New York. Scharf was friends with the graffiti artist Keith Haring.

In 2004 he appeared in The Nomi Song, a documentary about his friend, opera singer and new wave star Klaus Nomi.

In 2010 he completed a mural on South Houston in NYC, and repaired it in 2011.

He is currently represented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York and lives in Brooklyn.

Kenny ScharfAmerican Contemporary

The Fun’s Inside When World’s Collide

Kenny ScharfAmerican Contemporary

Mural on Houston